Psychiatrist Grant Hilary Brenner argues that looking inward brings people closer to physical reality than looking at the world. In an essay on introspection posted to the Psychology Today blog Experimentations in November 2025, Brenner writes that introspection gives “perhaps our most direct empirical contact with physical reality”, because a thought reaches awareness without passing through the eyes, ears, or skin. Brenner is a board-certified psychiatrist and a co-author of the book Irrelationship, on how couples use fixed routines to avoid real closeness. The essay is an opinion piece and reports no experiment of its own.
The narrow part of Brenner’s claim holds: introspection skips the sense organs. The broad part does not survive the experiments on self-report described below. They show that what people say about their own minds is often wrong, and wrong without any warning sign. A shorter path to the mind gives direct access, and direct access turns out to be a poor guide to accuracy.
Brenner’s case: fewer steps between the mind and itself
When you look at a cup, light bounces off it, enters the eye, and triggers light-sensitive cells in the retina. The signal travels along the optic nerve to a relay station deep in the brain, the thalamus, then to the visual cortex at the back of the head, where several stages filter and rebuild it. By the time a person “sees” the cup, they experience a reconstruction. Gromeus has described a related case, in which the brain builds the feeling of now as a best guess from slightly old signals.
Introspection, Brenner says, has no such pipeline. When you notice a thought, an emotion, or a shift of attention, the brain activity that makes up the thought becomes, in Brenner’s account, the activity that makes up awareness of it. Fewer layers sit between the observer and the thing observed. Brenner concludes that looking inward is the most direct empirical observation anyone can make. In the closing lines, Brenner concedes that introspection may involve just as much processing, only of a different kind.
The essay goes on to apply the idea to mathematics, physics, and future links between brains and AI. Those topics raise separate questions and are left aside here.
What experiments show about introspection
Psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson tested how well people explain their own choices. In a 1977 paper in Psychological Review, they published a review of evidence on verbal reports about mental processes. They concluded that people may have little or no direct introspective access to the processes behind their judgments. When asked why they acted as they did, people answer from common-sense theories about what usually causes such behavior, the authors argued.
One of their own studies is easy to picture. In shops, under the cover of a consumer survey, passersby were asked to pick the best of four pairs of nylon stockings laid out side by side, and the four pairs were identical. According to the review, the 52 shoppers preferred the pair on the far right over the pair on the far left by almost four to one. No one mentioned position as a reason, and when asked directly, almost all of them denied it had played any role. A second test with four different nightgowns, run with 378 people, showed the same left-to-right effect, the paper reports.
Nisbett and Wilson did not claim that people know nothing about themselves. The same paper accepts that each person has direct access to a large store of private knowledge: personal history, the current focus of attention, current sensations, emotions, and plans. Their doubt was about the causes of behavior, the hidden “why”.
Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel took the doubt one step further, to experience itself. In a 2008 paper on the unreliability of naive introspection, published in The Philosophical Review, Schwitzgebel argues that people make gross errors about their ongoing conscious experience, even after careful reflection. The paper’s examples include emotions (is joy felt mainly in the body?), side vision (how wide is the zone of sharp sight?), and whether thinking has a feel of its own beyond images and feelings. Schwitzgebel also reverses Brenner’s order: in the same paper, Schwitzgebel argues that knowledge of the outside world is more secure than knowledge of one’s own stream of experience.
Why a shorter path does not make introspection more accurate
Brenner’s essay treats a shorter path as a cleaner view. The experiments point the other way. The step Brenner removes, the sense organ, is also the step that other people can check: two people can look at the same cup, and a camera can record it. An inner report has only one witness. When it goes wrong, as with the shoppers and the stockings, nothing from the inside flags the error.
Brenner is right on one point. Introspection is the only window on what an experience is like, and the science of consciousness still has to start from what people say they feel. The range of competing ideas in one researcher’s map of the full spectrum of consciousness theories shows how far that starting point remains from a settled answer.
The evidence has limits too. The 1977 review mixed many small experiments, and the authors noted that in some, such as the stockings study, people may have denied an influence to avoid looking foolish. Schwitzgebel’s paper is a philosophical argument built on examples, with no new experiment. Brenner’s essay is a short blog piece without data.
What this means for reading your own mind
A feeling read from the inside, such as “I am anxious” or “I like this one”, is useful information about your current state. An explanation of why you chose or felt something is closer to a guess, and it is worth checking against what you actually do over weeks and months. The same caution applies to bigger claims about the inner life, such as the debate over whether the self is an illusion or a quantum process.
Sources and related information
Psychology Today – Why Introspection Is Our Most Direct Contact With Reality – 2025
Grant Hilary Brenner’s essay is the source of the thesis discussed here. It sets out the argument that introspection is less mediated than perception, and ends with the concession that the processing may simply differ.
Psychological Review – Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes – 1977
Nisbett and Wilson’s review (Psychological Review, 84(3), 231-259) supports the claim that people often misreport the causes of their own choices. It includes the stockings and nightgown position-effect studies and the list of private knowledge people do have.
The Philosophical Review – The Unreliability of Naive Introspection – 2008
Schwitzgebel’s paper (The Philosophical Review, 117(2), 245-273) supports the claim that people err about their ongoing conscious experience, and that knowledge of the outside world is the more secure of the two.
