Guillaume Dumas

Lived experience is shaped by intersubjective, social, cultural, and historical dimensions. For the past 30 years, neurophenomenology has… (see more) adopted an embodied perspective of the mind by integrating first-person experiential and third-person neurobehavioral perspectives. Indeed, the neurophenomenology pragmatic approach has embraced an embodied perspective of the mind by integrating experiential first-person and neurobehavioural third-person perspectives. Neurophenomenology reveals mutual constraints between both, as they co-constitute a person’s lived experience. This article emphasizes the intersubjective and social facets of lived experience as well as the readiness of the scientific community to use a "generative neurophenomenology" approach, envisioned in the 1990s by Francisco Varela. For this endeavour, we clarify three meanings of “generative” as it applies distinctly to generative phenomenology, generative passages, and generative models. Then, we propose to combine existing methods to update neurophenomenology program: First, by transitioning from individual to multiple people phenomenology methods that include intersubjectivity experience; second, by expanding traditional neuroscience to include measures of multimodal interpersonal synchrony; and third, by leveraging multiple computational tools to integrate different viewpoints, thereby enriching our understanding of lived experience; We also underscore the potential of diverse mathematical formalisms to capture aspects of human experience, all while underscoring that using computational approaches to model neurophenomenology does not entail endorsing computationalism as a grounding hypothesis of human experience. Finally, we illustrate the clinical relevance of this paradigm through two case studies in psychiatry—(1) with interactive dyads in autism and (2) with multiple members in family therapy sessions—demonstrating its translational potential.

Human sociality is grounded in the dynamic coordination of individuals as they interact with one another. Indeed, interpersonal coordinat… (see more)ion on various levels—neural, behavioural, physiological, affective, linguistic—are hallmarks of successful social communication and cooperation. However, describing these complex, interdependent dynamics has been limited by current methodological approaches, owing to a restrictive repertoire of tools and the absence of a unified, standardised methodological framework. Here, we identify information theory, the mathematical theory of communication, as a particularly well-suited conceptual framework to address this shortfall, given its appropriate sensitivity to complex dynamics, including potential nonlinearity and higher-order interactions, and its data-driven, model-agnostic foundations. With deep roots in computational, cognitive, and systems neuroscience, the formal introduction of information-theoretic quantities and methods into the study of interpersonal coordination is perhaps overdue. This Perspective advances the case for a unified information-theoretic framework for the field while paving the path for a new generation of empirically testable, theoretically grounded research questions.