LESS CARE, MORE STRESS: A RHYTHMIC POEM FROM THE ROMAN EMPIRE

This article considers a short text that was widely circulated in the mid- Roman Empire, in both a four-line and a six-line version, usually on gemstones. The text is a poem of sorts, but of a quite distinctive type. Part of it can be scanned according to the rules of classical (quantitative) metre, but more striking is the consistent rhythmic (stressed) pattern. Stressed poetry is not otherwise attested so early; this text may point to a substrate, now largely hidden from view, of popular verse that preceded the metrical revolutions of late antiquity and the Byzantine world. The poem is also a piece of visual artistry, designed to be looked at (particularly in its gemstone format). This hybrid status, between high art and popular culture, can also be detected in the content of the poem, which gestures towards both the poetics of intellectual elitism (using intertextual allusion, and dismissing the views of the masses) and a level of sexually aggressive assertion of embodied selfhood. It is a valuable witness to a form of middling literature (and a middling demographic), caught between aspirations to elite-style individuality and the mimetic imperative of an empire-wide consumer culture.

Heartbeat-evoked potentials during interoceptive-exteroceptive integration are not consistent with precision-weighting

Interoceptive-exteroceptive integration is fundamental for a unified interactive experience of the world with the body. Predictive coding accounts propose that these integrated signals operate predictively, with regulation by precision-weighting. Heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs) are one means to investigate integrated processing. In a previous study, consistent with predictive coding characterisations of precision-weighting, we observed modulation of HEPs by attention. However, we found no evidence of HEP modulation by participants’ interoceptive ability, despite the characterisation by predictive coding theories of trait abilities as a similar reflection of differential precision-weighting. In this study, we sought to more sensitively test the hypothesised trait-precision influences on HEPs by using an individually-adjusted measure of interoceptive performance. However, contrary to a precision-weighted predictive coding framework, we failed to find evidence in support of the HEP modulations by attentional-precision or trait-precision. Nonetheless, we observed robust HEP effects indicative of an expectation of a sound on the basis of a heartbeat -i.e. interoceptive-exteroceptive integration. It is possible that under our more individually-tailored task, participants relied less on attentional-precision to ‘boost’ predictions due to an enhanced perception of cardio-audio synchrony. Furthermore, assessing interoceptive ability is challenging, thus variations in performance may not accurately reflect trait-precision variations. Nevertheless, in sum, our findings are inconsistent with a precision-weighted prediction error view of the HEP, and highlight the need for clearer definitions of the manipulation and measurement of precision in predictive coding. Finally, our robust interoceptive-exteroceptive integration HEP effects may provide a valuable tool for investigating such integration in both clinical conditions and cognition.Impact statementWe investigate heart-evoked potentials during interoceptive-exteroceptive integration to determine whether cross-modal integrated processes operate under a precision-weighted predictive coding framework. Using a more sensitive individually-tailored task, we found no evidence of the modulation of cardio-audio expectation by attention or individual differences in interoceptive perception (i.e. by state or trait measures of precision). Nonetheless, we replicate evidence of cardiac-driven predictions of auditory stimuli, providing a potential tool for investigating their relationship with emotion and embodied selfhood.

Creativity and Dementia: New Directions From Embodiment, Relationality, and Citizenship Discourse

There have been important advances in research on creativity that have provided a more inclusive view of everyday and ordinary creativity, including that of persons living with dementia. However, these developments are limited by a lack of engagement with scholarship on embodiment, relationality, and citizenship. We address these limitations by drawing on a relational model of citizenship that offers a critical rethinking of the nature of creativity and the imperative that these be supported in long-term dementia care. We draw on transcribed video-recorded interactions between elder-clowns and residents living with dementia in one long-term care home in central Canada. These are analyzed with reference to key theoretical tenets of the relational model of citizenship. Embodied selfhood (i.e., the primordial and socio-cultural dispositions of the body that are fundamental sources of self-expression and relationality), are identified as key to the creativity of persons living with dementia. We argue that creativity is not an individual cognitive trait but rather emerges from the complex intersection of enabling environments and the embodied intentionality of all involved. We conclude that creativity must be supported in everyday life through organizational practices and socio-political institutions that more fully support the relational, interpersonal, and affective dimensions of care.

Mentalization and embodied selfhood in Borderline Personality Disorder

Aberrations of self-experience are considered a core feature of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). While prominent etiologic accounts of BPD, such as the mentalization based approach, appeal to the developmental constitution of self in early infant-caregiver environments, they often rely on a conception of self that is not explicitly articulated. Moreover, self-experience in BPD is often theorized at the level of narrative identity, thus minimizing the role of embodied experience. In this article, we present the hypothesis that disordered self and interpersonal functioning in BPD result, in part, from impairments in “embodied mentalization,” that manifest foundationally as alterations in minimal embodied selfhood, i.e. the first-person experience of being an individuated embodied subject. This account of BPD, which engages early intersubjective experiences has the potential to integrate phenomenological, developmental, and symptomatic findings in BPD, and is consistent with contemporary theories of brain function.

The Plantation Countermelodies of Dunbar and Du Bois: Writing Agropolitical Subjecthood in the Nadir

With attention to representations of the land and labor in the postslavery agricultural South of the nadir—a period when American apartheid was at its most violent—this essay uses Paul Laurence Dunbar’s plantation poems and W. E. B. Du Bois’s cotton novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), to explore counternarratives of black subjecthood. Agriculture’s focus on productive collaborations with the nonhuman, on cycles of decay and rebirth, and on the potential for self-determination provides a generative vocabulary for conceptualizing nadir-era experiences of the human. Under this model, literature provides a venue wherein the legacies of the plantation might be imaginatively transposed from a Jim Crow necropolitics of violent constraint and dispossession into vectors of agropolitical possibility. To that end, the essay uses Dunbar and Du Bois to propose potentially radical processes of black subject formation wherein physical and imaginative instances of reclamation give rise to fresh mergers of epistemic and embodied selfhood.

Being a Beast Machine

Throughout his career Andy Clark has shaped how scientists and philosophers think about the role of representation in action, perception, and cognition. In the latest iteration of this debate he has foregrounded the influential perspective of predictive processing, which sees perception as a process of action-oriented “best guessing” (inference) about the causes of noisy and ambiguous sensory signals and which involves the brain-inducing “generative” models of how hidden causes mediate the effects of actions on sensory signals. This chapter develops this position in the context of interoception (the sense of the body from within) and physiological regulation. A key idea here, which recalls twentieth-century cybernetic theory, is that interoceptive inference is targeted towards maintaining physiological homeostasis rather than inducing complete and accurate internal models of an external state of affairs. The chapter explores how this perspective helps connect control-oriented interoceptive inference to phenomenological properties of embodied selfhood and subjectivity. The upshot echoes (or perhaps subverts) a classic philosophical trope of the Enlightenment philosopher Julien de La Mettrie: to find the origins of our conscious selves in our nature as beast machines.

Emerson Attuning: Issues in Attachment and Intersubjectivity

This essay reads Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays in light of attachment theory, in particular the work of Daniel Stern. After providing an overview of attachment theory, it focuses on Stern’s argument that infants begin life in a relational state, gradually organizing a sense of embodied selfhood out of experiences of attuned interactions with other people. This image of subjectivity is presented as a corrective to the dominant conception of subjectivity in critical theory. The essay then uses Stern to argue that Emerson’s work elucidates an experience of early attachment trauma, driving a charged search for intersubjective contact and embodied presence in his work. This search informs Emerson’s response to the nineteenth-century logic of race: he understands race as a term for infinite connection at the level of biology, and responds to it with articulations of a different form of connection found at the level of the individual experience of the body within intersubjective relation. Subjectively oriented and embodied interdependency, visible in both Stern and Emerson, constitute a mode of interconnection crucially different from that which is the focus of actor-network-theory and critical work influenced by it.