This paper looks to phenomenology and enactive cognition in order to shed light on the self and sense of self of patients with locked-in syndrome. It critically discusses the concept of the minimal self, both in its phenomenological and ontological dimension. Ontologically speaking, the self is considered to be equal to a person’s sensorimotor embodiment. This bodily self also grounds the minimal sense of self as being a distinct experiential subject. The view from the minimal bodily self presupposes that sociality (...) comes after the self, or that in other words, the essence of self remains independent of our social interactions and relations. In this paper, I rely on the idea of enactive autonomy and Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s views of human existence as primordially social, to argue for the contrary. The self is fundamentally relational and this is also reflected at the level of the subjective experience of being a self. I indicate how a strong relational view of selfhood can serve as a preliminary heuristic to make sense of the situation of the patient with LIS and conclude with some practical implications concerning patient autonomy, our ethical responsibility toward the patient, and the possibilities for improving the life of patients with LIS. (shrink)

Brain–machine interfaces combining visual, auditory, and tactile feedback have been previously used to generate embodiment experiences during spinal cord injury rehabilitation. It is not known if adding temperature to these modalities can result in discomfort with embodiment experiences. Here, comfort levels with the embodiment experiences were investigated in an intervention that required a chronic pain SCI patient to generate lower limb motor imagery commands in an immersive environment combining visual, auditory, tactile, and thermal feedback. Assessments were made pre-/ post-, throughout (...) the intervention, and at 7 weeks follow up. Overall, high levels of embodiment in the adapted three-domain scale of embodiment were found throughout the sessions. No significant adverse effects of VR were reported. Although sessions induced only a modest reduction in pain levels, an overall reduction occurred in all pain scales at follow up. A high degree of comfort in the comfort scale for the thermal-tactile sleeve, in both the thermal and tactile feedback components of the sleeve was reported. This study supports the feasibility of combining multimodal stimulation involving visual, auditory, tactile, and thermal feedback to generate embodiment experiences in neurorehabilitation programs. (shrink)

Under many conditions, emotional information is processed with priority and it may lead to cognitive conflict when it competes with task-relevant information. Accordingly, being able to ignore emotional information relies on cognitive control. The present perspective offers an integrative account of the mechanism that may underlie emotional conflict resolution in tasks involving response activation. We point to the contribution of emotional arousal and primed approach or avoidance motivation in accounting for emotional conflict resolution. We discuss the role of arousal in (...) individuals with impairments in visceral pathways to the brain due to spinal cord lesions, as it may offer important insights into the “typical” mechanisms of emotional conflict control. We argue that a better understanding of emotional conflict control could be critical for adaptive and flexible behavior and has potential implications for the selection of appropriate therapeutic interventions. (shrink)