Cognitive science explains mind and brain in terms of computation, information-processing, and representationalism: the ability of a cognitive system to change internal microstructure so as to correspond with important features of the internal or external world. One could do worse than to sum up the cognitivist model of the mind as “computations over representations”, in [...]
Part II of Leder’s The Absent Body
“Spatiotemporal Continuity
The mysterious quality of our visceral space is based not only on such experiences but on all that is not experienced of our inner body, I have hitherto focused on what interoceptions we do have; they are marked by a limited qualitative range and a spatial ambiguity that together restrict our perceptual discriminations. Furthermore, [...]
How accurate are people at knowing what is happening inside their bodies?
Were people utterly inaccurate at judging their body state and reporting on it, clinical medicine would be deprived of a critical tool. Evidence has accumulated that in certain circumstances, some people are evidently able to access information about the physiological processes inside of their bodies, and to report on it. Experiments seem to demonstrate that [...]
Body-knowledge: what is it?
I use the term“body-knowledge” in my dissertation research primarily to refer to the experience of knowing about one’s own body, and especially embracing perception and assessments of the body through the body. It is meant to straddle the classic cognitive psychology distinction between explicit knowledge that is verbalizable, and implicit knowledge that may only be [...]
A critical look at the information-processing theories used to explain body-knowledge
The psychologist Raymond Gibbs (2006) in Embodiment and Cognitive Science asks (pg. 28) “What underlies people’s abilities to move as they do and have any awareness of their bodies?”
The conventional answer given by psychology, medicine, and cognitive neuroscience is physiological and cognitive systems using information-processing. Gibbs cites the work of Bermudez, Marcel, and Eilan (1995) [...]
Mental models of health professionals about patient symptom reports and “subjectivity”
Medicine has developed a pragmatic way to represent the verbal reports of patients within the context of diagnoses: for instance, patients report something about their experience; this is represented as a “symptom” on a “SOAP note” (Cutler, 1997): an acronym for subjective, objective, assessment, and plan. Health professionals duly record what a patient says about [...]
Verbal report data: psychologists may be skeptical, but clinicians are more practical
Cognitive neuroscience and psychology needs to account for verbal report data from people about their body states. In perceptual psychology and psychophysics experiments, in cognitive studies of human problem-solving, in clinical trials of drug efficacy and safety, in phenomenological-psychological investigations into the thematics of body experience, researchers routinely ask subjects or patients to answer [...]
the legacy of Cartesian “objectivity” makes it hard to understand patient verbal reports
Psychiatrist Allan Beveridge (2002) hones in on a facet of the patient-physician relationship relevant to neurophenomenology: the over-adoption in medicine of the scientific attitude of objectivity towards phenomena. While entirely appropriate in the many research contexts, this may make understanding the personal body-knowledge of the patient more difficult (pg. 101):
“In the mental state examination, a [...]
The brain and the internal state of the body
Hugo Critchley et al. (2004) state that (pg.189) “the internal state of the body is conveyed through a dedicated lamina-1 spinothalamocortical pathway that converges with vagal afferents”. These afferent nerves are noteworthy for the smallness of their diameter in comparison with the larger afferents that apparently deal with proprioception, the perception of the body in [...]
Modularism vs. globalism in cognitive neuroscience: implications for a science of body-knowledge
Models of how people are able to access physiological state information should take into account a long-running divide in cognitive neuroscience about to what extent explanations, models, and purported mechanisms privilege local, reductionistic, and/or modular theories, as opposed to global and holistic theories that emphasize connectedness with and interdependence of particular systems to the entire [...]
