(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
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 [...]
History of the development of neurophenomenology-pt.1
(Part II is here, and Part III is here)
I will attempt in three essays to outline the sweep of ideas, researchers, and works that lead a few of us to speak of “neurophenomenology” as a more or less distinct field. Part I traces 19th century psychology, neurology, and phenomenology roughly up to World War II. [...]
more on the status of introspection in psychology and in neuroscience
An index of the status of introspection within psychology comes from Medin, Markman, and Ross (2004) in the textbook Cognitive Psychology, which notes (pg.20) that:
“Although introspection is not an infallible window to the mind, psychological research is leading to principles that suggest when verbal reports are likely to accurately reflect thinking“
These perspectives all can be [...]
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, [...]
Jack and Roepstorff on introspection
From Trusting the Subject (2003), Anthony Jack and Andreas Roepstorff write:
“The unique challenge facing a science of consciousness is that that the best instrument available for measuring experience depends on cognitive processes internal to the subject. So just how much faith can we place in the capacity of the mind to understand itself? In principle, [...]
