Contemporary research on neuroscience and neuro-phenomenology opens in new and more complex models of interpretation regard- ing the phenomena that govern the development of knowledge and consciousness. In an interview with “Le Monde” in February 1999, Varela said, “from the age of 9 or 10, just one question nagged at me: how to understand the relationship between the body, so physical, so heavy, and the mind perceived as ephemeral, almost atmospheric”. This question is still recurrent and is expressed as a new paradigmatic model, able to explain, in terms of knowledge, the connection and the relation between the neuronal structure and the procedural knowledge; in other words, between neurophysiology and neuro-phenomenology. Which are, in this prospective, the interpretative approaches and the speculative developments? Besides, moving from these approaches, what kind of problem we will have to consider from a didactic point of view? Which rela- tionship exists between the encephalic reality and the phenomenological living body? These considerations, that investigate about the understanding of the relational nature of neural processes which regulate the evolu- tion of human consciousness/knowledge, find their roots and justification in the studies of J. Z. Tsien (in the neuro-physiological field) and of Varela & Thompson (in the neuro-phenomenological field). Tsien and his team, in a biomedical field and through combined and complex experiments, have developed an interesting theory on the basic mechanism by which the brain would be able to transform experience into memory. Clans of neurons involved in coding, they say, make a selection of experiences stored, giving a sense at the experience and transforming it into knowledge. From a different perspective, called Radical Embodiment, the problem of the relational nature of consciousness/knowledge is inves- tigated by Thompson and Varela. Their position is considered as a new approach to the study of neuroscience.

Key words: Neuro-phenomenology, Neuro-physiology of learning, Radical Embodiment, Neural code, Memory code.

Although the subject matter of religious studies is essentially phenomenal (e.g., conscious acts, attitudes, intentions, worldviews), the analysis of the basic datum, consciousness itself, remains of necessity incomplete because of the discipline’s restriction to the phenomenal envelope. Philosophical and psychological analysis contributed to our understanding of consciousness, but, lacking access to the neurological engine-room of consciousness, their explanatory power is compromised as well. Neuroscience, on the other hand, has moved beyond the behaviorist denial of consciousnessand recent research indicates that the evolutionary developmentof the brain’s representational capacity may well account for its ability to generate consciousness. These advances provide an opportunity to marry objectiveexplanation with phenomenological descriptions of the view from the inside, creating a powerful new analytic tool: Neuro-phenomenology. Comprised of an exaggerated differentiation between conscious state and informational content, and constituting an important phenomenological category within many Hindu and Buddhist programs, lucid consciousness makes an ideal subject with which to assess the analytic power of Neurophenomenology.

Can the “first person” point of view help in an assessment of the relevance of the theory of enaction, theory in which the inside and the outside, the knower and the known, the mind and the world, determine each other? On the basis of an exploration of the dynamic micro-structure of lived experience, we suggest some means of tackling this question.

Key words: Dynamic structure, enaction, explicitation, first person, lived experience, micro-genesis, neuro-phenomenology, transmodality

Contrary to a widespread belief, becoming aware of one’s lived experience is neither immediate nor easy, but supposes a real expertise which has to be learnt. Such training enables us to discover that lived experience associated to the realization of a given cognitive process, far from being a draft, has a very precise dynamic structure: it is constituted of a definite succession of sensations and operations that remains usually pre-reflective. Becoming aware of this dynamic structure opens up highly promising paths for transforming our experience in the medical, therapeutic and existential fields. This awareness also enables researchers to refine neurophysiological analysis, announcing the lifting of the ban that until now excluded subjective experience from the field of scientific investigation.

Key words: Cognitive therapy of epilepsy, epileptic seizure anticipation, epileptogenesis, first person, lived experience, neuro-phenomenology, phenomenology, pre-reflective experience, subjective experience.

Neurophenomenology, as an attempt to combine and mutually enlighten neural and experiential descriptions of cognitive processes, has met practical difficulties which have limited its implementation into actual research projects. The main difficulty seems to be the disparity of the levels of description: while neurophenomenology strongly emphasizes the micro-dynamics of experience, at the level of brief mental events with very specific content, most neural measures have much coarser functional selectivity, because they mix functionally heterogeneous neural processes either in space or in time. We propose a new starting point for this neurophenomenology, based on (a) the recent development of human intra-cerebral EEG (iEEG) research to highlight the neural micro-dynamics of human cognition, with millimetric and millisecond precision and (b) a disciplined access to the experiential micro-dynamics, through specific elicitation techniques. This lays the foundation for a microcognitive science, the practical implementation of neurophenomenology to combine the neural and experiential investigations of human cognition at the subsecond level. This twofold microdynamic approach opens a line of investigation into the very cognitive acts in which the scission between the objective and the subjective worlds originates, and a means to verify and refine the dynamic epistemology of enaction. Relevance: The twofold microdynamic approach that we are advocating in this article not only provides a methodological solution to the problems of correlation between experiential and neuronal, first-person and third-person descriptions of our cognitive processes. It also opens a line of investigation into the very cognitive acts in which the scission between the objective and the subjective worlds originates, and a means to verify and refine the dynamic epistemology of enaction.

Key words: Elicitation, neuro-phenomenology, microcognition, microdynamics, neurofeedback, enaction, microgenesis, gamma band

The purpose of this paper is to show through the concrete example of epileptic seizure anticipation how neuro-dynamic analysis (using new mathematical tools to detect the dynamic structure of the neuro-electric activity of the brain) and ‘‘pheno-dynamic’’ analysis (using new interview techniques to detect the pre-reflective dynamic micro-structure of the cor- responding subjective experience) may guide and determine each other. We will show that this dynamic approach to epi- leptic seizure makes it possible to consolidate the foundations of a cognitive non pharmacological therapy of epilepsy. We will also show through this example how the neuro-phenomenological co-determination could shed new light on the dif- ficult problem of the ‘‘gap’’ which separates subjective experience from neurophysiological activity.

Key words: Cognitive therapy of epilepsy, epileptic seizure anticipation, ictogenesis, explanatory gap, lived experience, micro-genesis, neuro-phenomenology, phenomenology, pre-reflective experience, subjective experience, synchrony analysis