(Part I is here, and part III is here)
In certain respects, development of the view that embodied experience is crucial to understanding the mind and brain reached a nadir in the period after World War II, at least within psychology. Behaviorism had redefined psychology as an “objective” science with no need to refer to consciousness [...]
History of the development of neurophenomenology pt.II-cognitivism, neurology, and psychology
Arthur Barsky on unexplained symptoms: clinical existential-physiological discrepancy
Arthur Barsky has a thought-provoking chapter entitled “The Validity of Bodily Symptoms in Medical Outpatients” in Arthur Stone’s important Science of Self Report (more available here):
“Although history-taking is the key to diagnosis in clinical medicine, and symptom relief is the goal of medical treatment, symptoms are often unreliable and invalid measures of the extent and [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Gallagher and Coles on body schema vs. body image and the body percept
The philosopher Shaun Gallagher has collaborated with neurologist Jonathan Coles on the significance of patients with enigmatic body-knowledge problems (Gallagher and Coles, 1998). Gallagher has analyzed this clinical data in the light of phenomenology and neuroscience, and has an essential book for anyone interested in neurophenomenology: How the Body Shapes the Mind
Gallagher is formulating a [...]
symptom verbal reports and existential-physiological discrepancy
While the anatomical basis of how nerve projections enable perception of the body is rather well known, physicians confront situations where patient verbal reporting about symptoms does not match models based on neurophysiological mechanisms. For instance, the Merck Manual Medical Library (2009) states:
“Painful stimuli from thoracic organs can produce discomfort described as pressure, gas, burning, [...]
