Experiencing your brain: neurofeedback as a new bridge between neuroscience and phenomenology. Bagdasaryan, J. & Le Van Quyen, M. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2013. ZSCC: 0000054 Publisher: Frontiers
Experiencing your brain: neurofeedback as a new bridge between neuroscience and phenomenology [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
Neurophenomenology is a scientific research programme aimed to combine neuroscience with phenomenology in order to study human experience. Nevertheless, despite several explicit implementations, the integration of first-person data into the experimental protocols of cognitive neuroscience still faces a number of epistemological and methodological challenges. Notably, the difficulties to simultaneously acquire phenomenological and neuroscientific data have limited its implementation into research projects. In our paper, we propose that neurofeedback paradigms, in which subjects learn to self-regulate their own neural activity, may offer a new pragmatic way to integrate first-person and third-person descriptions. Here, information from first- and third-person perspectives are braided together in the iterative causal closed loop, creating experimental situations in which they reciprocally constrain each other. In real-time, the subject is not only actively involved in the process of data acquisition, but also assisted to directly influence the neural data through conscious experience. Thus, neurofeedback may help to gain a deeper phenomenological-physiological understanding of downward causations whereby conscious activities have direct causal effects on neuronal patterns. We discuss possible mechanisms that could mediate such effects and indicate a number of directions for future research.
@article{bagdasaryan_experiencing_2013,
	title = {Experiencing your brain: neurofeedback as a new bridge between neuroscience and phenomenology},
	volume = {7},
	issn = {1662-5161},
	shorttitle = {Experiencing your brain},
	url = {https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00680/full},
	doi = {10.3389/fnhum.2013.00680},
	abstract = {Neurophenomenology is a scientific research programme aimed to combine neuroscience with phenomenology in order to study human experience. Nevertheless, despite several explicit implementations, the integration of first-person data into the experimental protocols of cognitive neuroscience still faces a number of epistemological and methodological challenges. Notably, the difficulties to simultaneously acquire phenomenological and neuroscientific data have limited its implementation into research projects. In our paper, we propose that neurofeedback paradigms, in which subjects learn to self-regulate their own neural activity, may offer a new pragmatic way to integrate first-person and third-person descriptions. Here, information from first- and third-person perspectives are braided together in the iterative causal closed loop, creating experimental situations in which they reciprocally constrain each other. In real-time, the subject is not only actively involved in the process of data acquisition, but also assisted to directly influence the neural data through conscious experience. Thus, neurofeedback may help to gain a deeper phenomenological-physiological understanding of downward causations whereby conscious activities have direct causal effects on neuronal patterns. We discuss possible mechanisms that could mediate such effects and indicate a number of directions for future research.},
	language = {English},
	urldate = {2020-10-06},
	journal = {Frontiers in Human Neuroscience},
	author = {Bagdasaryan, Juliana and Le Van Quyen, Michel},
	year = {2013},
	note = {ZSCC: 0000054 
Publisher: Frontiers},
	keywords = {Neurofeedback, downward causation, multiscale neural dynamics, neurophenomenology, voluntary action},
}

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