Chapter 1
Making Visible the Invisible
Daniel E. Brown and Lynnette Leidy Sievert
Introduction
Each person’s experience of the world is unique and, to a degree, private. Our
understanding of others’experiences is based on analogies with those of our own as
well as through communication—primarily through language, but can we ever
really know how others see the world? Primal experiences—such as pain, hunger,
anxiety, and tiredness—are inherently subjective experiences. Understanding our
own experience, and the experience of others, is limited because many of these
feelings are hidden from our consciousness and/or from the consciousness of
others. However, our species depends on the ability to empathize with others as the
foundation of our very social lives, and thus, the ability to understand the experi-
ence of others, and compare it to our own experience, is a basic human adaptation.
An attempt to understand human experience is the ultimate in hubris for a social
scientist, the equivalent of the physicists’search for a“theory of everything.”
Human experience incorporates objectivity, subjectivity, consciousness, and the
“outside” world, or in Heideggerian terminology, being-in-the-world.
Communication and understanding from the“outside”to the“inside”of people’s
experiences—that is, making visible the invisible—is the theme of this volume. The
following chapters provide two perspectives: understanding what is“inside”other
people and using objective measures to inform people about themselves.
Our interest is in appreciating how people experience and react to various
aspects of their lives in terms of their knowledge, mood, feelings, and physiological
states. These concepts often require intersubjectivity, where one tries to get inside
D.E. Brown (&)
Department of Anthropology, University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hilo, HI, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
L.L. Sievert
Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
©Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
L.L. Sievert and D.E. Brown (eds.),Biological Measures of Human
Experience across the Lifespan: Making Visible the Invisible,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44103-0_
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