Northoff’s Temporo-Spatial Sentience

Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Georg Northoff postulates what he calls “sentience” as “a more basic and fundamental dimension of consciousness,” and he proposes that sentience arises via “temporo-spatial mechanisms”—characterized by brain activity, spatiotemporal relationship, and structure—with which “the brain constructs its own spontaneous activity [that] are key for making possible the capacity to feel, namely sentience.”

Northoff's model is based on his supposition that “in addition to the level/state and content of consciousness, we require a third dimension of consciousness, the form or structure or organization of consciousness.” Thus, his “temporo-spatial theory of consciousness” leads him to posit “specific neuro-ecological and neuro-visceral mechanisms that are, in their most basic nature, intrinsically temporospatial.” We have this capacity to feel and thus for sentience, he says, “because our brain continuously integrates the different inputs from body and environment within its own ongoing temporo-spatial matrix” (Northoff, 2021).

Spatiotemporal Neuroscience

Northoff distinguishes “spatiotemporal neuroscience” from cognitive neuroscience and related branches (like affective, social, etc.) in that spatiotemporal neuroscience focuses on brain activity (rather than brain function), spatiotemporal relationship (rather than input-cognition-output relationship), and structure (rather than stimuli/contents).

In this sense, spatiotemporal neuroscience “allows one to conceive the neuro-mental relationship in dynamic spatiotemporal terms that complement and extend (rather than contradict) their cognitive characterization” (Northoff et al., 2020).

Dissolving the Mind-Body Problem

Finally, Northoff and colleagues feel “the need to dissolve the mind-body problem (and replace it by the world-brain relation).” They also address other philosophical issues like assuming “time (and space) to be constructed in different scales, small and long, with all different scales being nested (like the different Russian dolls) within each other.”

For example, “a mental feature may be characterized by an extremely short and restricted spatiotemporal scale which, if abstracted and thereby detached from its underlying longer and more extended scale may seem to be non-dynamic and thus a re-presentation of an event or object. This is like taking one smaller Russian doll out and consider it in isolation from all the others (and, even worse, forgetting that any of the others were ever present).”

If, in contrast, they suggest, “one conceives the spatiotemporal scale of mental features in the larger context of other spatiotemporal scales, one can take into view their nestedness.” In this view, Northoff has mental features as “nothing but a small Russian doll that is nested within the longer and more extended scales of the brain's spontaneous activity (which, by itself, is nested within the yet much larger spatiotemporal scales of body and world)” (Northoff et al., 2020).