Neuroscientific scanning of meditators is taken as providing data on mystical experiences. However, problems concerning how the brain and consciousness are related cast doubts on whether any understanding of the content of meditative experiences is gained through the study of the brain. Whether neuroscience can study the subjective aspects of meditative experiences in general is also discussed. So too, whether current neuroscience can establish that there are “pure consciousness events” in mysticism is open to question. The discussion points to limitations on neuroscience’s capability to add to our understanding of the phenomenological content of mystical experiences.

Key words: constructivism, meditation, mindfulness, multiple realization, mystical experiences, neuroscience, pure consciousness event, science of consciousness

In this programmatic paper we explain why a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience is needed. We argue for such a claim based on problems that have arisen in cognitive neuroscience for the project of localizing function to specific brain structures. The problems come from research concerned with functional and structural connectivity that strongly suggests that the function a brain region serves is dynamic, and changes over time. We argue that in order to determine the function of a specific brain area, neuroscientists need to zoom out and look at the larger organism-environment system. We therefore argue that instead of looking to cognitive psychology for an analysis of psychological functions, cognitive neuroscience should look to an ecological dynamical psychology. A second aim of our paper is to develop an account of embodied cognition based on the inseparability of cognitive and emotional processing in the brain. We argue that emotions are best understood in terms of action readiness (Frijda, 1986, 2007) in the context of the organism’s ongoing skillful engagement with the environment (Rietveld, 2008; Bruineberg and Rietveld, 2014; Kiverstein and Rietveld, 2015, forthcoming). States of action readiness involve the whole living body of the organism, and are elicited by possibilities for action in the environment that matter to the organism. Since emotion and cognition are inseparable processes in the brain it follows that what is true of emotion is also true of cognition. Cognitive processes are likewise processes taking place in the whole living body of an organism as it engages with relevant possibilities for action.

Key words: Emotion cognition interactions, psychological constructionism, salience network, embodied cognition, affordances, dynamical systems theory

Im Vorwort des Buches zeichnet Gerhard Roth (*1942) eine Art Urszene nach, die man als prägenden Rahmen für seine inzwischen bald fünfzigjährige Tätigkeit als philosophisch inspirierter und motivierter Naturwissenschaftler verstehen könnte.

It has been argued that Extended Cognition (EXT), a recently much discussed framework in the philosophy of cognition, would serve as the theoretical basis to account for the impact of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) on the self and life of patients with Locked-in Syndrome (LIS). In this paper I will argue that this claim is unsubstantiated, EXT is not the appropriate theoretical background for understanding the role of BCI in LIS. I will critically assess what a theory of the extended self would comprise and provide a list of desiderata for a theory of self that EXT fails to accommodate for. There is, however, an alternative framework in Cognitive Science, Enactivism, which entails the basis for an account of self that is able to accommodate for these desiderata. I will outline some first steps towards an Enactive approach to the self, suggesting that the self could be considered as a form of human autonomy. Understanding the self from an enactive point of view will allow to shed new light on the questions of whether and how BCIs affect or change the selves of patients with LIS.

Key words: locked-in syndrome, enactivism, extended cognition, self autonomy, bci

The paper discusses two recent approaches to schizophrenia, a phenomenological and a neuroscientific approach, illustrating how new directions in philosophy and cognitive science can elaborate accounts of psychopathologies of the self. It is argued that the notion of the minimal and bodily self underlying these approaches is still limited since it downplays the relevance of social interactions and relations for the formation of a coherent sense of self. These approaches also illustrate that we still lack an account of how 1st and 3rd person observations can fruitfully go together in an embodied account of disorders of the self. Two concepts from enactive cognitive science are introduced, the notions of autonomy and sense-making. Based on these, a new proposal for an enactive approach to psychopathologies of the self is outlined that integrates 1st and 3rd person perspectives, while strongly emphasising the role of social interactions in the formation of self. It is shown how the enactive framework might serve as a basis for an alternative understanding of disorders of the self such as schizophrenia, as a particular form of socially constituted self-organisation.

Key words: enactive cognition, autonomy, sense-making, enactive self, disorders of the self, meaning of symptoms, enactive approach to psychopathology, self-organisation, schizophrenia

We report here on a first attempt to settle the methodological controversy between advocates of two alternative reconstruction approaches for temporal dynamics in brain signals: the single‐channel method (using data from one recording site and reconstructing by time‐lags), and the multiple‐channel method (using data from a spatially distributed set of recordings sites and reconstructing by means of spatial position). For the purpose of a proper comparison of these two techniques, we computed a series of EEG‐like measures on the basis of well‐known dynamical systems placed inside a spherical model of the head. For each of the simulations, the correlation dimension estimates obtained by both methods were calculated and compared, when possible, with the known (or estimated) dimension of the underlying dynamical system. We show that the single‐channel method fails to reliably quantify spatially extended dynamics, while the multichannel method performs better. It follows that the latter is preferable, given the known spatially distributed nature of brain processes. Hum. Brain Mapping 5:26–47, 1997. © 1997 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.

Neurophenomenology (Varela 1996) is not only philosophical but also empirical and experimental. Our purpose in this article is to illustrate concretely the efficiency of this approach in the field of neuroscience and, more precisely here, in epileptology. A number of recent observations have indicated that epileptic seizures do not arise suddenly simply as the effect of random fluctuations of brain activity, but require a process of pre-seizure changes that start long before. This has been reported at two different levels of description: on the one hand, the epileptic patient often experiences some warning symptoms that precede seizures from several minutes to hours in the form of very specific lived events. On the other hand, the analyses of brain electrical activities have provided strong evidence that it is possible to detect a pre-seizure state in the neuronal dynamics several minutes before the electro-clinical onset of a seizure. We review here some of the ongoing work of our research group concerning seizure anticipation. In particular, we discuss experimental evidence of upward (local-to-global) formation of conscious experience and its neural substrate, but also of the downward (global-to-local) determination of local neuronal activity by situated conscious activity and its substrate large-scale neural assemblies. This causal role of conscious experience may lead to new kinds of therapy for epileptic patients.

We studied subdural recordings from a patient with an unusually focal and stable occipito-temporal epileptic discharge under four experimental conditions. The series of time intervals between successive spike discharges displayed a few (3–5) clusters of periodic values representing statistically significant short-term periodicities when tested against surrogate data. This short-term predictability was modulated during the different experimental conditions by periodicity shifts of the order of 15–30 ms. Correspondingly, there was an increased gamma-band (30–70 Hz) coherence between the epileptic focus and surrounding recording sites. We conclude that the focal epileptic activity is part of an extended network of neural activities which exert a fast modulation reflected in changes of transiently periodic activities.

We examine in detail subdural recordings from a patient with an epileptic focal seizure, highly unusual in the ongoing nature of the discharges and in the lack of cognitive impairment. We applied a recent method for detecting unstable periodic orbits to the series of time intervals between successive spike discharges, and report that a few unstable fixed points exist within their apparent random fluctuations. The statistical significance of this underlying deterministic dynamics is assessed using surrogate data. In particular, the approaches of trajectories toward the unstable periodic patterns are observed in the sequences immediately following the perceptual tasks. This suggests that the act of perception contributes in a highly specific manner to pulling the epileptic activities towards particular unstable periodic orbits, which closely resemble the technique called chaos control for stabilization of unstable periodic orbits.