Embodiment & Emergence — Weekly Roundup #7
May 8, 2026 · field history · hydraulic pressure · cerebellar loops · threat-pruned planning · neural variability
This week’s issue moves across five kinds of work that do not usually sit beside one another: a theoretical account of qualia as field history, a mouse study tracing brain motion to abdominal pressure, a review of cerebellar loops in cognition, an experiment on worry and action planning, and a philosophical proposal about consciousness and neural variability. The methods are different, and the evidentiary status of the pieces is not the same. That is part of the point. Each source asks how experience or behavior depends on the conditions that decide what a system can register, hold, select, and use.
Several pieces challenge the familiar picture of cognition as something happening inside a sealed central processor. In the mouse study, the awake brain shifts with pressure transmitted from the abdomen through a venous route. In the worry study, planning changes because actions linked with threat become less available as routes through a task. The cerebellum review places cognition in recurrent cortico-cerebellar loops rather than in a single control center. The two consciousness pieces work at a more speculative level, asking whether affect, will, motivation, and phenomenal quality can be treated as real features of natural systems without being reduced to ordinary neural computation.
The issue is not the vague claim that “the body matters.” That phrase has become too broad to explain much. The sharper question is how specific constraints shape the working model a system builds: pressure gradients, affective histories, learned avoidance, circuit loops, and patterns of variability. A model can feel coherent while leaving important conditions out. Adaptation depends partly on whether those excluded or underweighted conditions can become available for perception, planning, and action.
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Layers of mind and qualia in the Natural Criticality Hypothesis
CLaE. (2026). Layers of mind: Affect as field history, prediction as field organization: Returning to the deferred question of qualia in the Natural Criticality Hypothesis [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20001656
TAGS: Natural Criticality Hypothesis; qualia; affect; predictive processing; consciousness; self-boundary; action readiness; will; field theory; dynamical systems
OVERVIEW: This theoretical paper extends the Natural Criticality Hypothesis to the problem of qualia, the felt qualities of experience: the redness of red, the ache of grief, or the immediacy of fear. The author develops a layered account of mind around four constructs: action readiness density r(t), subjective time τ(t) = 1/r(t), self-boundary dynamics B(t), and will W(t), described as constraint dynamics inside a bounded domain. Mind is not treated as a storage space filled with representations. It is treated as a historically shaped transition field: a field of possible changes that can become organized into perception, affect, and action. Primitive consciousness is described as a pre-qualitative critical transition field, physically active and available for transition but not yet appearing as any particular felt quality. Self-boundary B(t) stabilizes part of that field as an “inside,” will W(t) constrains possible transitions toward action, and qualia are defined as the qualitative form taken by bounded, constrained transition dynamics.
OF NOTE: The most interesting distinction in the paper is between episodic qualia and affective qualia. Episodic qualia are momentary qualities, such as seeing a color or hearing a sound. Affective qualia are states such as grief, fear, longing, sadness, or joy, which are treated as more deeply historical. The point is not simply that affect lasts longer than perception. The author argues that affect reflects the way prior transitions have deformed the field in which present experience occurs. This gives affect a structural role rather than treating it as emotional coloring added after cognition has done the real work. Prediction-first frameworks, including the Free Energy Principle, active inference, predictive processing, Global Workspace Theory, and Integrated Information Theory, are placed at the level of organization rather than physical grounding. On this account, prediction helps arrange an already affect-bearing field. It does not by itself explain why the field has qualitative character.
CAVEATS: This is a conceptual paper, not an empirical study. It does not provide new data, experiments, measurement procedures, or quantitative tests. The constructs r(t), τ(t), B(t), and W(t) give the proposal a formal shape, but the paper does not specify how these variables would be operationalized in neuroscience, physiology, psychology, or clinical research. Its relationship to prediction-first theories is also presented as a layered alternative rather than a head-to-head comparison, so it does not provide a decisive test that would separate the Natural Criticality Hypothesis from competing accounts. The author does not claim to solve the hard problem of consciousness in a final sense. The contribution is a reformulation of where qualia might fit within a broader dynamical architecture of mind.
KEY TAKEAWAYS: A careful reader can take this paper as a map of distinctions rather than as a settled theory. It separates primitive consciousness, self-boundary, will, episodic qualia, and affective qualia into different levels of organization. The strongest idea is that affect is not just a content of experience. It is part of the history that shapes how new experience becomes possible. This is useful for readers interested in embodiment because it links felt life to action readiness, boundary formation, and the conditions under which possibilities become available or unavailable. It is useful for readers interested in emergence because it frames experience as something that forms through constrained transitions rather than being installed by a single inner observer.
Brain motion in awake mice is mechanically coupled to abdominal pressure
Garborg, C. S., Ghitti, B., Zhang, Q., Ricotta, J. M., Frank, N., Mueller, S. J., Greenawalt, D. I., Turner, K. L., Kedarasetti, R. T., Mostafa, M., Lee, H., Costanzo, F., & Drew, P. J. (2026). Brain motion is driven by mechanical coupling with the abdomen. Nature Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-026-02279-z
TAGS: brain motion; intra-abdominal pressure; abdominal musculature; vertebral venous plexus; intracranial pressure; cerebrospinal fluid; interstitial fluid; two-photon microscopy; poroelastic modeling
OVERVIEW: This study asks a deceptively simple question: what actually makes the awake brain move inside the skull? The authors studied 24 head-fixed Swiss Webster mice, including 12 males, using high-speed, multiplane two-photon imaging of GFP-labeled cortex together with fluorescent microspheres placed on a thinned skull. Across 316 trials at 134 cortical sites, locomotion was associated with brain motion on the scale of a few micrometers, mainly a rigid shift in the rostro-lateral direction, meaning forward and to the side, with little skull movement and approximately 1 µm of shared z-displacement. The motion was strongest at low frequencies below 0.1 Hz and, in awake mice, was not appreciably tied to respiration or heartbeat frequencies. Intracranial pressure rose from roughly 5–10 mm Hg at rest to more than 25 mm Hg during locomotion. Abdominal EMG recordings in 24 mice showed that abdominal muscle activation reliably came before locomotion and brain displacement, and abdominal EMG power tracked brain motion closely. Under deep anesthesia, respiration-driven abdominal EMG bursts were locked to brain movement. When the researchers applied external abdominal pressure in lightly anesthetized mice using a pneumatic belt, with 7 psi pulses lasting 2 seconds across 109 trials at 36 locations in six mice, they reproduced a similar rapid rostro-lateral brain shift. MicroCT in two mice showed a vertebral venous plexus connecting the abdomen and spinal canal, and poroelastic simulations suggested that this kind of hydraulic squeeze could move interstitial fluid from brain parenchyma toward the subarachnoid space and rostral outflow pathways.
OF NOTE: The paper is valuable because it gives a concrete mechanical pathway for a body-brain relation that is often described too vaguely. The awake brain is not merely influenced by bodily state in a general or metaphorical sense. In these mice, abdominal muscle contraction appears to increase intra-abdominal and intracranial pressure, transmitting force through a venous pathway that physically shifts the brain. The displacement is small, but the tissue context matters. The brain is soft, fluid-filled, and enclosed. Repeated micrometer-scale motion across a whole-brain geometry may be relevant to fluid movement, especially if it differs between wakefulness and sleep. The simulations suggest that the observed motion could support fluid efflux out of the brain, in the opposite direction of sleep-associated glymphatic inflow. That does not mean posture or abdominal pressure has a proven cognitive effect in humans, and the study does not test that. It does mean that the physical environment of the brain is partly produced outside the cranium, through muscles, pressure compartments, venous anatomy, and behavior.
CAVEATS: The study was performed in head-fixed mice, which removes natural head movement. The authors argue that forces from intracranial pressure changes, estimated at approximately 40 mN from a 10 mm Hg pressure gradient, are substantially larger than forces from typical mouse head accelerations, estimated at approximately 4 mN, but head fixation still narrows the behavioral setting. Imaging focused on dorsal cortex, so the study does not characterize subcortical deformation or motion near the sagittal sinus. Small, spatially heterogeneous strains across the whole brain could have been missed. Estimates of z-motion assume shared movement of brain and skull, and relative z-motion of up to about 2 µm cannot be excluded. The poroelastic model is deliberately simplified, with cylindrically symmetric anatomy, homogeneous tissue, an artificial central canal connection between ventricles and subarachnoid space, and no active physiological regulation. The microCT evidence for the vertebral venous plexus is based on two mice, which supports plausibility but does not independently establish the whole causal chain.
KEY TAKEAWAYS: The reasonable conclusion is that awake mouse brain motion is strongly coupled to abdominal pressure states. Abdominal EMG preceded the movement, external abdominal pressure reproduced a similar movement pattern, and modeling showed that such motion could in principle influence brain fluid movement. The work is most compelling when read as physiology rather than metaphor. It gives a specific route by which the abdomen, spine, venous system, intracranial pressure, brain tissue, and fluid movement can act as one mechanically coupled system. For readers interested in embodiment, this is a useful corrective to vague language. The body is not merely a background condition for cognition. In this case, a visceral pressure system is part of the physical milieu in which brain activity occurs.
How cerebellar loops may support diverse cognitive functions
Diedrichsen, J., & McDougle, S. D. (2026). How does the cerebellum contribute to cognitive functions? PLOS Biology, 24(3), e3003688. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003688
TAGS: cerebellum; cognition; cortico-cerebellar loops; connectivity; granule cells; climbing fibers; executive function; language; social cognition; systems neuroscience
OVERVIEW: This article is an integrative review, not a new experiment. Diedrichsen and McDougle synthesize anatomical, clinical, neuroimaging, evolutionary, and systems-neuroscience findings to address why the cerebellum, long associated with motor coordination, keeps appearing in cognitive domains such as working memory, language, executive function, and social cognition. The central puzzle is that the cerebellum has a relatively homogeneous local microcircuit, yet it appears to participate in many different functions. The authors organize the problem around several unresolved questions: how cerebellar territories connect with cortex and thalamus, how the granule cell layer recodes inputs, what climbing fibers signal during cognitive tasks, how cerebellar output modulates cortical dynamics, and how cerebellar systems may matter for development and aging.
OF NOTE: The review resists the tempting idea that the cerebellum must perform the same operation in every domain. That temptation comes from the fact that the local cerebellar circuit looks broadly similar across territories. The authors argue that it may be more productive to study specific cortico-cerebellar loops first, rather than assuming that a cerebellar region involved in language, one involved in executive control, and one involved in movement are all doing the same computational job. Functional connectivity, multi-domain fMRI mapping, and tracing evidence suggest that nearly all cortical areas interact with the cerebellum, but not evenly. Executive networks appear to receive disproportionate cerebellar representation, while visual networks appear to receive relatively little. Several candidate mechanisms remain on the table: the granule cell layer may expand and separate patterns into a higher-dimensional code, climbing fibers may carry task-specific signals beyond motor error, and cerebellar output may help stabilize or update cortical representations through thalamo-cortical dynamics. The important shift is architectural. Cognition is not being relocated from cortex into the cerebellum. It is being treated as something that depends on traffic around recurrent loops.
CAVEATS: The article explicitly frames the problem as an unsolved mystery, so it should not be read as offering a unified theory of cerebellar cognition. Many key claims depend on indirect measures. Human fMRI connectivity likely reflects mossy fiber input and local processing more than cerebellar output, which limits what can be inferred about what the cerebellum sends back to cortex. Precise input-output connectivity in humans remains incompletely mapped. Evidence on climbing fiber signals in cognitive domains is still mostly drawn from non-human animal reward-learning tasks. Some domains, especially language, are difficult or impossible to study directly in animal models. Non-invasive measurement of inferior olive activity in humans remains technically difficult, and developmental or aging-related claims are still largely inferred from lesions and clinical observations rather than longitudinal mechanistic data.
KEY TAKEAWAYS: The safest conclusion is that the cerebellum is systematically involved in cognitive as well as motor functions, but its role is likely loop-specific. Asking “what does the cerebellum do?” may be too blunt. A better question is what transformation occurs in a particular cortico-cerebellar loop under a particular task demand. The authors point toward three needs: more accurate mapping of cerebellar inputs and outputs, simultaneous multi-area recordings that can follow information around the loop, and perturbation studies that can distinguish competing models. For clinical and practice-facing readers, the implication is restraint. Cognitive, social, and developmental effects of cerebellar disruption are likely to depend on which networks are affected and how those networks are being used, not on a simple loss of a single cognitive module.
How worry can narrow the actions available for planning
Schiff, H., & Sharp, P. B. (2026). Anxiety is associated with biases in task generalization. Topics in Cognitive Science, e70051. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70051
TAGS: anxiety; trait worry; task generalization; social threat; goal-directed planning; reinforcement learning; avoidance; internal models; cognitive bias
OVERVIEW: This paper examines how trait worry affects task generalization, meaning the transfer of learned action-outcome structures into new planning situations. Participants played an online 2D grid navigation game in which they learned to control four categories of vehicles, each with its own key-transition mapping. One category was incidentally paired with possible negative social evaluation: hitting fire obstacles could increase time in a public-speaking task. Across two Prolific studies, with N = 21 in Study 1 and N = 30 in Study 2, participants showed some ability to generalize latent task categories during planning trials without feedback. Study 1 higher-order generalization accuracy was approximately 55%, with a 95% confidence interval of [0.53, 0.57], compared with 50% chance. Study 2 was weaker, approximately 51.6%, with a 95% confidence interval of [0.497, 0.535]. Trait worry, measured with a brief Penn State Worry Questionnaire-based measure, was associated with undergeneralization of actions from the threat-paired category, even though actual threat encounters were rare and overall planning performance remained intact. Exact-plan accuracy was 57.74% in Study 1 and 66.54% in Study 2, compared with 0.39% chance. In Study 2, worry correlated with undergeneralization in both safe and threat contexts, including ρ = 0.41, one-tailed p = .02, for safe-context undergeneralization and ρ = 0.45, two-tailed p = .01, for threat-context undergeneralization.
OF NOTE: The interesting part is that the finding runs against a simple overgeneralization story. Anxiety is often discussed as if threat spreads too broadly, causing safe situations to be treated as dangerous. That may happen in some settings, but here higher-worry participants did not carry threat-linked actions everywhere. They reused them less. Actions that had been associated with the threat-paired category were less likely to be brought forward into new plans, even when those actions were useful. This shifts attention from fear of stimuli to the structure of available action. In ordinary language, avoidance can sound like someone sees an option and decides not to take it. This study points to a subtler possibility: the option may be weakened inside the planning model before conscious deliberation gets very far. That matters in socially evaluative settings, where a person may appear rigid or hesitant while still performing competently overall. The narrowing is not necessarily a global failure of learning. It may be a selective change in what the planning system treats as usable.
CAVEATS: The samples were modest, and effective analytic sample sizes became smaller after performance-based exclusions. In Study 1, for example, n = 18 after excluding below-chance planners. Several Study 1 associations were explicitly preliminary and did not reach conventional significance thresholds, with correlations around ρ = 0.35 to 0.43 and p values around .11 to .15. Participants were online community volunteers rather than clinical anxiety samples, and the main construct was trait worry, not diagnosed anxiety disorder. Threat was narrowly defined as potential negative social evaluation, so the findings may not generalize to physical danger, relational threat, financial threat, or other forms of anxiety. The task also imposed a specific latent structure, including discrete vehicle categories and fixed four-step plans. Generalization was measured through key-category use, which captures one kind of planning but not all real-world planning. Participants received minimal instruction about how to generalize, and there were no feedback-based test trials during learning, so some aspects of their internal models remain inferred rather than directly observed. The exploratory result that undergeneralization may help in safe contexts while hurting in threat-related contexts was not preregistered and needs replication.
KEY TAKEAWAYS: Within this grid-world task, higher trait worry was associated with a selective reduction in reuse of threat-linked action transitions. Participants did not simply fail to learn the controls, and they did not show a broad collapse in performance. The more precise interpretation is that worry may prune the action landscape. In a safe context, underusing threat-linked actions may reduce interference and sometimes improve performance. In a threat context, the same narrowing becomes costly because useful routes are not carried forward. For clinicians, coaches, and team practitioners, this is a useful distinction. What looks like refusal, rigidity, or lack of initiative may sometimes reflect a model in which certain actions have already become less available before the person is choosing among them.
Irruption theory and the problem of conscious motivation
Froese, T. (2026, April 25). Irruption theory as a nonreductive realist approach to consciousness [Video]. Models of Consciousness Conferences. YouTube.
TAGS: consciousness; irruption theory; enactivism; motivation; agency; neural variability; neurophenomenology; intersubjectivity; nonreductive realism; mind-body problem
OVERVIEW: In this talk, Froese presents irruption theory as a nonreductive realist approach to consciousness and motivated action. The proposal draws on phenomenology, enactive cognitive science, systems biology, and EEG-related work, including readiness potentials, large-scale neural synchrony, and neural complexity. The basic claim is that standard deterministic dynamical systems do not adequately capture value and motivation as they are lived from the first person. Froese introduces two operators. “Irruption” refers to an increase in the material underdetermination or unpredictability of embodied activity, interpreted as an indirect marker of motivated involvement in behavior generation. “Absorption” names the complementary direction, where conscious perception is proposed to involve constrained or compressed variability in neural activity. These are proposed as possible indirect signatures of mental causation and experience, including in social or hyperscanning settings. The talk does not specify quantitative effect sizes, sample characteristics, or a new experimental dataset.
OF NOTE: The philosophical pressure point is straightforward and difficult: if consciousness and motivation are real, and if they matter to action, then they should make some difference that is not merely decorative. Froese is trying to avoid two weak options. One option reduces motivation so completely to neural machinery that the felt difference between doing and merely happening drops out of the explanation. The other preserves consciousness as a philosophical category but leaves it with no causal role. Irruption theory proposes that motivated agency may appear as structured unpredictability in neural or bodily activity, while conscious perception may appear as a reduction or compression of variability. In that sense, variability is not treated only as noise to be averaged away. It becomes a possible site where agency, perception, and lived concern leave measurable traces. The theory fits within embodied and enactive traditions, but it is more metaphysically demanding than many versions of them because it insists that lived motivation cannot be fully replaced by third-person neurophysiology.
CAVEATS: The talk is theoretical and interpretive. It does not present new primary data, a formal mathematical model, or a decisive test of the proposed operators. References to EEG, readiness potentials, neural complexity under psychedelics and anesthesia, and inter-brain synchrony are illustrative rather than a systematic evidentiary review in this format. “Irruption” and “absorption” remain high-level constructs, and the talk does not yet give clear criteria for distinguishing them from conventional stochasticity, measurement noise, uncontrolled physiological variation, or ordinary shifts in neural complexity. The framework is therefore best read as a research program. It identifies what kind of evidence would matter, but it does not yet show that the evidence has been secured.
KEY TAKEAWAYS: The useful criterion in irruption theory is that an account of consciousness should explain how conscious presence, absence, or modulation changes what happens, rather than treating consciousness as something that merely accompanies behavior. If a philosophical zombie were empirically indistinguishable from a conscious organism in every relevant respect, then consciousness would risk becoming explanatorily idle. Froese’s proposal tries to avoid that by treating subjective motivation and conscious awareness as real factors that may appear indirectly through structured changes in variability. The idea remains speculative, but it sharpens a problem that cognitive science often softens: whether first-person experience can matter without being collapsed into ordinary mechanism or sealed off from empirical study.
Conclusion
The pieces in this issue do not converge on one mechanism, and forcing them to do so would weaken them. They work at different levels: field theory, tissue mechanics, network architecture, behavioral planning, and philosophy of consciousness. Their shared contribution is more modest and more useful. They make the background conditions of behavior harder to ignore.
In the Natural Criticality paper, earlier transitions shape the field in which new experience appears. In the mouse study, abdominal pressure becomes part of the mechanical environment of the brain. In the cerebellum review, cognition depends on loop structure rather than a single central processor. In the worry study, threat-linked action mappings become less available for future planning. In irruption theory, motivation is treated as something that may alter variability rather than merely accompany neural activity.
For embodiment, the important point is specificity. The body is not invoked as a slogan. It enters through action readiness, self-boundary, abdominal EMG, intracranial pressure, task-linked motor policies, and proposed changes in neural variability. These are different mechanisms, and they should not be blurred together. What they share is that they shape what the system can take in and use. A signal that cannot be registered, a route that is no longer represented, or a pressure state that changes the physical brain environment is not just an external detail. It changes the range of responses available.
For emergence, the issue is whether new organization can form under constraint. A field becomes bounded enough for qualitative experience. A brain-spine-abdomen system produces movement through coupled pressure dynamics. Cognitive functions depend on recurrent loops rather than one module. A worried person may plan from a narrowed set of action routes. A theory of consciousness asks whether agency could appear indirectly as structured variability. In each case, the question is not only what components exist. It is how their interaction changes what becomes possible.
That has practical significance, but not as simple advice. In clinical, relational, or organizational settings, people often act from models that feel complete because excluded information is not experienced as missing. A team under pressure may not simply need more data. A person caught in worry may not simply need reassurance. The more useful question is what the system can actually include, tolerate, and use. The work gathered here does not solve that problem. It gives better language for recognizing it without flattening the differences between the studies.
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