#manos tsakiris

[maaarine]

The Interoceptive Mind: From Homeostasis to Awareness (ed. Manos Tsakiris and Helena De Preester, 2018)

"Briefly, we propose that organs endowed with pacemaker properties, such as the heart or the stomach, function as continuous sources of signals, sending the message to the central nervous system that a body is there—whatever the bodily state is.

This information would then be used at the central level to generate an egocentric reference frame, from which first-person perspective can arise. (…)

The gastrointestinal tract is lined with a specific pacemaker cell type, the interstitial cells of Cajal, that intrinsically generate a slow electrical rhythm at rates varying between 3 cycles per minute in the stomach to 12 cycles per minute in the duodenum.

This slow electrical rhythm controls the frequency of contraction of the gastrointestinal tract smooth muscle, but is generated at all times, even when fasting.

These signals, continuously emitted by the heart and gastrointestinal tract, are relayed up to the central nervous system, as will be detailed in section 3.2.1.

The brain is constantly monitoring visceral signals which most of the time are processed implicitly and remain unnoticed.

Visceral signals can sometimes become conscious to indicate a large deviation from homeostasis in order to trigger a protective behavior.

However, such events remain quite rare, whereas the self is continuously present.

It thus seems more likely that the self is rooted in the automatic, unconscious monitoring of visceral inputs, rather than in sparse, transient, conscious events."

[luxe-pauvre]

Looking ahead, humanity is likely to experience even more stressors of biological and sociopolitical uncertainty. How we respond to these challenges depends largely on how they make us feel – how we experience our physiological safety or lack thereof. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that the ideal subject of a totalitarian regime is one ‘for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie, the standards of thought) no longer exist.’ In our age of visceral politics, we should at least try to understand how the political animals of the 21st century can be made to feel the reality of experience, so as to distinguish between the facts and fictions of the present. Politics is visceral in at least two ways. It is visceral in the sense that our unsafe bodies drive our politics. The rise of visceral politics of this kind might reflect the failure of our socioeconomic system to take care of our brittle bodies, and its failure to enable us to accurately infer our physiological states and how the world makes us feel. But there is also another way in which we can think of visceral politics. They are visceral in the sense that our politics should make our bodies feel safe, and empower us to tolerate and explore the inherent uncertainty of the human condition. We witness the dominance of the former, but we should strive for the rise of the latter.

Manos Tsakiris, Politics is visceral

[luxe-pauvre]

Moreover, the very question of what precise emotions people are actually experiencing remains empirically underinvestigated or, at best, naively researched. There is an unwritten assumption in political life that people know what they want, or at least that politicians can persuade people about what they want. How would a political life play out that includes the idea that people might not know what they want, because they might not know what they feel? What would politics look like if it encompassed this emotional, affective domain? People in general are not that good at recognising or labelling their feelings. While there are differences, this finding has been validated across cultures. Either as a lifelong trait or as a state, people often show poor affective insight because they can’t produce the right inferences about their physiological states – they have poor interoceptive awareness. As a result, we routinely misidentify and mislabel or confuse our emotions.

Manos Tsakiris, Politics is visceral

[luxe-pauvre]

What matters here is not just the fact that we inhabit a world in crisis. It’s that we ‘live in a world where the language of crisis has become the most common way of representing a series of situations we face’, as the French anthropologist Didier Fassin has observed. The ubiquity of this language, he says, ‘tells us something about the actuality and the imaginary of contemporary societies’. The way we subjectively experience these feelings of uncertainty and crisis has a tangible effect on political animals of the 21st century. It places us in a state of ‘allostatic load’ – a constant state of accumulated high stress that comes from desperately trying to keep the body within its homeostatic safe zone. This exposure to chronic or repeated challenges, which the individual experiences as stressful, eventually wears out the body and brain. If one of the key functions of the brain is to serve the body by maintaining a healthy body budget, then chronic stress burns through cash. Without a healthy balance sheet, our options narrow as our organism can no longer rely on its increasingly depleted reserves. As a consequence, we lose our ability to flexibly regulate our bodies, and this loss contributes to poor health, emotional dysregulation and cognitive decline – a vicious cycle that exacerbates the conditions that promoted allostatic load in the first place. The strikingly increased prevalence of hypertension among African Americans compared with other Americans can’t be accounted for by genetic differences; instead, they reflect the sociopolitical tensions that such groups experience. The fact that the human body and the body politic are intertwined means that systematically depleting our body budget has far-reaching consequences. […] The political animals of 21st-century Western democracies seem ever more homeostatically and affectively dysregulated. Concerns about healthcare and financial stability consistently rank among the highest causes of stress. Our world is also one of increased informational uncertainty, driven by an ecosystem of 24/7 informational overdose and pervasive social media platforms that often breed fake news and belief polarisation. Under such conditions, our visceral states come to the forefront, and manifest themselves as powerful but dysregulated emotions. It’s against this background that we must understand how our affective needs and visceral expressions have come to dominate sociopolitical life.

Manos Tsakiris, Politics is visceral

[luxe-pauvre]

It’s not surprising, then, that political language has become saturated with emotion. Whether one calls the present era a time of anxiety, fear or anger, visceral states and feelings appear at the forefront of the political conversation. This is hard to square with Aristotle’s claim that human beings are ‘naturally rational’ creatures – ‘political animals’ who could flourish only within a political community or ‘polis’. The polis, as Aristotle wrote in Politics, ‘comes to be for the sake of life, and exists for the sake of the good life’. The different ways of organising the polis to promote the good life, and disagreements about the best way to do so, create the concept of politics as we know it. So, in the 21st century of ‘emo-cratic’ politics, what does it mean to be a ‘political animal’, and what counts as a ‘good life’? The answer from what I call ‘visceral politics’ emerges out of a historically novel scientific understanding of the human being, not so much as a rational creature, but as a primarily embodied and affective one. Visceral politics lies at the intersection of the body’s physiology and political behaviour. It’s informed by aligning the life sciences, social sciences and humanities to provide insights into how human emotions are created and experienced. It takes on board the visceral underpinnings of human nature, their importance for our physical and mental wellbeing, and the interdependence between the individual and society. It also captures the ways in which our emotions shape our needs and decisions and, in turn, how sociopolitical forces recruit or exploit physiology to influence behaviour.

Manos Tsakiris, Politics is visceral

[gcmyers]

"Let the Soul Dangle"

“Let the Soul Dangle”

I came across an article this morning that had been forwarded to me by a friend several years ago in response to a blog post.  Appearing in the online magazine Psyche, it was written by three researchers ( Julia Christensen, Guido Giglioni, and Manos Tsakiris) and was largely about how creativity and wellness were often boosted by allowing the mind to wander. It’s an interesting article that…

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[emotionandembodiment-blog]

(M)eine echte rechte Hand

Rubber Hand Illusion und Herzwahrnehmungstest

Die Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) beschreibt ein verblüffendes Phänomen, es beschreibt, wie sich das sogenannte Körper-Ich eine leblose Gummihand zu Eigen macht, also uns glauben lässt, dass diese Hand tatsächlich unsere eigene ist. Verblüffend ist dieser Befund vor allem deswegen, weil viele Jahre angenommen wurde, dass dieses Körper-Ich täuschungsresistent ist.

Diesen spannenden Sachverhalt haben uns  Katharina, Franzi und Laura näher gebracht. 

Wie kann man diesen Effekt, auch zu Hause, prima sichtbar machen?

Man legt die rechte Hand auf einen Tisch, die linke Hand bleibt unter dem Tisch verborgen. Neben die rechte ECHTE Hand, plaziert man einen Sichtschutz z.B, aus Pappe, dann legt man eine UNECHTE rechte Hand neben diesen Sichtschutz, z.B. wie unsere Referenten es machten, aus einem ausgestopften Gummihandschuh.

Nun braucht man einen "Versuchsleiter", der mit einem Pinsel oder einer Zahnbürste parallel über die echte nicht-sichtbare und die unechte sichtbare Hand streicht. Bereits nach einer kurzen Zeit, ist man davon überzeugt, dass die unechte Hand zum eigenen Körper gehört. Der Psychologe Manos Tsakiris ist der führende Forscher auf diesem Gebiet und beschreibt das Phänomen:

"Der Hauptgrund für die Illusion besteht darin: Das Gehirn versucht, den Konflikt zwischen den Berührungsreizen auf der eigenen Hand und den Streichelbewegungen, die die Versuchsperson auf der Gummihand sieht, zu lösen, indem es beide Sinnesinformationen zu einer zusammenführt. Dabei fängt die Sehinformation sozusagen die Berührungsinformation ein. Man beginnt daher das Gefühl zu entwickeln, dass die Berührungsempfindung von der sichtbaren Gummihand stammt."

Tsakiris wollte jedoch die Wirkrichtung des Effekts unter verschiedenen Bedingungen z.B. durch Veränderung der Position der Gummihand prüfen, um das Phänomen in seiner Gänze zu verstehen.

Die wichtigsten Schlussfolgerungen, die uns die Referenten präsentierten:

- Die RHI funktioniert nur bei kongruenter Position der Gummihand, sowie bei synchroner Stimulation.

- Die RHI funktioniert auch, wenn der Proband an seiner echten linken Hand stimuliert wird und dabei unechte rechte Gummihand sieht.

Tsakiris war mit dieser Entdeckung nicht vollständig zufrieden, denn die bisherigen Befunde bewiesen zwar eine multisensorische Integration exterozeptiver Signale durch bottom-up und top-down Prozesse, er stellte sich jedoch noch die Frage des Einflusses von Interozeption.

Er testete die innere Körperwahrnehmung von 46 weiblichen Probanden mit dem sogenannten Herzwahrnehmungstest. Auch diesen Test kann man zuhause wunderbar einfach zu zweit nachstellen. Auch wir haben ihn im Seminar unter der Anleitung der Referenten durchgeführt. Man selbst versucht dabei den eigenen Herzschlag zu zählen OHNE, dabei den Puls zu fühlen. Die andere Person fühlt den Puls in einem bestimmten Zeitintervall, z.B.30 Sekunden, danach werden beide Pulsschlagraten verglichen. So ähnlich geschah dies auch im Versuchslabor, anschließend wurde dann wieder die RHI durchgeführt. Tsakiris beschrieb:

"Diejenigen Versuchspersonen, die ihre inneren Körperzustände nur schlecht wahrnehmen können, waren viel leichter für die Gummihand-Illusion empfänglich. Offenbar gibt es einen engen Zusammenhang zwischen der äußeren und der inneren Körperwahrnehmung. Menschen mit schwacher Sensibilität für die inneren Körperzustände sind in ihrem Gehirn abhängiger von der reinen Außenwahrnehmung des Körpers, etwa über den Sehsinn. Menschen mit guter innerer Körpersensibilität dagegen können besser vorhersagen, wie sich ihr Körper angesichts äußerer Ereignisse anfühlen wird. Sie sind daher weniger gefährdet,            durch Körperillusionen getäuscht zu werden." 

Unsere Referenten schlossen ihren Vortrag mit der Erkenntnis ab, dass die individuelle interozeptive Sensibilität eine entscheidende Rolle bei der Integration multisensorischer Signale spielt.

 # RHI   #Power Point