Finding a scientific, third-person explanation of subjective experience or phenomenal content is commonly called the "hard problem" of consciousness. There has recently been a surge in ...neuropsychological research on meditation in general and long-term meditators in particular. These experimental subjects are allegedly capable of generating a stable state of consciousness over a prolonged period of time, which makes experimentation with them an interesting paradigm for consciousness research. This perspective article starts out with a historical reconstruction of the "hard problem," tracing it back to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Emil du Bois-Reymond in the 18th and 19th century, respectively, and the problem of introspection as already acknowledged by Wilhelm Wundt in the 19th century. It then discusses the prospects of research on long-term meditators from a contemporary perspective and with respect to the neurophenomenological research program already advocated by Francisco J. Varela.
This review illustrates the relevance of shamanism and its evolution under effects of psilocybin as a framework for identifying evolved aspects of psychedelic set and setting. Effects of 5HT2 ...psychedelics on serotonin, stress adaptation, visual systems and personality illustrate adaptive mechanisms through which psychedelics could have enhanced hominin evolution as an environmental factor influencing selection for features of our evolved psychology. Evolutionary psychology perspectives on ritual, shamanism and psychedelics provides bases for inferences regarding psychedelics' likely roles in hominin evolution as exogenous neurotransmitter sources through their effects in selection for innate dispositions for psychedelic set and setting. Psychedelics stimulate ancient brain structures and innate modular thought modules, especially self-awareness, other awareness, "mind reading," spatial and visual intelligences. The integration of these innate modules are also core features of shamanism. Cross-cultural research illustrates shamanism is an empirical phenomenon of foraging societies, with its ancient basis in collective hominid displays, ritual alterations of consciousness, and endogenous healing responses. Shamanic practices employed psychedelics and manipulated extrapharmacological effects through stimulation of serotonin and dopamine systems and augmenting processes of the reptilian and paleomammalian brains. Differences between chimpanzee maximal displays and shamanic rituals reveal a zone of proximal development in hominin evolution. The evolution of the mimetic capacity for enactment, dance, music, and imitation provided central capacities underlying shamanic performances. Other chimp-human differences in ritualized behaviors are directly related to psychedelic effects and their integration of innate modular thought processes. Psychedelics and other ritual alterations of consciousness stimulate these and other innate responses such as soul flight and death-and-rebirth experiences. These findings provided bases for making inferences regarding foundations of our evolved set, setting and psychology. Shamanic setting is eminently communal with singing, drumming, dancing and dramatic displays. Innate modular thought structures are prominent features of the set of shamanism, exemplified in animism, animal identities, perceptions of spirits, and psychological incorporation of spirit others. A shamanic-informed psychedelic therapy includes: a preparatory set with practices such as sexual abstinence, fasting and dream incubation; a set derived from innate modular cognitive capacities and their integration expressed in a relational animistic worldview; a focus on internal imagery manifesting a presentational intelligence; and spirit relations involving incorporation of animals as personal powers. Psychedelic research and treatment can adopt this shamanic biogenetic paradigm to optimize set, setting and ritual frameworks to enhance psychedelic effects.
With the emergence in human–computer interaction (HCI) of researching contemplative practices, authentic descriptions of first-person lived experience informing design are few. Most researchers in ...HCI are not trained in observing the mind. We draw on learnings from neurophenomenology, inspired by well-established Buddhist techniques for mind-training. We present a self-observation of
Tonglen
, a Buddhist meditation technique for compassion, conducted over 12 weeks. We found that to keenly observe and document the practice, it is important to go through preparatory stages of stabilising attention and observing the mind. For the practitioner-cum-researcher, the technique should be embedded into a framework training self-observation and developing meta-awareness, supported by documentation of somatic snapshots and reflective journal writing. The first-person method of self-enquiry and account of self-evidence offer insight and directions for refining first-person approaches for future HCI research in body and mind cultivation, and design implications for interactive technologies supporting any practice with a contemplative component.
Working memory is typically measured with specifically designed psychological tasks. When evaluating the validity of working memory tasks, we commonly focus on the reliability of the outcome ...measurements. Only rarely do we focus on how participants experience these tasks. Accounting for lived experience of working memory task may help us better understand variability in working memory performance and conscious experience in general. We replicated recently established protocols for the phenomenological investigation of working memory using the visual span task. We collected subjective reports from eighteen healthy participants (10 women) aged 21 to 35 years. We observed that working memory can be phenomenologically characterized at three different time scales: background feelings, strategies, and tactics. On the level of tactics, we identified transmodality (i.e., how one modality of lived experience can be transformed into another one) as the central phenomenological dynamic at play during working memory task performance.
•Working memory phenomenology can be described on different time scales.•Same strategies are implemented by different experiential modalities.•Working memory representations are transmodal.•Phenomenological studies of working memory replicate well.
Abstract
According to a long-standing belief, introspection provides privileged access to the mind, while objective methods, which we denote as “extrospection”, suffer from basic epistemic deficits. ...Here we will argue that neither an introspective privilege exists nor does extrospection suffer from such deficits.
We will focus on two entailments of an introspective privilege: first, such a privilege would require that introspective evidence prevails in cases of conflict with extrospective information. However, we will show that this is not the case: extrospective claims can prevail in cases of conflict. These conflicts are resolved by an inference to the explanation that best accounts for the available evidence. This explanation may speak in favor of extrospection.
Second, given an introspective privilege, the development of extrospective measurement techniques should be restricted by the accuracy of introspective reports. We will argue that this problem is part of a more general issue that comes up with the establishment of measurement in the natural sciences. We will identify three strategies that have proven successful in dealing with the problem in the natural sciences. It will turn out that all these strategies are available for extrospective measurement as well. Consequently, the insufficiencies of introspective reports do not impose a limit on the accuracy of extrospective measurement methods.
We conclude that neither an introspective privilege nor basic extrospective deficits exist. This does not mean that extrospection will ever replace introspection. Rather, both approaches provide independent and indispensable forms of epistemic access to the mind.
This paper takes initial steps towards developing a theoretical framework of contemplative neuroaesthetics through sensorimotor dynamics. We first argue that this new area has been largely omitted ...from the contemporary research agenda in neuroaesthetics and thus remains a domain of untapped potential. We seek to define this domain to foster a clear and focused investigation of the capacity of the arts and architecture to induce phenomenological states of a contemplative kind. By proposing a sensorimotor account of the experience of architecture, we operationalize how being attuned to architecture can lead to contemplative states. In contrasting the externally-induced methods with internally-induced methods for eliciting a contemplative state of mind, we argue that architecture may spontaneously and effortlessly lead to such states as certain built features naturally resonate with our sensorimotor system. We suggest that becoming sensible of the resonance and attunement process between internal and external states is what creates an occasion for an externally-induced contemplative state. Finally, we review neuroscientific studies of architecture, elaborate on the brain regions involved in such aesthetic contemplative responses, provide architectural examples, and point at the contributions that this new area of inquiry may have in fields such as the evidence-based design movement in architecture.
Abstract
Peripersonal space (PPS) is frequently defined as a plastic, pragmatic and goal-directed multisensory buffer that connects the brain-body with its immediate environment. While such ...characterisations indicate that peripersonal spatiality is profoundly embodied and enactive, comparatively few attempts have aimed to systematically synthesise PPS literature with compatible phenomenological accounts of lived space provided by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Moreover, in traditional cognitive neuroscience, neurophysiological activity is thought to map onto discrete ‘cognitive correlates’. In contemporary 4E approaches to cognition, however, phenomenology-derived notions such as ‘pre-reflective cognition’ and ‘motor-intentionality’ frequently appear, yet their neural correlates may be comparatively difficult to pin down. Pre-reflectively, agents seemingly do not thematise spatial properties as operationalised in key experimental paradigms (e.g., spatial rotation tasks) but are instead inherently spatially embedded within the world. To refine this distinction, I survey how tools co-determine this distinctly spatial ‘world-embeddedness’ using a neurophenomenological methodology (Varela,
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3
(4), 330–349, 1996). Specifically, I conduct two neurophenomenological analyses of tool-perception and tool-use, examining both how distance modulates affordance-perception and how tool-use remaps bodily space via the withdrawal of tools from intentional-objects into co-constituting motor-intentionality itself. I conclude by briefly distinguishing this interpretation of spatial cognition from cognitivist frameworks. Thereafter, I briefly highlight the temporal scaffolding underlying PPS while conceptually grounding my account within Embodied Simulation Theory (Gallese,
Reti, Saperi, Linguaggi
, (1), 31–46, 2018). What is at stake is thus both an explicitly embodied-enactive account of bodily space that is qualitative and situational instead of quantitative and positional, as well as a viable, interdisciplinary strategy for unifying pre-reflective cognition with neurophysiological data.
Traditionally, empathy has been studied from two main perspectives: the theory-theory approach and the simulation theory approach. These theories claim that social emotions are fundamentally ...constituted by mind states in the brain. In contrast, classical phenomenology and recent research based on the enactive theories consider empathy as the basic process of contacting others' emotional experiences through direct bodily perception and sensation.
This study aims to enrich the knowledge of the empathic experience of pain using an experimental phenomenological method.
Implementing an experimental paradigm used in affective neuroscience, we exposed 28 healthy adults to a video of sportspersons suffering physical accidents while practicing extreme sports. Immediately after watching the video, each participant underwent a phenomenological interview to gather data on embodied, multi-layered dimensions (bodily sensations, emotions, and motivations) and temporal aspects of empathic experience. We also performed quantitative analyses of the phenomenological categories.
Experiential access to the other person's painful experience involves four main themes. Bodily resonance: participants felt a multiplicity of bodily, affective, and kinesthetic sensations in coordination with the sportsperson's bodily actions. Attentional focus: some participants centered their attention more on their own personal discomfort and sensations of rejection, while others on the pain and suffering experienced by the sportspersons. Kinesthetic motivation: some participants experienced the feeling in their bodies to avoid or escape from watching the video, while others experienced the need to help the sportspersons avoid suffering any injury while practicing extreme sports. The temporality of experience: participants witnessed temporal fluctuations in their experiences, bringing intensity changes in their bodily resonance, attentional focus, and kinesthetic motivation. Finally, two experiential structures were found: one structure is self-centered empathic experience, characterized by bodily resonance, attentional focus centered on the participant's own experience of seeing the sportsperson suffering, and self-protective kinesthetic motivation; the other structure is other-centered empathic experience, characterized by bodily resonance, attentional focus centered on the sportsperson, and prosocial kinesthetic motivation to help them.
We show how phenomenological data may contribute to comprehending empathy for pain in social neuroscience. In addition, we address the phenomenological aspect of the enactive approach to the three dimensions of an embodiment of human consciousness, especially the intersubjective dimension. Also, based on our results, we suggest an extension of the enactive theory of non-interactive social experience.
A symptom cluster is very common among oncological patients: cancer-related fatigue (CRF), emotional distress, sleep difficulties, pain, and cognitive difficulties. Clinical applications of ...interventions based on non-ordinary states of consciousness, mostly hypnosis and meditation, are starting to be investigated in oncology settings. They revealed encouraging results in terms of improvements of these symptoms. However, these studies often focused on breast cancer patients, with methodological limitations (e.g., small sample size, no control group, and no follow-up). Another non-ordinary state of consciousness may also have therapeutic applications in oncology: self-induced cognitive trance (SICT). It seems to differ from hypnosis and meditation, as it involves the body more directly. Thus, investigating its clinical applications, along with hypnosis and meditation interventions, could improve available therapeutic options in oncology. This article details the study protocol of a preference-based longitudinal controlled superiority trial aiming to assess the effectiveness of 3 group interventions (hypnosis, meditation, and SICT) to improve oncological patients' quality of life, and more specifically CRF, emotional distress, sleep, pain, and cognitive difficulties (primary outcomes).
A power analysis required a total sample of 160 patients. Main inclusion criteria are: cancer diagnosis, active treatments completed for less than a year, no practice of hypnosis, meditation, or SICT, and presence of at least one of these four symptoms: fatigue, sleep difficulties, depression, or anxiety. Each participant will choose the intervention in which they want to participate (hypnosis, mindful self-compassion meditation, SICT, or no intervention-control group). To test the effectiveness of the interventions, data will be collected by questionnaires and neurobiological measures and directly from the medical record at four time points: before inclusion in the study (baseline); immediately after the intervention; and at 3- and 12-month follow-up. The longitudinal data in each group will then be measured.
In addition to standard cancer therapies, there is a growing interest from patients in complementary approaches, such as hypnosis, meditation, and SICT. The results of this study will be useful to increase knowledge about short- and long-term effectiveness of 3 group interventions for CRF, emotional distress, sleep, pain, and cognitive difficulties in patients with different cancers.
ClinicalTrials.gov/ (NCT04873661). Retrospectively registered on the 29th of April 2021. url: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04873661.
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