Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2008, 107,323-335.

O Perceptual and Motor Skills 2008

POINT ZERO: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL INQUIRY

INTO THE SEAT O F CONSCIOUSNESS ' L '

FRANC0 BERTOSSA, MARC0 BESA, ROBERTO FERRARI, AND FRANCESCA FERRI

Centro Studz Asia, Bologna, Italy

Summary.-Does consciousness have a spatial "location" that can be scientifically

investigated? Using a novel phenomenological method, when people are encouraged
to explore the question introspectively they not only can make sense of the idea of
their consciousness being "located," but will readily indicate its exact position inside
the head. The method, based on Francisco J. Varela's work, involves a structured in-
terview led by an expert mediator in which preliminary questions are asked of
untrained volunteers about the location of objects and body parts, and then they are
questioned about the location from which they are experiencing these objects. 83% of
volunteers located with confidence a precise position for the I-that-perceives in the
temporal area of the head centred midway behind the eyes. The same results were ob-
tained with blind subjects (congenitally or later) and with non-Westerners. The
significance of this subjective source of the experience of the location of perception is
discussed linking it to neurological correlates of self-referred conscious activities and
of conscious awareness in memory. Further investigations are suggested with trained
volunteers and with individuals with psychiatric disorders.

The subjective aspect represents the most central and evident fact of
human mental life. The terms commonly used to indicate it are, for example,
''I,,, "self," "consciousness," and "conscious experience." The present re-
search aims to verify whether people are able to point, through phenomeno-
logical procedures, to a precise seat where the "I" is located. We inquired
about consciousness as the I-that-perceives space dimensions with different
senses, and will not deal with emotions, feelings, or other types of subjective
experiences (the so-called qualia), or cognitive functions.
Philosophers and neuroscientists have regularly poured scorn on the
idea that consciousness might have a precise physical location:
You enter the brain through the eye, march up the optic nerve, round and round in the cortex,
looking behind every neuron, and then, before you know it, you emerge into daylight on the
spike of a motor nerve impulse, scratching your head and wondering where the self is. (Den-
nett, 1989)

'Address corres ondence to F. Bertossa, Centro Studi Asia, via h v a Reno 124, 40121 Bologna,
Italy or e-mail (~anco.bertossa@gmail.com).
Thanks to the volunteers and Loretta Secchi for recruitin blind subjects. Laura Podda cooper-
ated in the phase of collecting data; Paolo B. ~asarteli?,Ricardo Pulido, and Kristerfor T.
Mastronardi improved the text in English. Very special thanks to Nicholas Humphrey and John
Skoyles for having reviewed the manuscript, providin suggestions, and encouraging publication.
Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their criticaf comments and suggestions. This work is
dedicated to the memory of Francisco J. Varela, whose studies on the first-person approach
provided the starting point for these investigations.
324 F. BERTOSSA, ET AL.

It would be difficult to deny the existence of conscious experience from a

first-person perspective; it is inconsistent to postulate the nonexistence of
the self, because without the self there is no first person. Examining the con-
scious experience, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) noted that "if some-
body asks us to look for the self, we would have so much to do to look for
it," thus highlighting the insurmountable difficulty in answering the ques-
tion: "Where am I?" For Varela (1999), consciousness is extended to the
whole body, a "not-place" distributed in the net of organism, its movements,
and its environment. Clark (2003) proposed an "extended mind," including
physical, physiological, linguistic, and social environments: mind is extended
as far as its actions and interactions are extended.
From a third-person research perspective, brain imaging studies have
been conducted to characterize and locate in brain areas associated with
some self-referred mental activities (Gusnard, Akbudak, Sulman, & Raichle,
2001; Kjaer, Nowak, & Lou, 2002; Goldberg, Harel, & Malach, 2006). Tul-
ving and Lepage (2000) investigated where in the brain the activity corre-
lated with the autonoetic awareness of one's past is observed. Not denying
this dimension of the self in the third person, we want to compare it with
the examined experience in the first person.
Tempting a phenomenology of mind, Clarke (1995) claimed that mental
objects are nonspatial; he admits only for visual percepts and thoughts, and
for dreams, an internal space where objects are located, denying it is a struc-
tural aspect but only a "temporary presentation device" (p. 167) is derivative
from eyesight and contemplated physical space. McGinn (1995), starting
from Descartes' intuition that "pure thought" is not spatial as matter, ex-
tends this feature to all experiences and imaginations: terms like form, di-
mension, and position would not make any sense if referred to the conscious
subject and to conscious events, because these are not perceptual objects.
For McGinn, if a conscious event appears to be located in an inner space in
the vicinity of the brain, i.e., "I locate my thoughts nearer to my head than
to my feet," this judgment of location is derivative from causal considera-
tions of the brain's role in controlling mental life: no more than "a sort of
courtesy location" (p. 98). Other researchers emphasized the importance of
leaving the question open:
"Of course, in order to learn what something is, it is useful in the initial instance to know
where it is, so that one can point to it-enabling the attention of different investigators to be
focused upon it. But where does one point, when one is pointing at consciousness?" (Velmans,
1996, p. 183)

With Velmans, we believe that the significance of such a question is to

focus the attention of different investigators on a single phenomenological
place and to compare understanding and observations. Finding the seat of
 POINT ZERO 325

subjective consciousness would mean finding the "place" from which all ex-
periences occur apart from their sensory field of origin (sight, hearing, touch,
etc.).
Until now, few researchers (Petitmengin-Peugeot, 1999) have listened to
what people actually have to say about consciousness. Starting from the
assumption that the first-person subject should be considered an authority
on consciousness, we adopted the method of asking people about their lived
experience. Specifically, three issues were investigated: (1) can people na'ive
to phenomenological training about consciousness understand the question;
(2) can such people actually locate a precise seat for I-that-perceives; and (1)
is this ability independent of culture and sense of sight?
METHOD
A structured interview procedure was used within a phenomenological
"second-person" approach (Varela & Shear, 1999; Velmans, 1998, 2OOOb;
Vermersch, 1999), which involves an expert person acting as an intermediary
between the first-person experience of the volunteers and the third-person
report they make of that experience.
Participants
Fifty-nine sighted and blind volunteers were recruited and investigated.
(21 students, 32 employed, and 4 retired people; Mdn age=33 yr., range
18-66) Eighty-one sighted were recruited with a written announcement in a
university area; 54 were Westerners and five were non-Westerners (from
Morocco, Eritrea, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines); this small num-
- -

ber of people from other cultures was recruited to assess possible cultural
attitudes in the localization of consciousness. Eight blind Italian volunteers
(five with acquired blindness and three with congenital blindness) were re-
cruited by contacting an association for the blind and included in the sam-
ple to verify whether the spatial localization of consciousness was based on
the sense of sight or not. None of the subjects were friends or acquaintances
of the interviewers, nor were they engaged in academic courses on introspec-
tion, phenomenology, or meditation.
Procedure
A first-person approach demands a phenomenological description of ex-
perience with precise distinctions, but in investigating untrained people, nei-
ther their accuracy in filling out questionnaires nor their frankness in verbal
accounts are sufficient to ensure that the experimental data stem from an au-
thentic and genuine examination of the conscious experience. To tackle this
problem, the volunteers were interviewed separately using a semistructured
interview following a methodology for second-person investigation (Ver-
mersch, 1999; Varela & Shear, 1999), with an expert person acting as an in-
326 F. BERTOSSA, ET AL.

termediary between the experience in the first person of the volunteer and
the report in the third person of that experience.
The intermediary or mediator must be able to help each subject open
himself and self-observe the inner phenomenology. Through opportune ques-
tions (see transcription of interviews in Results), he must guide the process
of verbalization and make sure all the volunteers go through the same series
of steps. Mediators need an adequate scientific qualification and mastery of
the method, gained in several years of both philosophical (phenomenological
reduction) and pragmatic (mindfulness meditation) training (Bertossa & Fer-
rari, 2006). Only through systematic exercise is it possible to pass from "an
episodic incursion into consciousness" to the ability to stabilize attention in
a prolonged way on conscious experience (Varela, 1996). The training of the
mediator must be completed with the acquisition of empathic, communica-
tive, and listening abilities that are necessary to guide the volunteers to
produce a verbal report of their experience in the first person.
Steps and Thematic Areas of Interview
The interview was constructed using the three stages employed by Petit-
mengin-Peugeot (1999), and the three steps proposed by Depraz, Varela,
and Vermersch (2003). The first phase (thematic areas 1-3, see below) aim-
ed to produce a "suspension" of speculative thoughts and prejudices, thus
clearing the way for the volunteer to pay attention to his lived experience.
The second phase (thematic area 4) aimed to "redirect" attention from the
exterior to the interior, guided by proprioceptive sensations, while specifical-
ly avoiding engaging with their quality or content, so that attention could be
paid to their location and the "flow" of perception. The third phase (the-
matic area 5 ) asked volunteers to "let go" and be receptive to the emerging
experience, and so to make themselves open to the experience.
Each volunteer was introduced to the interview after sitting down, com-
fortably and quietly, and was requested to answer and follow the forthcom-
ing questions simply using direct perception, without any speculative atti-
tude. The interview protocol was not a questionnaire with a rigid series of
prearranged questions, but a semistructured sequence of thematic areas to
be discussed and examined thoroughly, favouring contents and their com-
pleteness. Every thematic area represented a stage of a logical and hierarchi-
cal succession where each issue had to be exhausted before going on to the
following stage (as in the example in Fig. 1). The specific contents of each
of the thematic areas were:
1. Visual (tactile) perception of space.-Volunteers were invited to recog-
nize the distance and location of simple objects with respect to the body.
2. Distinction of subject-object.-Volunteers were directed with ques-
tions to recognize the usual and na'ive experience of the difference between
a subject that perceives and an object that is perceived.
 POINT ZERO

THE INTERVIEW
GOES ON
FOLLOWINQA
DIFFERENTCOURSE

T R I T O INDICATE WITH YW
FINOERS A PART OF YOUR
BODY THAT IS NETHER
OVER NOR UNDER NElmER
BEFORE NOR 0EHIND.
NEITHER ONTHE RIGHT
N O R O N W E LEFi WlTF CANNOT
RESPECT T O T

FIG. 1. Steps and thematic areas of interviem

328 F. BERTOSSA, ET AL.

3. Visual (tactile) perception of the subject-object direction.-Volunteers

were invited to recognize the way objects are directed in respect to the I-
subject that moves perceived objects nearer or farther away. In this and all
preceding areas, the interviewer makes clear the difference between the de-
scription of an actual experience and its description in remembered experi-
ences, beliefs, comments, judgments, and emotions. Through questions he
creates the conditions in which the volunteer is constantly referred back to
his direct experience.
4. Proprioception (with closed eyes).-Volunteers were invited to con-
sider the distance and the location in space of various parts of the body with
respect to the I-that-perceives them. The distance and directionality of this
are specified through body movements and changes in the proprioceptive
feel of how they are attended. The purpose of this part of the interview is to
prepare the subject for identifying the location of the I-that-perceives.
5. Location of the seat of consciousness.-Thematic area 4 gradually shift-
ed into thematic area 5 by referring to parts of the body that are perceived
as being nearer to or farther from the I-that-perceives. After this progressive
"moving back and forth of the flow of perception," volunteers were invited
to make an attempt to locate the first-person "source of perception."
i. Volunteers were invited to give an opinion as to whether they sense
there is such a location;
ii. Volunteers were invited to indicate by pointing, using the forefingers
of each hand positioned orthogonally to the other, the place that is
detected as the source of perception;
iii. Sighted volunteers who pointed to a spatial location of the I-that-
perceives in the head were then asked to represent the position on
two human profiles, one frontal and the other lateral.
Each interview lasted at most an hour. A detailed video record was
made and reviewed by other researchers for independent assessment and vali-
dation.
QUANTITATIVE RESULTS
The results are summarized in Table 1. The main finding was that 90%
of the participating volunteers found it natural to locate the I-that-perceives
inside their body. Furthermore, 83% of these pointed out a location of the
I-that-perceives in what they felt was a precise point inside the head. The
eight blind subjects and five non-Western volunteers gave answers that were
very similar to those given by the 54 sighted Western volunteers.
Most volunteers, when moving their fingers up and down, reported a
defined location. The sighted volunteers indicated a precise point and not an
extended area of a human profile; when all the data from the points drawn
were superimposed, they were quite widely dispersed in the lateral plane
and arranged along the midline in the frontal plane. The terms that volun-
 POINT ZERO

TABLE I
OF I-THAT-PERCEIVES
LOCATION

Location of the I Sighted Blind Total

Italian Non-Western ri %
Precise point inside the head 38 4 7 49 83.0
Generally inside the head 1 0 1 2 3.4
Generally inside the body 0 1 0 1 1.7
In the belly 1 0 0 1 1.7
No location 6 0 0 6 10.2
Total 46 5 8 59 100.0

teers introduced during the interview to indicate this experience were "I,"
"centre of me," "here," and "my point of observation." In this work we use
the terms "I-that-perceives" and "point zero" to indicate the subjective loca-
tion of experience.
The significance of the results lies in the evidence that, since all con-
scious humans have a sense of "I," here for the first time there is large
consent in answering the question, "Where is the I-that-perceives," indicat-
ing a precise seat that is the reference point for conscious localization of in-
ternal and external objects in space.
QUALITATIVE DESCRIPTION
To provide a qualitative description of method and results, we w d
comment on some examples of thematic areas of the interview protocol and
then provide a description of the six cases in which the interviewed volun-
teers were not able to detect any seat of consciousness. Verbal descriptions
given by the eight blind volunteers and the five non-Westerners were com-
parable to those of the sighted and Western participants; the locations of
the "I-that-perceives" were completely similar and thus are described with-
out making any distinctions.
Thematic Area 1: Introduction to Perception of Space
Starting from the analysis of common and completely clear events, the
interviewer used simple exercises to create conditions that maintained the
volunteer's attention on his being-experiencing. It is necessary to separate
the phenomenological perception of space, resolving the difference between
the verbal report of a sensomotor or cognitive experience while in action as
compared to the description of other experiences to be suspended: memo-
ries about perception of space, beliefs, comments, judgments, and emotions.
For example:
Interviewer: Can you tell me if one of these two objects is closer and the other one is far-
ther?
Volunteer 46: The pen is closer and the plant is farther.
Through simple exercises of this type, it is easily highlighted that when we
330 F. BERTOSSA, ET AL.

perceive something we also perceive it at a certain distance which, with a

certain approximation, we are able to evaluate and compare.
Interviewer: Can you tell me where the ceiling is with respect to you?
Volunteer 46: It is above me.
Thematic Area 2: Distinction of Subject and Object
At this stage, the interviewed people have been asked to use touch or
sight to examine their experiences in the moment when any event of percep-
tion occurs.
Interviewer: Consider any object in this room
Volunteer 42: That chair by your side.
Interviewer: Who has considered this chair?
Volunteer 42: Me.
Through this type of question the interviewed people have noticed, without
it being assumed beforehand or suggested by the interviewer, the existence
of a bipolar structure in their usual conscious experience: what is somehow
perceived, and what perceives in us.
Interviewer: Try to put a hand in front of you.
Volunteer 44: [brings the hand in front of the bodyl
Interviewer: With respect to what are you able to determine the position of your hand?
Volunteer 44: T o myself.
In this way the interviewed person recognized that the reference point about
which he is able to determine the distance and the location of the perceived
objects is just the "I" (or "myselfH).
Thematic Area 3: Perception of Direction of Subject-Object Movement
Asking the subjects to take in their hands any object and to move it
closer or farther with respect to themselves, we detect a direction going away
or approaching with respect to the I-that-perceives.
Interviewer: Take this object and move to a farther position.
Volunteer 59: [puts the object in a faraway point from the bodyl
Interviewer: Now bring it nearer.
Volunteer 59: [brings object close to the chest]
Thematic Area 4: Proprioception with Closed Eyes
Often this stage would foster a state of greater tranquility in the volun-
teers and help them to stabilize their attention on the tasks that were assign-
ed. Through the use of the proprioception, the various parts of the body
were recognized as distinct parts with respect to the I-that-perceives.
Volunteer 10: The hand can be perceived by the I, but at the same time it is also some-
thing that perceives.
Interviewer: Is your hand "I," or does your "I" perceive through your hand?
Volunteer 10: It is a channel of perception, it is not the I.
Volunteers were able to associate the proprioception of each part of the
body with a sensation of closeness-distance with respect to "I." Volunteers
 POINT ZERO 33 1

were asked to single out parts of the body that were perceived as closer and
farther in order to identify a course of gradual approach to the I-that-per-
ceives. (The following interchange is with respect to the "I.")
Interviewer: Is there a zone between your belly and your throat that you feel is closer?
Volunteer 46: The throat.
Interviewer: If you feel your mouth, where do you feel it?
Volunteer 46: Downward.
Interviewer: If you feel your scalp, where do you feel it?
Volunteer 46: Upward.
The course of approach to the "I" has been used to identify a precise spatial
trajectory between the subject and any object perceived. One achieves a
clear recognition of a trajectory in the perceptive flow of the conscious I.
The following step is the attempt to locate the "I."
Thematic Area 5: Attempt to Locate the Seat of Consciousness
Most of the volunteers gave descriptions with a high level of detail until
they indicated a precise seat inside the head at which the spatial trajectory
ended and where spatial perception had its origin.
Interviewer: When you draw your attention to your throat, from where do you perceive it?
Volunteer 46: From the head.
Interviewer: Try to indicate with a finger the direction from which you perceive the eyes.
Volunteer 46: From here [indicates with the finger a direction that goes from the centre
of the headl.
Interviewer: Try to keep your finger po~ntedlike you have done now.
Volunteer 46: Toward my point of observation?
Interviewer: Yes, exactly. Now try to indicate this "point of observation" using both
forefingers to create two imaginary lines that produce a system of orthogonal coordi-
nates.
Volunteer 46: [indicates a point inside the headl
Interviewer: This point that you are indicating inside your head, where do you feel it in
the space?
Volunteer 46: It is before.
Interviewer: Then try to move your coordinate system a little backward.
Volunteer 46: Here behind the ear [draws only the forefinger of the hand on the side of
the head a few centimeters backl.
Interviewer: Now are you indicating a different point from the previous one?
Volunteer 46: Yes.
Interviewer: Where is this point in the space?
Volunteer 46: Here, it is neither before nor behind.
Interviewer: Are you exactly indicating what you have called "my point of observation"?
Volunteer 46: Yes.
For Volunteer 47, a similar procedure was used, but with some small varia-
tions:
Interviewer: Try to feel your eyes. From where do you feel them?
Volunteer 47: [the subject has the eyes closedl From inside the head.
Interviewer: Try to indicate from where you feel them.
Volunteer 47: [subject indicates a point inside the headl
Interviewer: This point that you are indicating, do you feel it upward, downward, on the
right, on the left, over, or under?
 F. BERTOSSA, ET AL

Volunteer 47: I feel it downward.

Interviewer: Then try to indicate a point a little bit above.
Volunteer 47: [follows the instruction]
Interviewer: Now are you indicating a different point as compared to the previous one?
Volunteer 47: Yes.
Interviewer: Where do you feel this point?
Volunteer 47: I feel it closer but a little bit lower.
Interviewer: Then, like before, try to move with the forefingers and to verify where you
feel this new point.
Volunteer 47: Yes, here I really feel at the centre, I am actually here.
Volunteer 51 indicated the location of the I-that-perceives in the belly:
Interviewer: Do you perceive the distinction between the sensation and the attention that
perceives the sensation?
Volunteer 51: Well, here I feel [touches the chest] and here I have the attention [touches
the bellyl. . . . I feel here as if my eyes were here [belly].
Interviewer: What importance does this point hold?
Volunteer 5 1: It is mvself.
This latter result, although different from the other volunteers that located
the I-that-perceives in the head, also comes from a progression up of the
flow of perception and localization in first person of the source of percep-
tion.
Another interesting case is Volunteer 55, a volunteer with acquired
blindness who lost his sight first from one eye and, over five or six years
progressively, also from the other.
Volunteer 55: The movement of my "I" is on the left eye. It's like the left eye occupies
this strange thing that we call "I." Consider that I have lost my sight first in the right
eye as a child, while I lost the left eye when I was thirteen. My "I" is kind of a bit
decentralized toward the eye that has seen longer. I feel the centre a little shifted to-
ward the left.
Volunteer 55, going on in the interview, recognized that this "centre" was
perceived "shifted" from a punctiform localization more original and con-
cluded:
Volunteer 55: The seat of perception seems to have to do with sight, but it is the part
behind the sight.
Five volunteers' experience showed contradictions and inner discrepan-
cies. Difficulties in the description have been observed as regards the dis-
tinction of subject-object inside the body.
Interviewer: Are there parts of your body that are additional with respect to your "I" and
which could even not exist without compromising your "I"?
Volunteer 8: Yes.
Interviewer: And then why do you say that your "I" coincides with your whole body?
Volunteer 8: I don't know, I really have no idea.
In Volunteers 9 and 44,the main obstacle was the difficulty of distin-
guishing between the criterion of the "emotional distance" (how beautiful,
how amazing, how suggestive) of the physical objects and the criterion of
distance at the physical level (distance in meters or centimeters).
 POINT ZERO

Interviewer: Now bend your arm and tell me if the hand is closer or farther.
Volunteer 44: It is closer when the arm is stretched.
Interviewer: Why?
Volunteer 44: I don't know, I feel it more mine, I feel it more.
Also with Volunteers 14 and 38, difficulties were observed in applying
the criterion of physical distance and a general difficulty in understanding
the questions exactly.
Interviewer: Now try to stand up and feel the floor; as compared to when you were sit-
ting, is it closer or farther?
Volunteer 14: Well, I feel it in the body, the floor, now, is a part of me.
Interviewer: Sit down now and try to tell me if you feel it closer or farther.
Volunteer 14: The sensation is different. I feel it, but I feel first the support of the chair,
and I am also more relaxed. I have a more widespread sensation and it is different
from before.
We highlight that when different difficulties emerged, they were often
linked to the entry into and persistence in thematic area number four, re-
lated to proprioception, perhaps because it is one of the less experienced
phenomenological issues in everyday life.
A sixth volunteer (No. 35), without presenting any contradiction or de-
scriptive inconsistency, denied the possibility of defining a location for the I-
that-perceives.
Interviewer: If you consider the terms "I" and "hand," "I" and "knee," "I" and
"mouth," is there a term that never changes?
Volunteer 35: "I," but should I locate it?
Interviewer: Yes.
Volunteer 35: 1 can't locate it. I point to it but I cannot locate it.

DISCUSSION
Human volunteers generally seem to find it easy and natural to locate
their centre of self, the place "I am" or the I-that-perceives. With consider-
able consistency, sighted or blind, Western or non-Western, it is placed
somewhere near the centre of their head. This seat corresponds to a "point
zero," the origin (O,O,O) point of a Cartesian spatial geometric framework,
whose axes are defined by the subjects' experience of what lies closer or far-
ther in front or behind, above, or below, where their sense of "I" and their
sense of "here" are felt to coincide. At the same time this sense of "from
where I perceive" remains always connected and distinct with respect to the
phenomenological thereness of "what I perceive." Thus this sense goes be-
yond an experience that can be reduced to a Cartesian dualism of subject
and object: remaining faithful to the field of phenomenology and of direct
experience, the point of departure of perception-even of a nonobject-is
reported to be inseparable from the objects perceived. It represents one
"pole" of what might be called the bipolar monism of experience (Bertossa &
Ferrari, 2002). This location is better understood within the context of at-
tention, requiring what might be called the open pole of hereness, from
334 F. BERTOSSA, ET AL

which attentional experience originates, that complements the pole "terminal

point of experience" (Velmans, 1996, 2000a) to which attention is directed.
Conscious attention might require two spatial locations: one invariant,
from which attention always moves to the particular (and varying) entity to
which it is directed. We cannot perceive the point of origin of perception,
but we can point to that as a source of perception.
The question that now confronts us is: What does it mean to locate a
"point zero" origin of perceptions? Why is it interesting and what does it
help to understand? Point zero is a phenomenological datum widely shared
and recognizable by volunteers na'ive in phenomenological training; this seat
is the reference point for conscious localization of all internal and external
objects in space involved during the execution of perceptual or self-referred
tasks. Brain imaging studies can precisely locate the brain areas actively me-
tabolizing during these tasks: conscious self-related introspective processes
have a clear localization in the lateral and medial prefrontal cortex, lateral-
ized to the left hemisphere (Goldberg, et al., 2006): self-referential mental
activity of judgment of pleasant/unpleasant matches increases in metabolic
activity of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (Gusnard, et al., 2001). Kjaer,
et al. (2002) in a PET imaging study observed that there are neural networks
connecting precuneus, angular gyri, and anterior cingulated gyri, associated
with reflective "self-awareness"; this network is common to the resting con-
scious state, thus they proposed "self-awareness" as a core function of con-
sciousness, representing a fundamental contribution to the contents and co-
herence of the conscious state.
Point zero can be involved also in making clear a person's position not
only in space and in actions, but also in time: memory research has investi-
gated the subjective experience of past events which enables us to travel
back into our personal past (Tulving & Lepage, 2000). This awareness of
one's ~ast-"autonoetic consciousness"-has neuroanatomical correlates: a
memory retrieval task activates lateralized brain areas of the right prefrontal
cortex, possibly extending posteriorly. From a first-person perspective, the
past (and future) time-landscape of the I-that-perceives could be the subjec-
tive sense for the present duration (pole here/now) that complements the
past-future self-representation (pole there/at that time).
The present study may serve as a model for a new approach to research on conscious-
ness, giving a reliable reference map with nearly universal subjectzve features in naive volunteers,
in which time and space are integrated. The significance of the "point zero" of perception lies
in the nature of the invariable point "I," "here," "now," continually involved in moving through
space and subjective time, and perhaps also through psychological crises or social relations. In
future research we might ask, for example, whether the sense of the I-that-perceives is different
in volunteers trained in phenomenological descriptions, and expands to "felt meanings" (Petit-
mengin, 2007) and other features of subjective experience (Bertossa, Ferrari, & Besa, 2004). Fi-
nally, it would be interesting to investigate if the I-that-perceives is altered--or even nonexis-
tent-in individuals with autism, or those classified with psychiatric disorders, in order to as-
sess differences in their external spatial phenomenological perception related to the sense of
self.
 POINT ZERO

REFERENCES
BERTOSSA, F., &FERRARI, R. (2002) Cervello e autocoscienza. La mente tra neuroscienze e feno-
menologia. Rivista di Estetica, 21, 24-48. [In Italian]
BERTOSSA, F., & FERRARI, R. (2006) Meditazione di presenza mentale per le scienze cognitive.
Pratica del corpo e metodo in rima persona. In L. Cappuccio (Ed.), Ncurofenonzenolo-
gia. Milan: Editore Bruno ~ o n & d o r i .Pp. 271-291. [In Italianl
BERTOSSA, F., FERRARI, R., & BESA,M. (2004) Circolariti della conoscenza opgettiva e prospet-
tiva buddhista. In L. Cappuccio (Ed.), Dentro la matrice-Filosofia, scienza e spiritualitd
in Matrix. Milan: Edizioni Albo Versorio. Pp. 107.128. [In Italianl
CLARK, A. (2003) Natural-born cyborgs. Oxford, UK: Univer. Press.
CLARKE, C.J. S. (1995) The nonlocality of mind. In J. Shear (Ed.), Explainztzg consciousness:
the 'hard problem.' Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 165.175.
DENNETT, D. C. (1989) The origins of selves. Cogito, 3, 163-173.
DEPRAZ,N., VARELA, F. J., &VERMERSCH, I? (2003) On becoming aware: a pragmatics of experi-
encing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
GOLDBERG, I. I., HAREL,M., &MALACH,R. (2006) When the brain loses its self: prefrontal in-
activation during sensorimotor processing. Neuron, 50, 329-339.
GUSNARD, D. A,, AKBUDAK, E., SULMAN, G. L., & RAICHLE, M. E. (2001) Medial prefrontal cor-
tex and self-referential mental activity: relation to a default mode of brain function. Pro-
ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98, 4259-4264.
KJAER,T. W., NOWAK,M., &LOU, H. C. (2002) Reflective self-awareness and conscious states:
PET evidence for a common midline parietofrontal core. Neurotmagr, 17, 1080-1086.
MCGINN,C. (1995) Consciousness and space. In J. Shear (Ed.), Explaining consciousners: the
hard problem. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 97-108.
PETITMENGIN, C. (2006) Describing one's subjective experience in the second person: an inter-
view method for the science of consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,
3-4, 229-269.
PETITMENGIN, C. (2007) Towards the source of thoughts: the gestural and transmodal dimen-
sion of lived experience. Journal of Consciousnets Studies, 14, 54-82.
PETITMENGIN-PEUGEOT, C. (1999) The intuitive experience. In F. J. Varela & J. Shear (Eds.),
The view from within: first-person approaches to the study of conscioz~mess.Exeter, UK:
Imprint Academic. Pp. 43-77.
TULVING, E., &LEPAGE, M. (2000) Where in the brain is the awareness of one's past? In D. L.
Schacter & E. Scarry (Eds.), Memory, brain and belief. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer.
Press. Pp. 208-228.
VARELA, F. J. (1996) Neurophenomenology: a methodological remedy for the hard problem.
rournal o f Consciousne.c.r Studies, 3, 330-349.
vA~LA, F, J. (1999) Quattro linee !guida per il futuro della conoscenza. Strutture Ambzentali,
118, 66-73. [in Italian]
J. (1999) First-person accounts: what, why, hour? In F. . Varela & J.
VAREIA,F, J., &SHEAR,
i'
Shear (Eds.), The view from within: first-person approaches to the study o consciousness.
Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic. Pp. 1-14.
VARELA, F. I., THOMPSON, E., &ROSCH,E. (1991) The embodied mind: cognitive science and hu-
marz experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
VELMANS. M. (1996) What and where are conscious ex~eriences?In M. Velmans (Ed.). The
science of consczousness: psychological, neuropsych~logzcaland clinical reviews. London:
Routledge. Pp. 181-196.
VELMANS. M. (1998) Goodbve to reductionism. In S. Hameroff. A. Kaszniak. & A. Scott
( ~ d s . )Toward
, a science'of consciousness: the second Tucson djscussions and debates. cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 45-52.
VELMANS, M. (2000a) A psych~logist'smap of consciousness studies. In M. Velmans (Ed.),
lnvcctiguting phenomenal consciousness, new ?nethodologies and maps. Amsterdam: John
Benjamin. Pp. 331-358.
VELMANS, M. (2000b) Ut~derstandin~ consciousness. London: Routledge.
VERMERSCH, P. (1999) Introspection as practice. lournal of Consciousness Studtes, 6, 17-42.

Accepted ]uly 7, 2008