The nervous system couples effectively a person with the world in an ongoing interaction via its lower level neuromechanical loops. We humans, with a multilevel brain consisting of extensive neural loops superimposed on the primordial neuromechanical loops, are still coupled with the world as a giant complex neuromechanical system. The process of becoming aware of the external world requires an ongoing activity of the primordial neuromechanical sensory-motor circuits accompanied by visual, tactile and auditory inputs, bound together in percepts of the external world.
The idea has been expressed well by Shaun Gallagher when he maintained that the human brain evolved along with the human body and works the way it does because is not isolated but rather is dynamically coupled to the body and, via the body, to the external environment1. The coupling of brain-body-environment is shaped by the physical aspects of the underlying neuronal processes and the bodily movements they generate and respond to.
These results support the original idea of William James that the self consists in two parts2. The first is an “I” that physically perceives and experiences the world and the own body, and the second is a “me” that encompasses inner experiences with mental narrative about oneself based on memory3.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James
- Shaun Gallagher (2017): Enactivist Interventions: rethinking the Mind. Oxford University Press. ↩︎
- See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-brain-creates-your-physical-sense-of-self/ ↩︎
- D Lyu et al (2023): Causal evidence for the processing of bodily self in the anterior precuneus. Neuron 111, 2502-2512;
V Gallese (2014): Bodily selves in relation: embodied simulation as second-person perspective on intersubjectivity. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 369, 20130177. ↩︎