Recent advances in brain imaging have improved the measure of neural processes related to perceptual, cognitive and affective functions, yet the relation between brain activity and subjective experience remains poorly characterized. In part, it is a challenge to obtain reliable accounts of participant’s experience in such studies. Here we addressed this limitation by utilizing experienced meditators who are expert in introspection. We tested a novel method to link objective and subjective data, using real-time fMRI (rt-fMRI) to provide participants with feedback of their own brain activity during an ongoing task. We provided real-time feedback during a focused attention task from the posterior cingulate cortex, a hub of the default mode network shown to be activated during mind-wandering and deactivated during meditation. In a first experiment, both meditators and non-meditators reported significant correspondence between the feedback graph and their subjective experience of focused attention and mind-wandering. When instructed to volitionally decrease the feedback graph, meditators, but not non-meditators, showed significant deactivation of the posterior cingulate cortex. We were able to replicate these results in a separate group of meditators using a novel step-wise rt-fMRI discovery protocol in which participants were not provided with prior knowledge of the expected relationship between their experience and the feedback graph (i.e., focused attention versus mind-wandering). These findings support the feasibility of using rt-fMRI to link objective measures of brain activity with reports of ongoing subjective experience in cognitive neuroscience research, and demonstrate the generalization of expertise in introspective awareness to novel contexts.

Key words: Real-time neurofeedback, Real-time fMRI, Focused attention, Posterior cingulate cortex, Default mode network, Meditation

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

Open peer commentary on the article “Enacting the “Body” of Neurophenomenology: Off-Radar First-Person Methodologies in Pragmatics of Experiencing” by Jakub Petri & Artur Gromadzki. Abstract: Petri and Gromadzki’s claims about radical neurophenomenology’s position with regard to the existence of a “gap” require clarification. I raise questions about how the three disciplines outlined would contribute, specifically, to an understanding of reciprocal constraints between the experiential and that which is perceived to be external to the subject; and to experience of co-constitution. Finally, I suggest that the methodology proposed in the target article could potentially benefit from being supplemented by the use of neurofeedback, in order to retain the neuro element of neurophenomenology.

How can pain science objectively know pain experience when it is subjective and private? Viewed as a puzzle about pain research methods, I make the pragmatic point that pain science has for decades used established objective methods to generate powerful data about the subjective dimensions of pain experience. However, as important as these methods are for our understanding of pain, they alone cannot describe subjective pain under the fluctuating conditions of everyday life, especially chronic pain, or provide a research strategy to model pain-brain relationships. I propose that an integrative research line I label “Subjective-Neuroscience of Pain” can address this research challenge and silence the puzzle via three main research activities: (1) using “subjective research methods,” such as the Experiential-Phenomenological Method, describe subjective pain experiences, especially chronic pain experiences; (2) using relevant objective neuroscientific procedures (e.g., neurofeedback), relate subjective pain descriptions to brain activity; and (3) develop an online repository and archive for the storage and sharing of subjective pain data and pain-brain data. The confluence of these activities within “Subjective-Neuroscience of Pain” may uniquely contribute to the understanding of pain. Relevance: This publication discusses first-person or experiential research methods in the scientific study of pain.