Ecological Neuroscience: From Reduction to Proliferation of Our Resources

Abstract

In one common view, human activity is explained by neural processes, because these implement psychological functions that underlie overt behavior. In the ecological approach, such accounts are taken to be nonexplanatory, because they reify the phenomena they wish to explain. We argue that ecological psychology offers an antidote to such reification with concepts such as resonance, attunement, and anticipation, if they are considered as relational, world-involving activities. Our main claim is that we can understand our scientific explanations of neural phenomena as itself an attunement to sociomaterial practices. This allows us to understand neuroscientific processes as conditions that enable a resonating organism-environment system. In this view, neuroscientific and psychological phenomena are usually found in widely different sociomaterial practices. But we can occasionally achieve coordination between those practices. Establishing that a dependence of a psychological phenomenon on neural events holds is an achievement of a novel practice that we developed and to which we resonate. Thus the more we want to understand what happens inside the nervous system, the more we also need to scrutinize the sociomaterial environment in which we do so.

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to our two reviewers for their insightful comments. We also thank Victor Loughlin for his useful suggestions.

Funding

The research of Ludger van Dijk was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO, project Thinking in Practice: A Unified Ecological-Enactive Account [12V2318N]). The research of Erik Myin was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO, projects Getting Real about Words and Numbers [GOC7315N] and Facing the Interface [G049619N]).