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.

This special issue commemorates the tenth anniversary of the publication of The View from Within (Varela & Shear, 1999), where Francisco Varela in collaboration with Jonathan Shear designed the foundations of a research program on lived experienced.

My comments on this pioneering book by Russ Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel do not focus on the descriptions of experiences that it includes, but on the very process of description, which seems to me insufficiently highlighted, described and called into question. First I will rely on a few indications given by Melanie herself, the subject interviewed by the authors, to highlight an essential difficulty which the authors only touch upon: the not immediately recognized character of lived experience. Then I will look for clues about what Melanie does to come into contact with her experience and recognize it. These clues – completed by elements of description of this act collected through explicitation interviews – provide criteria enabling a more precise evaluation of what the authors do to guide Melanie in the real-ization of this act, and therefore the accuracy of Melanie’s descrip-tions. I will defend the idea that the description of the very process of becoming aware and describing is an essential condition for the understanding, refinement, teaching, and evaluation of introspection methods, as well as for the reproducibility of their results.

Context: The founding idea of neurophenomenology is that in order to progress in the understanding of the human mind, it is indispensable to integrate a disciplined study of human experience in cognitive neuroscience, an integration which is also presented as a methodological remedy for the “hard problem” of consciousness. Problem: Does neurophenomenology succeed in solving the hard problem? Method: I distinguish two interpretations and implementations of neurophenomenology: a light or “mild” neurophenomenology, which aims at building correlations between first-person descriptions and neural recordings, and tries to evaluate the validity of first-person descriptions through objective criteria; and a deep or radical neurophenomenology, which aims at investigating the process of co-constitution of the subjective and the objective poles, within lived experience, and tries to evaluate first-person descriptions through processual criteria. Results: While mild neurophenomenology does not solve the hard problem, radical neurophenomenology solves it by dissolving it. Exploring the early stages of phenomenal processes such as the emergence of a perception or an idea highlights: (1) a dimension of experience where the separation usually perceived between the subjective and the objective poles vanishes; (2) micro-actions that instant after instant create and support this process of co-constitution, which Varela called “enaction.” This involves on the one hand experiencing concretely the dissolution of the hard problem, and on the other hand verifying the theory of enaction in lived experience. Implications: Radical neurophenomenology is a research programme that enables us to investigate precisely the mutual unfolding of the subjective and objective poles, from its most primitive phases such as perceptual events, to its latest phases such as the co-construction of scientific objectivity and intersubjectivity.

The article by Froese, Gould and Seth is a survey rather than a commentary, dealing with the intertwined issues of the validity of first- person reports and of their interest for a science of consciousness. While acknowledging that experiential research has already produced promising results, the authors find that it has not yet produced ‘killer experiments’ providing a definitively positive answer to these two questions, and wonder what kind of experiment would allow it. Our response will address these two questions successively.

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

This article describes a research programme aimed at integrating a disciplined study of lived experience as a part of cognitive science, thanks to new methods which make it possible to obtain a precise and rigorous description of the “first person” experience of the subject. After presenting the procedures involved in these methods, their epistemological foundations, and the process of circulation between analysis in the first person and third person, we explore possible applications of these methods in clinical and therapeutic domains, in the domains of education transfer.

Analysis of electroencephalographic signals and several brain imaging studies suggest that a preictal state precedes the onset of seizures. In this study, we used phenomenological strategies to detect modifications in patients’ experience before their seizures. We observed that patients with partial epilepsy feeling an aura (n = 9) frequently experienced prodromes (n = 6). Prodromes were subtle preictal symptoms, varying among patients and having common negative features. They were generally continuous before seizures and could last hours, whereas auras were sudden and intermittent. All patients were able to recognize facilitating factors. We also found that patients spontaneously develop cognitive countermeasures to avoid facilitating factors (n = 6), to prevent a seizure (n = 1) or to interrupt a seizure (n = 5). Prodromes are not specific enough for clinical use, but could refine the behavioral strategies used in the treatment of epilepsy and the pathophysiology of the preictal state.

Key words: Neurophenomenology, phenomenology, epilepsy, seizure anticipation, seizure prediction, aura, prodrome, control of epileptic seizures, behavioral treatment of epilepsy