From Enaction to Emersion: the Way of Living Body

Body ecology explores the direct relationship of the living body and its nervous system with their environment, especially during immersion in natural, artificial or virtual environments. The activation of the body is the activation of the nervous and sensitive part of the living body under the effect of ecologization. Emersiology proposes to analyze the emersion of the living body in the consciousness of the lived body. Emersion is the involuntary movement in our body of networks, moods and images about which our consciousness knows only the emerged part of. In this issue of Intellectica, we question the modalities of the activation of the living part of our body whose knowledge is not immediately accessible to us. Some authors question here this ecological and unconscious treatment of neurobiological signals (emotions, gestures, movements), so that subjects learn from their living body; while others would like to transform the awareness of experience or cognition by what will have been awakened by the activity of the living (by technologies, emerging logic, attention focusing, neuro-imagery etc.). Indeed, certain activities, often made possible by recent technical developments, are able to participate in the activation of the living body and to produce enabling effects on neural networks. The concepts proposed by emersiology are obviously related to others belonging to different disciplines or theoretical currents such as the neurobiological phenomenology of action, enactivism, embodied cognition, neurosciences and psychology of emotions, of attention and awareness. This issue therefore brings together contributions of a theoretical and/or experimental nature which are concerned with philosophical, psychological and neuro-scientific aspects concerning practices involving the activation of the living body, in particular by the use of hybridization devices or technical remedies.