Contemplating on the Nature of Selfhood in DoC Patients: Neurophenomenological Perspective
Andrew A Fingelkurts, Alexander A Fingelkurts
Journal of Integrative Neuroscience February 1, 2023 DOI: 10.31083/j.jin2201023 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Selfhood Self-consciousness Quantitative electroencephalogram qeeg First-person givenness Operational synchrony Brain Vegetative state vs |
| Key points | Argues that current DoC policy recommendations neglect the patient's self due to the difficulty of assessing self-awareness, yet Selfhood is crucial for clinical, ethical, and moral reasons. Proposes that Selfhood can be conceptualized within Operational Architectonics and measured via qEEG operational synchrony, supporting the idea that rebooting self-awareness is the first step to recovery. |
Abstract
Medical well-regarded policy recommendations for patients with disorders of consciousness (DoC) are almost exclusively relied on behavioural examination and evaluation of higher-order cognition, and largely disregard the patients’ self. This is so because practically establishing the presence of self-awareness or Selfhood is even more challenging than evaluating the presence of consciousness. At the same time, establishing the potential (actual physical possibility) of Selfhood in DoC patients is crucialy important from clinical, ethical, and moral standpoints because Selfhood is the most central and private evidence of being an independent and free agent that unites intention, embodiment, executive functions, attention, general intelligence, emotions and other components within the intra-subjective frame (first-person givenness). The importance of Selfhood is supported further by the observation that rebooting of self-awareness is the first step to recovery after brain damage. It seems that complex experiential Selfhood can be plausibly conceptualized within the Operational Architectonics (OA) of brain-mind functioning and reliably measured by quantitative electroencephalogram (qEEG) operational synchrony.