What is it about?
This article examines the potential (actual physical possibility) of Selfhood in unresponsive patients from neurophenomenological point of view.
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Why is it important?
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. At the same time, establishing the potential (actual physical possibility) of Selfhood in DoC patients is crucially 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).
Perspectives
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. Given the critical importance of major ethical decisions (i.e., in particular, withdrawal of life-sustaining therapy) that are often made while dealing with unresponsive patients, such patients would benefit from the brain assessment aiming to evaluate the level of functional integrity of SRN and its OMs, and thus infer which patients are at least minimally self-aware and which aspects of Selfhood dominate, regardless of whether these patients do not exhibit self-reflective abilities on additional behavioral/instrumental tests.
Dr. Alexander A Fingelkurts
BM-Science
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Contemplating on the Nature of Selfhood in DoC Patients: Neurophenomenological Perspective, Journal of Integrative Neuroscience, January 2023, IMR Press,
DOI: 10.31083/j.jin2201023.
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