Narratives of the self in bilingual speakers: the neurophenomenal space

Abstract

Abstract We tell one another stories of our lives. Sharing subjective experience is part of what it means to be an embodied, languaging being. In order to explore this aspect of our nature we need to relate our phenomenal experience to its neural bases as we talk. I describe a three-step procedure to do so as a person recounts a personal story. The first step characterizes their subjective experience. I describe two complementary ways to do so. The second step infers the attentional and attributional processes that compose that experience. I suppose that telling a personal story is a form of reliving it. The process of mental simulation involved recruits other attributional processes and is itself nested under one that sustains attention to the goal of telling the story. The third step identifies these processes with their possible neural bases expressed through the language network. I take the mapping from the phenomenal to the neural to be the neurophenomenal space and offer a visualization of it. I illustrate the procedure using the hypothetical example of a bilingual speaker who tells of a recent experience walking in a new city.