University of Ljubljana
NEUROPHENOMENOLOGY

Neurophenomenology is a research programme that seeks to systematically integrate first-person descriptions of people's lived experience with third-person biobehavioral findings. Its guiding idea, first proposed two decades ago by Francisco Varela (Varela, 1996), is that a comprehensive account of any cognitive phenomenon must take experience seriously. That does not merely mean adding empirical first-person data to an already existing scientific model built on the basis of results obtained by standard methods of neuroscience and psychology. Rather, the idea is that first-person inquiry can guide and enrich neuroscientific and psychological research - just as it can, in turn, itself be guided and enriched by findings about people's brain activity and behavior.

The importance of neurophenomenology has been recently demonstrated in a study of the phenomenon of inner speech (Hurlburt, Alderson-Day, Kühn & Fernyhough, 2016). The experiment compared brain activation during spontaneous and task-elicited inner speech. Placed in an fMRI scanner, the participants were either instructed to perform a standard psychological task designed to elicit inner speech, or lied in the scanner long enough that inner speech eventually spontaneously occurred in their experiential field. As it turned out, the two conditions gave rise to a different (and even opposite) activation in crucial brain areas associated with inner speech - posing a challenge to findings of previous task-based research on inner speech, and encouraging researchers to come up with research designs more suitable for investigating this phenomenon.

Our current project deals with neurophenomenology of visuo-spatial working memory, whereby we are recording what types of experiential states participants reach while solving memory tasks, and testing whether these differences are so significant as to yield differing patterns of brain activation. We are looking for the latter by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging. Thus, we are talking about combining the first-person method of phenomenological interview and the third-person solving of psychological tasks and functional imaging. The hope is that this task will aid us in improving the validity of neuroimaging studies.

REFERENCES
Varela, F. J. (1996). Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem. Journal of consciousness studies, 3(4), 330–349.
Hurlburt, R. T., Alderson-Day, B., Kühn, S., &; Fernyhough, C. (2016). Exploring the ecological validity of thinking on demand: neural correlates of elicited vs. spontaneously occurring inner speech. PLoS One, 11(2), e0147932.