- seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
experience is not reducible to third-person descriptions, but proposes a new way
of dealing with this irreducibility. Chalmers’s hard problem cannot be solved, he
says, by piecemeal studies of neural correlates of experience, but requires a strict
method for rediscovering the primacy of lived experience. To get past piecemeal
correlations and pure theory, we need systematic exploration ‘of the only link
between mind and consciousness that seems both obvious and natural: the struc-
ture of human experience itself’ (p. 330). Anyone following this method must culti-
vate the skill of stabilising and deepening their capacity for attentive bracketing
and intuition, and for describing what they find.
Varela describes the basic working hypothesis of neurophenomenology as that
‘Phenomenological accounts of the structure of experience and their counter-
parts in cognitive science relate to each other through reciprocal constraints’
(1996, p. 343). So, the findings of a disciplined first-person approach should be
an integral part of the validation of neurobiological proposals. This is perhaps
the kind of coming-together that philosopher Dan Lloyd imagines in his novel
about a theory of consciousness: ‘a transparent theory of consciousness, a Rosetta
stone – you’d put in phenomenology at one end and get spiking neurons at the
other’ (2004, p. 31).
What does neurophenomenology mean in practice? Varela suggests that as tech-
niques for brain imaging improve, ‘we shall need subjects whose competence in
making phenomenological discriminations and descriptions is accrued’ (1996, p.
341). The basic idea is to gain more accurate descriptions of experiences in order
to correlate them with measures of brain activity.The practice of neurophenomenology has gradually been finding its way into
neuroscientific experiments. A 2002 study by Antoine Lutz, Varela, and colleagues
is often cited as one of the early examples of neurophenomenology in action.
The idea is to take individual variation seriously, rather than simply averaging out
everyone’s results and pretending they are all the same. Participants were pre-
sented with a 3D illusion, and first-person reports about the participants’ mental
states were elicited after every trial. These were used to identify phenomenolog-
ical clusters, and for each cluster the EEG imaging results were analysed sepa-
rately. The neural patterns turned out to correlate with the degree of cognitive
preparedness and immediate perception of the illusion as reported verbally by
the participants. This suggests that variation which would otherwise have to be
written off as ‘noise’ can be meaningfully interpreted by treating participants’
first-person experiences as valuable data in their own right. Of course, if con-
sciousness is what we are investigating, this should come as no surprise. But this
and later work (e.g. Garrison et al., 2013; Petitmengin et al., 2013) helps show the
concrete benefits of integrating ‘first-person’ accounts with neuroimaging data.The experiment has been criticised, mainly for the lack of detail provided about
the phenomenological side of their procedures. The authors state that partic-
ipants were ‘trained extensively with a well-known illusory depth perception
task’, and that they ‘underwent the task until they found their own categories
to describe the phenomenological context in which they performed it and the
strategies they used to carry it out’ (Lutz et al., 2002, p. 1586). But their reporting is
especially opaque on how the first-person behaviours were collected
and clustered into categories. The authors do not say how often subjects‘a quest to marry modern
cognitive science and a
disciplined approach to
human experience’
(Varela, 1996, p. 330)