the union of two nervous systems - Constructivist Foundations

Neurophenomenology

The Union of Two Nervous Systems: Neurophenomenology, Enkinaesthesia, and the Alexander Technique Susan A. J. Stuart • University of Glasgow, UK • susan.stuart/at/glasgow.ac.uk

Philosophical Concepts in Neurophenomenology

> Context • Neurophenomenology is a relatively new field, with scope for novel and informative approaches to empirical questions about what structural parallels there are between neural activity and phenomenal experience. > Problem • The

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overall aim is to present a method for examining possible correlations of neurodynamic and phenodynamic structures within the structurally-coupled work of Alexander Technique practitioners with their pupils. > Method • This paper includes the development of an enkinaesthetic explanatory framework, an overview of the salient aspects of the Alexander Technique, and the presentation of an elicitation interview technique as part of a neurophenomenological method. It will propose a way of testing the hypothesis that if, in the effective practice of Alexander Technique, there is a union between the nervous systems of teacher and pupil, it should be visible neurologically and affective phenomenologically, and thus it should be possible to investigate both its neural and phenomenal signatures. > Results • The proposed means of testing the hypothesis is to use the elicitation interview technique alongside neural monitoring during the teaching of the Alexander Technique in four paired sets of subjects. > Constructivist content • At the heart of this paper is the claim that all activity is co-activity. I make no assumption of an ontological primacy of mental or physical, or explanatory primacy of any methodology. > Implications • This has important ramifications for somatic education and therapies, for establishing frameworks of co-engagement and care in health-care situations, and for understanding empathy. > Key words • Co-activity, co-intentional, resonance, inhibition, guidance, direction.

Introduction Alexander Technique teachers, in recent discussions about their practical technique, have begun to speak about a phenomenon that they express as a union of two nervous systems or neural sets. In practice, what is meant by a neurological union or neural set remains obscure, but it seems very likely that the expressions are associated with the affective resonances felt between teacher and pupil when there is a co-ordinated flow of their somatosensory co-intentional activity. So, in some pre-theoretical sense, the phrase “neurological union” seems to be used to express something like “we are of the same mind,” where the phrase is intended as a metaphor for being in some kind of co-intentional kinaesthetic resonance or affective attunement, and this translates, again pre-theoretically, into the pair acting and moving together synchronously. But there is a lot that needs to be unpacked in these claims, and the simplicity of the phrase, “being of the same mind,” masks the complexity of the participants’ utterly entwined neuro-experiential,

Constructivist Foundations

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that is, neuro-phenomenological, co-activity that is always anticipatingly, recursively, co-livingly enkinaesthetic (see below). It is this complex co-activity that rests at the heart of our current investigation and will be laid out in the following pages. With this in mind, the theoretical foundations of this work include the following presuppositions: 1 | that all activity is co-activity1 – we exist in a world of immanent agents and things, separable only because we take objects of perception to be the result of singular modalities, most usually visual, and then impose on them a linguistic order;2 1 | I do not wish to make any claim about the co-active agency of objects, even though this might not be unreasonable within some suitably modified Latourian framework (Latour 2005); all I wish to say is that objects are routinely and prereflectively incorporated (brought into our wholebody-environment being) into our activity. 2 | I thank Gene Gendlin for his conversation and inspiration in these matters, and I recognize

2 | that processes of co-agential resonance and fragmentation typify our natural pre-reflexive, preconceptual engagement; 3 | that all living agential action is characterized by a recursive affective anticipatory dynamics; 4 | that there can be no assumption of an ontological primacy of mental or physical, or explanatory primacy of any method. I will begin by examining the nature of affective attunement from an enkinaesthetic perspective. It will be seen that enkinaesthesia provides a framework for lived experience, a way in which preconceptual, prereflective plenisentient polyadic co-agency can be made intelligible. From here, I will give a summary of the Alexander Technique and the way in which it can be advantageous to understand it within an enkinaesthetic framework. Following this, I will develop the proposed study in terms of the most apthat these claims would require another paper’s worth of substantiation that is not possible here. Trust me, it will come.

Neurophenomenology

The Union of Two Nervous Systems Susan A. J. Stuart

propriate tools for its investigation, firstly, the explicitation (henceforth “elicitation”3) interview techniques developed by Pierre Vermersch (1994, 1997, 2012) and Claire Petitmengin (2006; Petitmengin, Navarro & Le Van Quyen 2007), and secondly, neurophenomenology as first proposed by Varela (1996) and later Lutz (2007). I have chosen these as the most practical and fruitful methods by which we might test the hypothesis that if there is a union of two nervous systems, it should be visible neurologically, and affective and accessible phenomenologically, and thus it should be possible to investigate its neural and phenomenal signatures. Finally, I will present the experimental rationale, an outline with four proposed conditions, and address some of the most pressing concerns about the proposal. So, enkinaesthesia will provide the underlying theoretical framework; elicitation interviews will provide a second-person method for gaining access to first-person pre-reflexive experience; neurophenomenology will provide a means of drawing together first-, second-, and third-person methods of exploration; and the Alexander Technique will provide the provocative claim to be examined.

Enkinaesthesia4 In his Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes that phenomenology is 3 | Petitmengin et al. (2013), Froese (2013), Valenzuela-Moguillansky (2013), and Bitbol & Petitmengin (2013) have all adopted the use of “elicitation” in preference to “explicitation.” Each word has its own merits in this context of carefully guided introspection: “explicitation” is used to express making experience explicit though the interactive interview, whilst “elicitation” is used to express the way in which the interview elicits a description of earlier experience. I will follow the form in this Special Issue and use “elicitation.” 4 | “Enkinaesthesia” is a neologism that refers to the reciprocally affective neuro-muscular dynamical flows and muscle tensions that are felt and enfolded between co-participating agents, and felt, though not reciprocated, in our engagement with non-agential things. I introduced this word for the first time in Stuart (2010).

… a philosophy for which the world is always “ ‘already there’ before reflection begins – as an inalienable presence; and all its efforts are concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status. 5 (MerleauPonty 1962: vii)

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Part of my project here is to demonstrate the always already there of our direct and primitive contact in our enkinaesthetic engagement. So, let us begin by unpacking the notion of enkinaesthesia. Enkinaesthesia describes our plenisentient – tactile, auditory, visual, gustatory, olfactory, kinaesthetic, nociceptive, and proprioceptive – possibly naturally synaesthetic, affectively-entangled living being-with our world. It emphasizes both the felt neuromuscular dynamics of the agent, that is, the givenness and ownership of the agent’s experience (Henry 1973), and the entwined and situated co-affective immanence of the other (agential – fox, cockroach, bacteria, human beings, and non-agential – jodhpurs, sand, paper, coffee). “Immanence” is used to signify and emphasise the direct non-duality of the inescapable experience of other,6 and also our always becoming.7 Our enkinaesthetic experience of other agents will include our anticipated arc of their intentional action or movement, which is to say that our lived (intentional) experience appresents the lived (intentional) experience of the other.8 It is the affective intentional 5 | Punctuation modified slightly (removal of an apostrophe before “an”) due to what is apparently a typographical error in the English translation referenced here, which does not reflect anything in the French original. 6 | See, for example, the use of the term by Deleuze & Guattari (1994, 2004). 7 | See Bergson’s notion of “universal mobility” as the immanence of becoming (Bergson 1903). 8 | I am not suggesting that this is always the case or that we are always correct in our anticipation of the action of other agents; patently that is not true. I am merely saying that there are things, agents, with which we have a different affective dynamical interaction than with other things, non-agents, and that part of that difference is evident in our appresented anticipation of their intentional trajectory. In an enkinaesthetic twist

reciprocity of other sensing and experiencing agents that co-constitutes conscious relations, and that contributes to the experientially recursive temporal dynamics that lead to the formation and maintenance of integral enkinaesthetic structures. It is these enkinaesthetic structures that express the perpetual felt community and reciprocity of our living being in an enkinaesthetic field, where “field” is used to refer to the region in which a particular condition prevails; in this case, “field” refers to the topologically complex, affectively-laden dialogical field of our being-with our world.9 We have a prereflexive intuitive understanding of ourselves10 within this enkinaesthetic field, where each action is affective and engenders affect and that affect engenders action, not just within ourselves but within all life. Thus, it is through our enkinaesthetic entanglement that we create intercorporeal resonances with those agents with whom, and those objects with which, we are in relations of perpetual community and reciprocity within the experiential repertoire of our lived world. As Merleau-Ponty (1964: 15) says: “whenever I try to understand myself, the whole fabric of the perceptible world comes too, and with it comes the others who are caught in it.” Gendlin characterises this as an “implicit interactional bodily intricacy”: There is an implicit interactional bodily intri“ cacy that is first – and still with us now. It is not the body of perception that is elaborated by language, rather it is the body of interactional living in its environment. Language elaborates how the on Bergson, our affective becoming enfolds the affective becoming of the other if it is an agent, or changing becoming if non-agent, and vice versa. 9 | Elsewhere I have referred to this as our “Mitseinwelt” (Stuart 2010). 10 | “Ourselves” should not become a hostage to fortune because it seems once again to individuate. It is beyond doubt that the capacity to affect and be affected entails an individuating event in which “one” actively participates and is immersed, but the individuation is impersonal and pre-individual. In this respect I agree with Deleuze that the “one” is a “science fiction” derived from the simulation of identity “produced as an “optical effect.”” More needs to be said about this, but unfortunately not here.

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body implies its situation and its next behavior. We sense our bodies not as elaborated perceptions but as the body sense of our situations, the interactional whole-body by which we orient and know what we are doing. (Gendlin 1992: 353)


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Enkinaesthesia presents this living coaffectivity as a primordial condition for living being, with its inherent affective entanglement of being-with and being-among, which comes already clothed in “aboutness,” already saturated with intentionality (Steinbock 1999). Such intentional saturation, being always already enkinaesthetically entangled, requires synrhythmic regulation,11 which couples the “volitional and experiential functions of the minds of infant and mother through sympathetic response of their brains to the anatomical forms and dynamics of movement in structures of their body” (Trevarthen et al. 2006: 107). Although I have a local concern about the use of the word “mind” because it seems to presume an ontological distinction that does not need to be made, I am taking “experiential functions” to be a broad brush that includes plenisentient affect. In this way I take Trevarthen’s quotation to express the basis of enkinaesthetic balance and counterbalance. In an enkinaesthetic reading of Gendlin, we might understand this to mean the attunement and coordination of interactional whole-body-environment through mutual, reciprocal affective adaptation.12 In this way, enkinaesthesia provides us with a means of beginning to understand and dis-

11 | “Synrhythmia” is the reciprocal co-regulation of well-being or experience. “In each environment the vitality of the child is dependent on regulations across a succession of ‘frontiers’ with the human world, first physiological or amphoteronomic, then by the special direct psychological communications which we define as synrhythmic, and finally by sharing symbolic awareness of culture and language” Trevarthen et al. (2006: 69). 12 | These processes have their developmental basis in the co-regulation of affect in the dialogically coordinated modes of physiobiological regulation and adaptation that characterize mother-infant dyads in primary intersubjectivity (Bråten 1992, 2007; Cowley, Moodley & FioriCowley 2004; Trevarthen 1979, 1998, 2006), but also in utero (Stuart 2012).


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cuss the dynamics of polyadic experiential resonance and fragmentation. Enkinaesthetic resonance has a particular feel or phenodynamic13, by which is meant the diachronicism that distinguishes it in particular from the experiential phenodynamics of friction, fragmentation, and conflict. We can begin to think about the enkinaesthetic feel of synrhythmically regulated resonance with the notions of absorbed or smooth coping, where the world of other agents, objects, and obstacles absents itself as we act skilfully in a steady flow of plenisentient reciprocal affective adaptation. If we just think for a moment of playing the piano or dancing a waltz, these can each be done poorly, where the wrong notes are struck, the tempo is disorganised or you stand on your partner’s feet. At these times there is friction and fragmentation of the (longed-for) coordination. But there are also times when the instrument is brought into the body in the sense that it ceases to be other or alien, it has been in-corporated and the sound is full and flowing; or when the person with whom you are dancing ceases to be a separate person for in the fluency of your movement you feel and act as one.14 On these occasions the body is no longer … an object with fixed boundaries, but the “ practical unification of coordinated activity. Mastery of a tool allows its incorporation within the field of one’s bodily comportment; the difference 13 | “Phenodynamic” or “pheno-dynamic” is a term used by Le Van Quyen (2010) and Petitmengin et al. (2006 & 2007) to refer to the phenomenological structures of diachronic living experience. I intend the same referent here but I am emphasising the enkinaesthetic being-with in the living experience. 14 | Merleau-Ponty speaks of the “blind man’s stick [which] has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch” (1962: 165). Heidegger (1962) would speak here of equipment as being ready-to-hand, and Dreyfus subsequently speaks of practical, smooth or absorbed coping in these contexts (see, for example, Dreyfus 2007). And, in another vein, we might think of Csikszentmihalyi’s “concept of flow – the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter” (1990: 4).

between smooth competence and clumsy ineptness reflects the degree of bodily assimilation of the tool. (Rouse 2000: 9)

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Joseph Rouse continues: wielding relevant equipment and interacting “ with other practitioners is not an indifferently instrumental taking up of various discrete ‘means’ to chosen ends, but a referentially interrelated inorder-to-for-the-sake-of complex which sustains the intelligibility of its ‘component’ practices and equipment. (ibid: 12)

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We might describe this as being “in the zone” or “in the moment,” where the moment is not a discrete punctuated event, but a Husserlian “living-present” (Husserl 1964, particularly §11), which is always co-livingly enkinaesthetically active, drawing us along with our world and forward anticipatingly.15 So, just as Merleau-Ponty says that our body is “a grouping of lived-through meanings that moves towards its equilibrium” (1962: 177), we now say that there is an enkinaesthetic move towards resonance within the immanent, affected, and affecting whole-body-environment. And just as Merleau-Ponty says “the process of grasping a meaning is performed by the body” (ibid), we now say that it is in the shifting synrhythmic resonance and fragmentation of our enkinaesthetic entanglement that meaning arises. So, our enkinaesthetic dialogue or melody carries within itself, or comes gifted with, an immanent intelligibility,16 and it is 15 | There is, at one and the same time, a linear (explicit) order, a story we can tell and an implicit forth-coming, where the coming-forth is only possible because there is a perpetual feedback process into the already-changed and a feedforward into the anticipating. We might express this as a recursive “synchrony” of being-into-becoming. In our being is our becoming. Our being – never still, never quiet, never discrete – yields to our becoming, which shapes and alters our being, which yields to our becoming, and so the processual, recursive nature of our experience continues. We are, so to speak, immersed anticipatingly, recursively, becomingly, livingly, that is, enkinaesthetically, with our world. 16 | Trevarthen provides a lovely example of immanent intelligibility in the enkinaesthetic “proto-habitus” of mother and infant: “Malloch’s

Neurophenomenology


this enkinaesthetic immanent intelligibility, with its phenodynamics for resonance, friction, fragmentation, fluency, and flow, that Alexander Technique practitioners seek with their pupils.

in breath through the mouth in such a way as to produce a gasping sound… I was led to conjecture that if pulling back my head, depressing my larynx, and sucking in breath did indeed bring about a strain on my voice, it must constitute a misuse of the parts concerned. I now believed I had found the root of the trouble, for … if my hoarseness arose from the way I used parts of my organism, I should get no farther unless I could prevent or change this misuse… In this way it was borne in upon me that the changes in use … had produced a marked effect upon the functioning of my vocal and respiratory mechanisms. (Alexander 1988: 6–8)

Alexander had learnt how to re-educate the natural somato-sensory-kinetic relations between his head, his neck, and his back, to bring back into alignment “the ‘core’ of the body that supports the strength of the limbs and which provides the structural environment for breathing and for the internal organs.”17 His harmful bodily habits had led him to a faulty sensory appreciation of the “rightness” of his felt movements and, because they felt right, they continued until he was forced, by encountering a hindrance, to reflect on, and make himself aware of, what was going wrong. And, so, central to the success of the Alexander Technique is that we must first become aware that our sensory appreciation of our movements may be at fault, that something that feels comfortable or feels right, may be wrong,18 and as a consequence, it may be a misuse of the body and related to pain or discomfort elsewhere in the body. The underlying sense of this is that there is an organic congruence to the body that, if maintained, will enable a fluency and flow to movement and an enkinaesthetic resonance with the whole-body-environment. Conversely, if the original natural congruence is lost, the movement will become discordant and affect the organism’s smooth coping with its world.19 There are many ways for the original and natural congruence to be lost, physical injury is the most obvious, but being asked as children to “set aside [our] organic knowledge and curiosity [and] to sit still (without

theory of communicative musicality (Malloch 1999; Malloch & Trevarthen 2009) – derived from microanalysis of a proto-conversation between a six-week-old girl and her mother… – details the expressive parameters that enable the infant, with the support of her mother’s affectionate sensibility, to find intersubjective harmony of purpose. They compose a melodic story together by sharing the pulse, quality, and narrative of their expressive sounds and movements. Gratier has applied similar analysis to vocal dialogues between mothers and infants across cultures, with different states of sensitivity or security in intimacy. She shows how, in a thriving relationship, mother and infant discover a ‘proto-habitus,’ or shared world of meanings, as conventions of expression invented in their play (Gratier & Trevarthen 2007 2008; Gratier & Apter-Danon 2009)” (Trevarthen 2012: 30f).

17 | The Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique. Retrieved from http://www.stat.org. uk/pages/general.htm on 21 June 2013 18 | The terms “right” and “wrong” are used by Alexander Technique teachers to assume norms of bodily feelings that may be cultural and not simply “natural,” though there is no doubt that this is what is implied. This is one aspect of the technique that would benefit from a careful conceptual analysis. 19 | The Alexander Technique is used extensively by those who have to use their bodies in the course of their professions, for example, musicians, singers, actors, dressage riders, and other athletes, but also by those who seek relief from Parkinson’s disease (viz. Stallibrass, Sissons & Chalmers (2002)) or chronic pain, and as an adjunct to psychotherapy for those suffering from, for example, stress or anxiety-related disorders.

Alexander technique The Alexander Technique was developed by F. M. Alexander in the 1890s as a means of relieving breathing problems and hoarseness after medical intervention and advice had failed. It began as a process of self-examination, using mirrors to observe the movements involved in his own speaking habits and, gradually, learning to inhibit movements that were harmful to his body and the production of unimpeded speech. I saw that as soon as I started to recite, I tended “ to pull back the head, depress the larynx, and suck

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ever being taught stillness)” (Zahn 2005: 10) can create restlessness and bad posture. Additionally emotional stress and trauma can create tension and contraction in muscle tissue,20 which fractures and fragments the enkinaesthetic fluency that existed previously. The body adjusts to compensate in an attempt to re-establish its congruence, but now what feels right is wrong. Furthermore, because it is enkinaesthetically related to the whole-body being, the adjustments have led to an incongruent and discordant coping, where the actions have lost their fluency and flow in the whole-body-environment, and the immanent intelligibility of our enkinaesthetic relationships has altered, as have affordances and our horizons of action possibilities. Our action possibility horizons are nothing mysterious, they consist of the everyday “actual functioning of the body … in operation under the ordinary conditions of living – rising, sitting, walking, standing, using arms, hands, voice, tools, instruments of all kinds” (Dewey in the Preface to Alexander 1988: 8), and constitute the enkinaesthetic field of my living present. With each activity is also a co-activity: we use, for example, our arms to encircle our child, our hands to carry our heavy bags, our voice to soothe the distressed animal, and our body to sit down on the chair. Activity is always “full and vital” (ibid: 9), even in the ordinary conditions of living, but we are rarely aware of this vitality, of this enkinaesthetic plenisentience. Developing this awareness is the first stage within 20 | Stress and emotional trauma are usually associated with the mental, as though there were an objectively demonstrable dichotomy of mind and body and not just an unproven hypothesis. Alexander wrote: “[W]hen I began my investigations, I, in common with most people, conceived of the ‘body’ and ‘mind’ as separate parts of the same organism, and consequently believed that human ills, difficulties and shortcomings could be classified as either ‘mental’ or ‘physical’ and dealt with on specifically ‘mental’ or specifically ‘physical’ lines. My practical experiences, however, led me to abandon this point of view, and readers of my books will be aware that the technique described in them is based on the opposite conception, namely, that it is impossible to separate ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ processes in any form of human activity” (Alexander 1988: 21).


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the Alexander Technique, and the two ordinary conditions in which this is investigated are walking and chair work – sitting down and standing up from a chair. It is their relative simplicity and their ubiquity that make them ideal conditions for focused attention. In each case the pupil may have learned to compress their neck and spine when sitting down, or lean forward with hands pressing on knees for extra “lift” when standing up. They may have developed particular muscular tensions that spread themselves into habits of holding themselves awkwardly across their hips and pelvis when walking, or straining neck and shoulder muscles when concentrating on reading or using their mobile phone. These tensions may contribute to the invisibility of enkinaesthetic vitality because they restrict movement, muscular flow, feedforward, and feedback, but they also narrow the horizon of action possibilities – limit the affordances – the individual perceives as available to them. The Alexander teacher is sensitive to, one might even say enkinaesthetically skilled at, perceiving somatic and anatomical irregularity in their pupils. And this brings us to a fundamental claim, already stated, at the heart of enkinaesthesia: our enkinaesthetic experience of other agents includes our anticipated arc of their intentional action or movement, which is to say that our lived (intentional) experience appresents the lived (intentional) experience of the other. For it is only in the teacher’s being affectively present in the pupil’s movement or action that they can become immediately aware of a problem and draw it and its faulty sensory appreciation into the pupil’s awareness.21 In this way the Alexander Technique is not an end in itself but a means whereby we become aware of harmful interference in our fluent whole-body-environment activity. So, the next stage is for the pupil to learn to inhibit the action that feels right but is not, and to learn to employ the action that feels wrong but is not. To do this successfully they need careful direction from the 21 | This is not to suggest that other somatic methods do not share this sensitivity. I am sure they do, and the Feldenkrais is one of the most obvious examples. But the Alexander Technique is most frequently practised dyadically, and this makes it especially interesting for this current project.


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Alexander teacher. This direction is important because bad habits persist and are hard to break, especially if they do not feel wrong and the subsequent limitations are taken to be nothing more than a symptom of advancing years. Recently a friend remarked to me that there was “ one superstition current among even cultivated persons. They suppose that if one is told what to do, if the right end is pointed to them, all that is required in order to bring about the right act is will or wish on the part of the one who is to act. He used as an illustration the matter of physical posture; the assumption is that if a man is told to stand up straight, all that is further needed is wish and effort on his part, and the deed is done. He pointed out that this belief is on a par with primitive magic in its neglect of attention to the means which are involved in reaching an end. (Dewey 1922: 27f)

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So, the pupil must attend to the means involved in reaching an end, for example, getting up from a chair. Then, in order to establish an open manner of being, unfettered by preconceptions of how to perform the action, they must first inhibit the old habitual impulsive action and be guided by an Alexander teacher with practised enkinaesthetic skills in how best to achieve that end and reintroduce a fluency and flow to their movement and an enkinaesthetic resonance with their whole-body-environment. Only then should they give themselves consent to act. And this consent to act is the pupil’s secondary consent; their primary consent is when they first consent to be directed by the Alexander teacher. In this primary consent they open themselves up in a new way to the community and reciprocity of an enkinaesthetic relationship with their teacher, in an enkinaesthetic field involving a reciprocity of openness, responsiveness, and trust. And so, in this attitude, begins a lesson: We are going to let the neck be free, to let the “ head move forward and up, to let the back lengthen and widen, to let the knees go forward and away from the hips, to let the feet release down to the ground. These are your primary directions. 22

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22 | Alexander Technique in Glasgow with Michal Segal. Retrieved from http://www.glasgowalexandertechnique.co.uk/ on10 April 2013

With this attitude and these primary directions there is a process of “letting go” as teacher and pupil move more fully “into the moment,” which is to say, they become more aware of the plenisentient vitality of their experience as always co-livingly enkinaesthetically active. We might now say that the phrase more accurately describes the phenodynamical experience of the teacherpupil anticipatory enkinaesthetic synrhythmic regulation, and we might now ask if it could be dynamically and phenomenologically appropriate to talk of a union of two nervous systems in this particular dyadic enkinaesthetic field. I now propose that if such a union is occurring, it should be visible neurologically in terms of the respective location of activation and (though possibly or) the amplification of neural activity, and it should be experientially available to the participants in terms of phenodynamical elements of their phenomenology. We will look first at how we might access the phenodynamics with some reliability using elicitation interview techniques.

Elicitation interview The elicitation interview is an interactively guided process of first-person access that “enables us to bring a person, who may not be trained, to become conscious of his or her subjective experience, and describe it with great precision” (Petitmengin 2006: 230f). Training may seem a little excessive, given how confident we are about knowing our own experience, but given 1 | the very rich enkinaesthetically entangled and co-livingly appresented nature of our experience, 2 | that an ill-placed confidence in our knowledge can alter – exaggerating, masking, self-deceiving – what we recall, 3 | that the language we use will influence what we recall, and 4 | that we are aiming for great precision in our phenodynamical account, there is a need for the attention to detail provided by training. As Petitmengin later says: As our cognitive processes are the most per“ sonal and intimate things about us, we think we

Neurophenomenology


are familiar with them, and cannot imagine for a moment that any particular inner effort should be necessary to become aware of them… [Yet] not only do we not know that we do not know … we believe that we know. (Petitmengin 2006: 234f)

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And she concludes that this false grasp of our knowledge has both a deforming effect and a concealing effect on what we actually report. It is this that must be countered by elicitation interview techniques that elicit a verbal description of what was prereflective but has now become reflective. It is an evocative process, akin to Proust’s “cherchez la madeleine”23 (Vermersch 1994: 97), that grants one access not to the content of one “ moment of experience, but rather to the subjective features of the moment, such as the degree of phenomenal intensity, attentional stability, emotional tone, cognitive schema present in the moment, associations that are taking place, and so on. (Lutz 2007: 767)

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In an interesting parallel with the consent granted by the pupil in the Alexander Technique, the person who is to be interviewed using the elicitation method has first to consent to the interview. Then they must concentrate on a singular evocative event or occasion and frame what comes to mind in words. But this is not a simple exercise.24 Petitmengin (2006) lists the main difficulties of the exercise as 1 | a natural inclination for the dispersal of attention, 2 | an absorption in the objective, 3 | (a confusion of experience and representation, 4 | the impossibility of real-time access, 5 | ascertaining the “right” level of detail, and, finally, 6 | putting the experience into words.25 23 | From Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust 1998). 24 | See, for example, the work of Husserl (1977, 1983), Gendlin (1997), James (1890), Titchener (1901–1905, 1903), and, of course, Vermersch (1994, 1997, 2012), which is testament to the difficulty of making the pre-reflective explicit. 25 | It cannot be the job of this current paper to outline these difficulties in detail, so the reader

With all of this in mind the interviewer must, rather like the Alexander teacher, stabilize the interviewee’s attention through 1 | their physical presence, 2 | their guidance, 3 | their drawing the interviewee back when they drift away or move towards generalizations, 4 | their encouragement of the use of “direct references” (Gendlin 1997), that is, symbols which “do not mean but only point or specify a meaning” (ibid: 112), and 5 | the repeated reformulation of the interviewee’s description with a request for the interviewee to consider the accuracy of the interviewer’s account. In this process, the interviewer must turn the interviewee’s attention from the object or “what” of the experience, to the “how” of their experience, that is, its subjective modes of appearance. Their aim is to bring forth the phenodynamics of

moment,” that the immanent intelligibility of their enkinaesthetically entangled whole-body-environment is changing through deepening the synchronic dimension of the co-activity of interviewee and interviewer.

a specific lived experience, with affective mem“ ory, which enables the rediscovery of the past in

Again there is an interesting parallel with the Alexander Technique, where the teacher shifts the pupil’s focus from gaining a particular end – for example, standing up from the chair – to the particular phenodynamics of how the end is to be reached. Then, through inhibition of the end-gaining physical action, the subjective modes, of how the action feels in its anticipatory “were-to-be-enacted living present,” are brought into reflective awareness. In our Alexander Technique comparison we might now refer to these as the “very inhabitual interior gestures” that must now become habitual. So, in the Alexander Technique, teacher and pupil live the future, with all the anticipatory freshness of its plenisentient enkinaesthetic imaginary enaction, because there can be no action until the faulty habit has been inhibited and the new one guided into the possibility of becoming. The one striking dissimilarity between the elicitation interview method and the Alexander Technique is that the latter has no requirement for a verbalization of prereflective experience when it becomes reflective; just being able to perform the newly-guided action is enough. But it is a central hypothesis of this paper that a phenodynamical resonance can occur between teacher and pupil, and by using the elicita-

all its freshness, all its carnal and living density. In concrete memory, we experience an immediate coincidence with the past, we relive the past as if it was present. (Petitmengin 2006: 244)26

”

The enkinaesthetic plenisentience with which the evocation is experienced is described well in this passage: In the context of an interview, to guide the “ interviewee towards a concrete evocation of a past situation … the interviewer helps him to rediscover the spatio-temporal context of the experience (when, where, with whom?), and then with precision the visual, auditive, tactile and kinesthetic, olfactory and possibly gustatory sensations associated with the experience, until the past situation is ‘re-lived,’ to the point that it is more present than the interview situation. (Petitmengin 2006: 244f)

”

Perhaps here we might say that the interviewee is coming “more fully into the is urged to read Petitmengin (2006) for a detailed elaboration. 26 | The reference to “concrete memory” in this quotation is a reference to Gusdorf (1950), who speaks of concrete or affective memory.

Guided by his meta-knowledge of the syn“ chronic structure of subjective experience, the interviewer will help the interviewee to deepen the description of the characteristics of his experience… (Petitmengin 2006: 250)

”

This is achieved in part through the interview“ er’s frequent reformulations of the interviewee’s descriptions, and in part by the non-inductive but directive guidance that ‘very firmly maintains the interviewee in the framework of the singular experience he is exploring…’ This firmness is essential to enable the interviewee to carry out the very inhabitual interior gestures which are required for him to achieve this description. (ibid: 252)

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tion interview method to describe their coactive experience with detailed precision we have a means of testing the first stage of that claim. The second stage comes in implementing the whole within a neurophenomenological framework and examining the interaction for the occurrence of a corresponding neurodynamic resonance.


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The neurophenomenological method, offering a dual approach to understanding experience, was proposed by Francisco Varela as a remedy for the hard problem of consciousness. The remedy – for those who begin by assuming a dichotomizing metaphysics – was to come in the form of marrying “modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience” (Varela 1996: 330). In both the Alexander Technique and the elicitation interview method we have disciplined approaches to human experience; here, I will outline briefly the benefits of an accompanying cognitive science. “Central to neurophenomenology is the combination of quantitative measures of large-scale neural activity with detailed first-person descriptions of categorical features of experience” (Lutz 2007: 765). In the use of elicitation methods with Alexander practitioners, we have proposed a means of deriving detailed first-person descriptions of the categorical features of their joint experience. We also have dyadic relationships that work, through the stabilizing of attention, towards a deepening synrhythmic resonance in which extraneous social noise is minimized. This is also one of the great advantages that a neurophenomenological approach has over a simple neuroscientific investigation. Even during well-calibrated cognitive tasks, “ successive brain responses to repeated identical stimulations are highly variable. The source of this variability is believed to reside mainly in fluctuations of the subject’s cognitive context defined by his/her attentive state, spontaneous thought process, strategy to carry out the task, and so on… As these factors are hard to manipulate precisely, they are usually not controlled, and the variability is discarded by averaging

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vol. 8, N°3

techniques. We combined first-person data and the analysis of neural processes to reduce such noise. (Lutz et al. 2001: 1586)

”

The pragmatic and very useful conclusion of their study is that because of a systematic correlation of the two methods, “first-person data can be used to detect and interpret neural processes” (ibid: 1586). One of the most significant examples of a neurophenomenological project, and a good model on which to base this current proposal, comes from work carried out by Petitmengin, Baulac & Navarro (2006) and Petitmengin, Navarro & Le Van Quyen (2007), which aimed … to show through the concrete example “ of epileptic seizure anticipation how neurodynamic analysis and ‘pheno-dynamic’ analysis may guide and determine each other. On the one hand, the neuro-dynamic analysis will use new mathematical tools to detect the dynamical structure of the neuro-electric activity of the brain. On the other hand, the pheno-dynamic analysis will use new interview techniques to detect the pre-reflective dynamic micro-structure of the corresponding subjective experience. (Petitmengin, Navarro & Le Van Quyen 2007: 746)

”

It is significant that they go further than Lutz and his colleagues (2001) and present a case for a bi-directional guidance and determination of neurodynamics to phenodynamics and vice versa. It is this bi-directionality that supports Varela’s neurophenomenological ambition, for in it there is no evidence of any reductive explanatory primacy of neurology over phenomenology, or phenomenology over neurology. In Petitmengin et al.’s (Petitmengin, Baulac & Navarro 2006; Petitmengin, Navarro & Le Van Quyen 2007) study they aimed to demonstrate the phenomenal circumstances surrounding ictogenesis, that is, the affective experience presaging the onset of an epileptic seizure. Prior to the onset of a seizure, there are preictal symptoms or prodromes and it is through carefully elicited descriptions of prodromic experience that a phenodynamics of each particular experience of each particular interviewee can be established.

The main prodrome (which was often de“ scribed by the patients with very similar words) was a feeling of ‘tiredness,’ ‘weakness,’ ‘lack of energy,’ or ‘fragility’ (n = 4). Other patients described a feeling of distress (n = 3), ill-being (n = 1), or ‘loss’ (n = 1). These feelings may be associated with difficulties in concentrating and speaking (n = 1), clumsiness (n = 2), hypersensitivity to light (n = 2), noise (n = 1), or other stimuli (n = 1), and with headache (n = 2). (Petitmengin, Navarro & Le Van Quyen 2007: 752)

”

Each description is analyzed so that “the micro-structure of the experience, i.e., the precise sequence of sensations and possible actions which constitute the experience” (ibid) can be extracted. Then, through a comparison of these specific structures, Petitmengin et al. were able to detect synchronic, diachronic, and functional regularities that enabled them “to identify a (synchronic, diachronic, or functional) generic structure, which [was again] progressively extracted from the initial descriptions through successive operations of abstraction” (Petitmengin, Navarro & Le Van Quyen 2007: 752). These abstractional processes make it possible to establish temporal and structural correlations between neurodynamical activity and phenodynamical descriptions. In their particular study, it “enabled the discovery of a “preictal state” characterized by a desynchronization of the neuronal populations related to the epileptogenic focus, up to 5 hours before the seizure onset” (ibid: 256), and this provides a means by which the spatiotemporal neural and phenomenal dynamics of ictogenesis can be correlated and observed. As Petitmengin and her colleagues observe, this neurophenomenological “meta-observation” “shows that the neurological analysis and the phenomenological analysis guide and enrich each other” (ibid: 2007: 260). It is this guidance, enrichment, and discovery that we will now carry over into the proposed neurophenomenological experimental structure for examining the enkinaesthetic union of two nervous systems in the practice of teaching the Alexander Technique.

Neurophenomenology


Proposed experimental structure We have already noted that in the interaction of Alexander Technique practitioners with one another or with their pupils, there is the immediate advantage of focusing on a specific dyadic exchange and eliminating other extraneous social noise. We have also noted that successful Alexander teachers must become skilled at perceiving or sensing somatic and anatomical irregularity in their pupils, and in such a way that they recognize in the pupil, as they come forward for the lesson, a way of being that needs awareness, reflection, inhibition, the initiation of primary directions, and guidance. In their skilled being-with their pupil, the Alexander teacher is enkinaesthetically appresent in the other’s lived (intentional) experience, the pair living the immanent (pre-reflective and pre-conceptual) intelligibility of their direct non-propositional grasp of their engagement. The phenodynamics of this joint experience, with its anticipatory enkinaesthetic synrhythmic regulation, may have a corollary in the union of two nervous systems, and here I will present an experimental outline for testing if this is indeed the case. Hypothesis: If, in the effective practice of Alexander Technique, there is a union between the nervous systems of teacher and pupil, it should be visible neurologically and affective phenomenologically, and it should be possible to investigate in terms of its neural and phenomenal signatures. I will begin by proposing four experimental conditions: Condition 1: Alexander teacher and Alexander teacher – a pairing of two experts: one as subject, the other as practitioner, and vice versa Condition 2: Alexander teacher and Alexander pupil – a pairing of an expert with someone who is experienced, perhaps has regular lessons, but is not an expert Condition 3: Alexander teacher and novice – a pairing of an expert with someone who has no practical experience of the Alexander Technique Condition 4: Novice and novice – a pairing of two people with no practical experience of the Alexander Technique. This pair will provide a control condition.

At this stage, the object of the proposed experiment is to test the hypothesis that there should be evidence of a greater phenodynamic and neurodynamic union in Condition 1 because both participants will have an enhanced enkinaesthetic appresentational skill and be more practised at coming into the moment. In this condition, cooccurring intelligibility would be expected to be the norm. It might be interesting to switch the participants around in Condition 2 because, we might speculate, a phenodynamic and neurodynamic union is more likely in one direction – teacher working with pupil – than the other direction. Similarly, in Condition 3, and as further evidence for the hypotheses of Condition 2 (if it turns out to be supported), it might be interesting to switch the participants around. The hypothesis in this case is that a phenodynamic and neurodynamic union would be more likely in one direction – teacher working with novice – but that even then an enkinaesthetic anticipatory resonance would be much less likely than in Condition 2 because the novice has little relevant experiential history with which to render the occasion intelligible. Condition 4 is not expected to produce evidence of any phenodynamic or neurodynamic union. The most obvious pilot study, in terms of economic use of resources and clarity of phenodynamical and neurodynamical data, would be with two pairs of Alexander teachers, though it is recognized that such a limited data-set will provide only an indication of the possible future success of the project and not statistically significant results. Time-slice fMRI would be useful if the concern was with a particular moment, but since the living felt being-with is diachronically dynamic, it would be much more productive to capture neural activity throughout a lesson; only then would we get some impression of the convergence or co-creation of shared enkinaesthetic meanings. In this case it might be more appropriate to use a pair of EEG or MEG caps, since these would minimize environmental noise and would allow for more natural movement, the lack of which would otherwise be a particular problem for a practice of this sort.

Initially, it will be important to carry out some analysis of the global cerebral dynamics associated with (i) particular movements, and here we might confine ourselves to chair work only or walking only; (ii) particular locutions associated with the giving of primary directions; and (iii) particular tactile sensations, for example, gentle guiding touches, the subtlety of which is extraordinary but, nevertheless which might have a significant neural impact. Having done this, there is now the process of collecting rigorous and precise descriptions of the phenodynamics of the corresponding experience, and beginning the process of abstraction and refinement. And, finally, I intend to find out if correlations between the two dynamic structures can be established, and examine with great care the possible process of reciprocal determination. If the hypotheses are confirmed, this will have important ramifications for somatic education and therapies, for establishing frameworks of co-engagement and care in health-care and educational environments, and even for understanding the nature of empathic experience.

Conclusion I have presented a neurophenomenological method for examining possible correlations of neurodynamic and phenodynamic structures within the structurally coupled, enkinaesthetically rich work of Alexander Technique practitioners. I have done this within an enkinaesthetic explanatory framework, by presenting the salient aspects of the Alexander Technique, and by describing the elicitation interview technique and its central role within this, potentially, very important project. In terms of their significance, the methodologies presented here have a parity; they each contribute to a rigorous and careful enquiry into the nature of conscious enkinaesthetic engagement. Given this parity, there can be no reductionist assumption of an ontological primacy of either the mental or the physical; indeed, it will have been intimated that these categorisations are false, and that a dichotomizing metaphysics is a form of casuistry. In their own way, each methodology presented here picks out


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{

Susan Stuart

is a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow. Her research is primarily in the area of hermeneutic philosophy with strong links to the phenomenological method. Her work centres on developing the notion of enkinaesthesia: the reciprocally affective neuro-muscular dynamical flows and muscle tensions that are felt and enfolded between co-participating agents, and felt, though not reciprocated, in our engagement with non-agential things. Currently she chairs the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society.


References regularities known to us only through experience, where experience is primordially enkinaesthetic; and those regularities are brought into a reciprocal dialogue with one another. For these reasons, these methods are corroboratory not explanatory, and we move back to the Husserlian phenomenological aim of description not genesis. What has been proposed and instituted here is a systematic symmetrical relationship of first-, second-, and third-person approaches, which develops a strategy whilst avoiding specious ontological claims. As Michel Bitbol says “method comes first, and ontology is the shadow cast by methodology,” and as he intends, erroneous claims about ontologies must not be permitted to overshadow our endeavours.

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There are a number of people I would like to thank. These include Rachel Zahn for organising an inspiring workshop, The Embodied Mind – a domain of second-person psychophysical experts – which took place in CREA, Paris, in February 2012; Michal Segal for her marvellous lessons, good-humour, and insight; Michel Bitbol for his continued confidence in and support of my work; Eugene Gendlin for his many kind words and persistent questions; Mike Beaton, Alex South, and Michael Moss for their criticisms and comments; and Bryony Pierce, without whose patience, criticism, and encouragement this paper may not have reached full term.

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