Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
January 22, 2002
Antoine Lutz, Jean-Philippe Lachaux, Jacques Martinerie et al.
500 citations
Brain responses to identical stimuli vary greatly even during well-designed cognitive tasks, and this variability is thought to stem from fluctuations in a person's cognitive context—such as attention, spontaneous thoughts, and task strategy. By combining first-person reports with neural recordings, researchers reduced this noise. Subjects viewed a three-dimensional illusion while their brain activity was recorded and they reported their cognitive context. Clustering trials by these reports revealed that patterns of neural synchrony in frontal electrodes before stimulation depended on the degree of preparation and immediacy of perception. These patterns were stable across recordings and influenced both behavioral performance and subsequent brain responses, showing that first-person data can help detect and interpret neural processes.
Biological research
January 1, 2003
David Rudrauf, Antoine Lutz, Diego Cosmelli et al.
194 citations
Francisco Varela's work on subjectivity and consciousness is reviewed, presenting a view of subjectivity as deeply intertwined with biological and physical roots. His theory of concrete, embodied dynamics, grounded in autonomous systems, posits that biological autonomy defines life and identity as emergent, circular self-producing processes. Embodiment explains how a cognitive self arises from an organism's internal regulation and sensorimotor coupling, with global subjective properties emerging from component interactions and constraining local processes through recursive morphodynamics. Neurophenomenology uses first-person methods to examine experience, creating mutual constraints between biophysical data and subjective accounts, aiming to ground disciplined insight in biophysical emergence. Varela's contribution is framed as a "biophysics of being."
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2013
Claire Petitmengin, Jean-Philippe Lachaux
90 citations
Neurophenomenology aims to combine neural and experiential descriptions of cognitive processes, but faces a practical difficulty: neural measures typically have coarser functional selectivity than the micro-dynamics of brief mental events. A new approach is proposed, using human intra-cerebral EEG (iEEG) to capture neural micro-dynamics with millimetric and millisecond precision, alongside disciplined elicitation techniques for accessing experiential micro-dynamics. This lays the foundation for a microcognitive science that practically implements neurophenomenology to investigate human cognition at the subsecond level.