Consciousness

• seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
  Maybe a final part of the complicated jigsaw of different ways of studying con-
  sciousness is that we are scared of what we might find if we abandon the meth-
  ods that are familiar to us. We may well have ‘quite reasonable anxieties about
  whether we might hate what we eventually learned about our own brains and
  mind, and these anxieties promote wishful thinking on all sides’ (Dennett, 2007,
  p. 269). It takes courage to set aside what you think you know, is this is nowhere
  more true than of the experiences that feel so intimately yours. In the final chap-
  ter, we will hear more from people who have trained with great commitment in
  noncommittal self-observation. What do they have to say about what they find?

‘Self-deception may feel

like insight’

(Metzinger, 2009, p. 220)

Dennett, D. C. (2007). Heterophenomenology recon-

sidered. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,

6 (1–2), 247–270.

A response to fifteen peer commentaries in the same

special issue on different versions of phenomenology

(and other ways of studying consciousness).

Garrison, K. A., Santoyo, J. F., Davis, J. H.,

Thornhill, T. A., Kerr, C. E., and Brewer, J. A.

(2013). Effortless awareness: Using real-time neuro-

feedback to investigate correlates of posterior cingulate

cortex activity in meditators’ self-report. Frontiers in

Human Neuroscience, 7 , article 440.

Uses grounded theory to analyse self-reports and

derive distinctions between different meditative states

during real-time neurofeedback sessions.

Petitmengin, C., and Lachaux, J.-P. (2013).

Microcognitive science: Bridging experiential and

neuronal microdynamics. Frontiers in Human Neurosci-

ence, 7 , article 617.

Suggests new methods to tackle the problem of different

levels of description between neurophenomenology and

neuroimaging.

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