A review of the attempts at establishing neurophenomenology as a new research paradigm for neuroscientific research on music concludes that the integration of the first-person perspective of phenomenology and the third-person perspective of neuroscience remains an unfinished project. Relevance: This paper proposes methods for phenomenological investigation of music, and discussion of research in the neurosciences and music.

The article briefly describes the relatively young field of cognitive science dedicated to the research of lived human experience – the so-called phenomenological inquiry (or first-person research). It enumerates the reasons for the renewed interest in the study of experience and outlines the field’s relation to the rest of cognitive science. With the help of an example (phenomenology of thinking), the article attempts to illustrate the importance of systematic study of experience and addresses some open questions emerging from such an enterprise.

Key words: phenomenological inquiry, first-person perspective, experience, thoughts

Phenomenology and empirical research are not naturally compatible and devising an empirical technique aiming at researching experience is a challenge. This article presents second-person in-depth phenomenological inquiry – a technique that tries to meet this challenge by allowing the transformation of a participant greatly interested in the investigation of their own subjective experience, into a co-researcher. It then provides an example of this technique being used in a study on enaction of beliefs, more closely showing the cooperative research process of researcher and co-researcher and its result: a grounded theory. The article ends with a discussion on the techniques strengths and weaknesses.

Key words: phenomenological inquiry, first-person perspective, experience, enaction, belief

The aim of this article is to set up a reciprocal relationship between a scientific study of perception, and phenomenology as a philosophical method. The domain chosen for this exercise is the constitution of spatiality, and in particular spatial depth. After recalling the question of depth as it is presented in The phenomenology of perception by Merleau-Ponty, we present an original experimental study based on a sensory substitution device. This study, which is based on an approach to perception as the extraction of sensory-motor loops, is carried out following two successive points of view: an objective, “third person” perspective, and a “first person” perspective involving a phenomenological analysis of the experience of the subject. The concluding discussion, based on the original phenomenological status of tools, proposes the existence of an “asymmetrical reciprocal envelopment” between that which is constitutive and that which is constituted. This makes it possible to determine the objective “correlates” of the elements of the phenomenological description of the constitution of the experience of depth.

Key words: depth perception, phenomenology, experimental study, third person perspective, first person perspective, tools, constitution.

Open peer commentary on the article “Modeling Subjects’ Experience While Modeling the Experimental Design: A Mild-Neurophenomenology-Inspired Approach in the Piloting Phase” by Constanza Baquedano & Catalina Fabar. Upshot: Baquedano and Fabar’s provoking article highlights several difficulties of neurophenomenology, and brings into light the necessity of further clarification of its basic concepts such as human experience, first-person perspective, phenomenological validation, explanation, adequate measurement and so on. Particularly, it becomes more and more clear that the “explanatory gap” cannot be liquidated by means of explanation procedures alone, for the unavoidable variety of modes and forms of (mutual and individual) human understanding cannot be exhaustively reduced to just any one of these modes.

Excerpt: A perusal of the research and literature on the cognitive neuroscience of emotion bears this out: there is a sudden interest in the phenomenology of emotion, and this is because some cognitive neuroscientists are finally beginning to get the picture; one cannot explain the consciousness of emotion as a content of experience without necessarily presupposing the ontological primacy of the experience being explained. Let me put this another way: what neuroscientists are charged with doing is taking the experience of emotion and then explaining it in terms of cognitive processes and physiological events in the nervous system. These efforts from the beginning have always had as their goal to reduce the meaning of conscious experience to biomechanical explanations. But this approach has proved fatal for the project of a reductive cognitive neuroscience, because as soon as you explain something, you are presupposing the existence of whatever it is you set out to explain. If I say, “emotion is triggered, in part, by neuromechanisms in the amygdala of the brain’s limbic system,” this means that the amygdala’s activity explains how emotion gets triggered, but what the explanation presupposes is an experience of emotion that is in need of explanation. But what is this experience of emotion? Clearly, from the first-person perspective of the person undergoing the emotional experience, this is not remotely experienced as an event in the brain. As the phenomenologist understands it, the first-person experience of emotion is the transformation of a world. Neuroscientists who ascribe to phenomenology are beginning to come to terms with the fact that their neuromechanisms are tied to a world of experience that cannot be accessed with their instruments, but require careful experiential description.

Context: The integration of sensorimotor signals and prior beliefs contribute to our sense of body. An influential framework in the study of the bodily self is Gallagher’s distinction between body image and body schema, which are roughly comparable to the perceived body and the lived body, respectively. Through systematic manipulations of sensorimotor signals, it is possible to induce the illusion of agency or ownership over foreign limbs or full bodies. Yet, there is diverging empirical evidence regarding the coherence of sensorimotor signals necessary to elicit such illusions. Problem: The large amount of empirical evidence and its relation to the concepts of body image and schema is not well understood and requires more fine-graded distinctions of various aspects of sensorimotor coherences. Method: We systematically discuss literature on sensorimotor coherence during bodily illusions and argue for the importance of distinguishing between head- and limb-related coherences. To support this discussion, we present new experimental findings where participants experienced a first-person perspective (1PP) full-body illusion over another human through the manipulation of hand-related visuotactile or visuomotor coherence. Results: Participants showed no significant reduction in ownership after asynchronous visuotactile, but after asynchronous visuomotor stimulation. Based on these results and the literature, we propose that head-related temporal sensorimotor coherences are necessary to integrate limb-related incoherent signals during full-body illusions. Furthermore, we speculate that during full-body illusions, head-related coherences are a binding factor between the body image and the body schema; that is, only through the coherent manipulation of the visual field over a 1PP resulting from an immersive image (body image) is our body schema manipulated. Implications: While yet to be experimentally tested, distinguishing head- and limb-related sensorimotor integration and their influences on body image and body schema could refine the study of the bodily self. Constructivist content: The plasticity of the bodily self - as shown in bodily illusions - reflects the dynamism of the subject as observer and its binding to its environment.

Dreyfus’s model of expert skill acquisition is philosophically important because it shifts the focus on expertise away from its social and technical externalization in STS, and its relegation to the historical and psychological context of discovery in the classical philosophy of science, to universal structures of embodied cognition and affect. In doing so he explains why experts are not best described as ideologues and why their authority is not exclusively based on social networking. Moreover, by phenomenologically analyzing expertise from a first person perspective, he reveals the limitations of, and sometimes superficial treatment that comes from, investigating expertise from a third person perspective. Thus, he shows that expertise is a prime example of a subject that is essential to science but can only be fully elaborated with the aid of phenomenological tools. However, both Dreyfus’s descriptive model and his normative claims are flawed due to the lack of hermeneutical sensitivity. He assumes an expert’s knowledge has crystallized out of contextual sensitivity plus experience, and that an expert has shed, during the training process, whatever prejudices, ideologies, hidden agendas, or other forms of cultural embeddedness, that person might have begun with. One would never imagine, from Dreyfus’s account, that society could possibly be endangered by experts, only how society’s expectations and actions could endanger experts. The stories of actual controversies not only shows things do not work the way Dreyfus claims, but also that it would be less salutary if they did. Such stories amount to counterexamples to Dreyfus’s normative claims, and point to serious shortcomings in his arguments.

In this article we are aiming to build cognitive semantics over a first person perspective. Our goal is to specify meanings connected to cognitive agents, rooted in their experience and separable from language, covering a wide spectrum of cognitions ranging from living organisms (animals, pre-verbal children and adult humans) to artificial agents and that the cognitive semantics covers a broad, continuous, spectrum of meanings. As regards the used method, the first person perspective enables a kind of grounding of meanings in cognitions. An ability of cognitive agents to distinguish is a starting point of our approach, distinguishing criteria and schemata are the basic semantic constructs. The resulting construction is based on a projection of the environment into a cluster of current percepts and a similarity function on percepts. Situation schemata, more sophisticated similarity functions, event schemata and distinguishing criteria are built over that basis. Inference rules and action rules are components of our semantics. An interesting property of the proposed semantics is that it makes possible coexistence of subjective and intersubjective meanings. Subjective (first person perspective) meanings are primary, and we have shown the way from them to collectively accepted (third person perspective) meanings via observable behaviour and feedback about success/failure of actions. An abductive reasoning is an important tool on that way. A construct of an instrument, which represents a measure for using intersubjective meanings, is introduced. The instrument serves as a tool for an inclusion of sophisticated meanings, e.g. of scientific constructs, into our framework.

Key words: meaning, cognitive semantics, situated agent, schema, distinguishing criterion

Open peer commentary on the article “Applying the Neurophenomenological Approach to the Study of Trauma: Theory and Practice Yochai Ataria, Mooli Lahad & Omer Horovitz The Study of Trauma” by Yochai Ataria, Mooli Lahad & Omer Horovitz. Abstract: Linking phenomenology with natural sciences, in this case experimental psychology, is a major ambition, but is methodologically difficult. My goal here is to grasp (a) whether the design proposed by Ataria et al. may renew the studies related to neurophenomenology, and (b) whether it may help the researcher to apprehend what a trauma is from a first-person perspective and a third-person perspective. I argue that rather than being an auxiliary science that is only supposed to give an experiential underpinning to natural sciences, neurophenomenology must instead be phenomenological. In this perspective I suggest returning to Husserl’s teaching and innovative approaches such as micro- and cardiophenomenology in order to develop a non-reductionist approach to subjective life.