Collecting systematic, introspective reports of pharmacological effects and side-effects
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Toxicology, Evidence Based Medicine, Neurology, Pharmacology, Psychiatry and Psychology
- Keywords
- pharmacology, introspection, contemplative neuroscience, data science, philosophy of mind
- Copyright
- © 2016 Sarma
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Collecting systematic, introspective reports of pharmacological effects and side-effects. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2424v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2424v1
Abstract
The study of subjective, first-person experience is a topic with both philosophical and practical implications. In this article, I discuss the value of collecting a critical mass of prose or verbal descriptions of introspectively determined, subjective effects of pharmacological agents. I suggest that datasets of introspective reports fit in the modern research landscape at the intersection of biomedical informatics and the emerging discipline of contemplative neuroscience. I compare the current proposal to Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES), discuss relevant methodological and conceptual issues in the study of introspection, and provide a list of questions for directing future investigation.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ Preprints.