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#192 DISCUSSÃO MUNDO: Vicente Raja – radical embodiment and resonance
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Welcome to the Progressão podcast.
As Progressão now continues in English, we are revisiting some of our earlier Discussão conversations — episodes that have stayed with us and still feel highly relevant today.
In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Vicente Raja, a researcher working at the intersection of ecological psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. His work explores the relationship between brain, behaviour, and environment through ideas such as radical embodiment and resonance.
In this conversation, we dive into these concepts and reflect on what they might mean for understanding skill, learning, and coaching. A thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion that connects science, philosophy, and practice.
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Fruit is still in 40 years. Yes, that's beautiful, focus of the team of our food, focus colour, how we have to be able to football. We explore the beautiful games, complex relationships between humans and their environment, and the nature of skills in football. Welcome to debate. Welcome to Crux Tower. As we continue in English, we are revisiting some of our earlier DiscoStow episodes that have stayed with us and still feel highly relevant today. In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Vicente Raja, a researcher working at the intersection of ecological psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. His work explores the relationship between brain, behavior and environment through ideas such as radical embodiment and resonance. In this conversation, we dive into some of these concepts and reflect on what they might mean for understanding skill learning and football. For now, we welcome Vicente Raja.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for having me here.
SPEAKER_00The pleasure is ours. Your work levels into human and non-human cognition. Could you please introduce your work to us?
SPEAKER_02I would say I'm, or I like to say, and I hopefully am, uh, 70% a philosopher and 30% a cognitive scientist. Most of my work is uh focused on trying to develop an approach to neuroscience that is compatible, or that is at least, or is it based on the ecological approach to perception and action. So in a way, most of my work is trying to develop what one would call an ecological neuroscience. This is, of course, I mean, it's not, it's uh neuroscience is a huge field, right? So it could be something like an alternative to cognitive neuroscience for perception and action, so to speak, right? In doing so, I do a lot of um theoretical work um trying to develop the the concepts we need for this kind, or I think we need for this kind of neuroscience, the main concept being resonance. And uh and I do also some empirical work. Uh for instance, last summer I've spent two months in Berlin running an experiment that uh combines motion capture, virtual reality, and mobile EEG. So we can have you know data both from movement, from the visual field, and from the brain, and try to put all those uh together in trying to understand um basically what our brain is doing while we are actively engaging with our environment.
SPEAKER_00Very interesting and also challenging, seems that it could be very challenging, also. But you uh touched a couple of topics that we will talk later, but we would like to start about resonance. That is a concept that uh you have been talking a lot about and you wrote a lot about. So, what is resonance?
SPEAKER_02In the last uh few years I like to call it ecological resonance because resonance has been used in different ways, not only in physics, so to speak, uh which is a you know very well-known uh uh phenomenon in which an oscillator drives another oscillator to increase the amplitude at some uh frequencies, right? But it's been used in the in the in the cognitive sciences and and in the neurosciences in many different ways, too. In neurophysiology, um in some forms of embodied uh cognition, in the work of motor, no, mirror neurons and that kind of stuff, right? But so to me, ecological resonance is uh labeled to refer to the role of the brain in uh in uh daily activities from an ecological point of view, right? So to say what resonance is, I have to say a few words about what the ecological approach is, or you know, like at least very briefly now, and we can talk more about it afterwards if we want to. But basically, I would say that at the core of the of the ecological approach, there's a couple of ideas. One is that the the relationship between the organism and the environment is always dynamic. The organism is always moving around, always acting. Basically, a property of living systems. Even when we think we are, so to speak, staying still, we are, you know, controlling the posture, we are doing things in some ways. So, from that point of view of the of the always acting, always moving organism in an environment, ecological psychologists claim that there are some properties of the energy fields that surround that that environment that organism. And in this uh context, energy fields are the light that surrounds us, the air, and that kind of stuff. There are some properties there that tell us or that inform us about affordances. Affordances that are the kind of things we can do in our environment, the opportunities of interaction, uh some people say, right? So our brain is not in the business of building up an internal model of the external environment, but on in the business of detecting that information or those patterns in the energy arise, those those patterns of light or those patterns of sound that inform us about what we can do in the environment. And uh, this activity, the activity of detecting that information, is what we call ecological resonance, which is when the brain is attuned to the informational variable that actually constrains its activity in the environment.
SPEAKER_00Attunement word was there. So is attunement somehow then related to this resonance concept?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I uh a thing, so to speak, in the more general sense, a thing that resonates with or to another thing is attuned to that, right? Uh when when when when we move the tuner of our radio, it resonates to the right signal and it's attuned, right? So some people think that you know we should use resonance and not attunement, or you wish we should use attunement and not resonance. I'm not very picky about it, uh because at least the notion of ecological resonance that I propose is formal to an extent that doesn't matter if you call it resonance or you call it attunement. So, formally speaking, what I say is that when you describe the organism environment dynamics in terms of, say, dynamical systems theory, one of the variables that you are going to use to explain how these dynamics evolve in time is information, right? It's whatever ecological info specifies uh those those dynamics. And that information is going to be a variable of the organism environment dynamics. So if the brain is attuned to that variable or resonates to that one, what you have to find is in the in the in your model of brain dynamics, that variable must be there too, right? So let's say that we write down a differential equation that describes the organism environment dynamics. And we have a variable X there that stands for the ecological information that constrains those dynamics. Then if the brain is resonating to that information, X has also to be part of the equation that describes brain dynamics. So to resonate to ecological information means that the same ecological variable that constrains organism environment dynamics also constrains brain dynamics. And then you can call it resonance attainment. I don't have hard feelings about it.
SPEAKER_00Interesting in your um conceptualization of resonance is that you often mentioned that it can be in different scales. So you could find it in the brain in near neuronal scale, but also then in behavioral scale. Could you please open this? Because this could be interesting for, for example, sports science then.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I could say that within the ecological approach, most of the the focus when when you know when when when ecological psychologists have been focusing in the control of action, most of the most of uh the focus has been at the at the organism organism environment scale or behavioral scale, right? The scale of behavior itself. So how how my steering changes uh depending where my goal is, or depending on the way I have to avoid obstacles, or you know, how how much force I have to make with my upper limbs to move this, or that kind of stuff, you know. So um ecological psychologists have focused on describing behavior at that scale, at the behavioral dynamics scale, so to speak. Behavioral dynamics is the is the is the is the way that Bill Warren, who is one of the main ecological psychologists, uses to refer to that scale, right? Um and of course, they try to find whatever perceptual ecological information variable is that the organism used to control those those dynamics at that scale, right? So the most famous variable is time to contact, right? It's it's it's called tau, and it's has to do with the expansion of the of an object in your in your visual field, right? And it's described at the behavioral scale. So what resonance means is that you have to find that same variable, let's say tau, in all the other scales, right? Or in some other scales uh at least. And I and I focus on the on the neural scale or on the brain dynamics scale because I I want to try to do neuroscience, right? But there are many other scales, you know, you can focus on the on the on the muscular skeletal scale or on a different physiological scale or on the fascia, right? The thing is that behavior at the end emerges from from a multi-scale, non-linear set of nested processes, right? And in principle, or at least by hypothesis, you should be able to track some of the regularities through all those scales or through some of them. But also up, right? We are talking about an organism and behavioral dynamics there, but you can think about joint action, right? So when the information or the perceptual information in the environment changes so that uh we need two people to carry something, like it this is too heavy for just one uh person, but then you need another uh person to carry, right? To carry a table or to carry a bed, but then the whole behavior uh changes, right? Then you'll you need to adjust with the other person too, and the whole dynamic has so to speak a different equation.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating to hear about these things because we Vitani of course have been talking a lot about uh different scales like team scale or individual, but now we have like good examples that we can go beyond and what it would like be. And the other thing that comes to mind that we talk a lot about skill. So how this resonance could be some kind of explanation or part of it, what is a skill behavior, in your opinion?
SPEAKER_02Starting to I mean you can find some recent work on group dynamics. Like one one one one of those things are sometimes simple things, right? Like uh again, Bill Warren has some recent papers on crowd locomotion, right? How a group of people walk together, whether there's a leader or not, and how they relate to each other locally, as to the whole pattern to emerge them, right? There's also a good amount of work on behavioral, let's say, synchronization and join action by people like Michael Richardson at Macquarie University in Australia. Um and they actually him also with uh Kerry Marsh, that is still in uh Connecticut, I think, they talk sometimes about the organism environment system. So instead of the organism environment system, it's the organism organism environment system. And the and the and the and the approach is actually methodologically the same one, right? It's just to include the new variable and then explore how the perceptual information changes there and how the the the overall dynamics get this other uh constraint, right? So there's some work actually. There's also um a good friend of mine, Luis Fabela, who is uh a professor at uh in at the university in uh Florida, and me are are um um editing a new special issue on dynamical systems and how we look at them 30 years after the first dynamical hypothesis was uh proposed by people like Tim van Gelder and Esther Thielen and all these people. And a couple or three papers there are about team teams and teamwork uh dynamics. Uh one of them is already published, it is in the in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science. So if people want uh to check, and is by the group uh of uh Travis Wilshire, who is uh is a researcher in the Netherlands. And it's it's it's a whole paper on how to apply dynamical systems to team work analysis and that stuff, and I think it's uh quite cool. So that's that's for the part of you know the the work that is starting to move towards the group level instead of just the organism. Actually, I think that you can read the ecological approach now as as moving towards two levels. One is the so to say, so to speak, downwards towards the brain, right? Which is what I'm I'm trying, um not just me, no, but it's it's what people like me are trying to do, and other ones is upwards, with all these brain dynamics, of course, ecological dynamics by Keith Richards, uh Keith Richards, I'm sorry, no, uh Keith, Keith uh Davis and and and Duarte Araujo and that kind of stuff, right? Um and then skills. Skills, I always find skill to be a difficult concept, right? A friend of mine, Ed Bax and Michael Anderson and I have a paper called Extended Skill Learning. Um and I remember we were part of the struggle was to provide a proper definition of skill. I'm not completely sure that we succeed, you know, like uh it's it's uh difficult. I think that nowadays we approach skills in two different ways, right? Uh because it can play it can play different roles, right? One of them is the is the the focus on skill skill learning and skill development, right? So part of it is I guess you you two as as uh coaches know this better uh than me. Try to make your team or your you know the players you work with to gain the skills you want to, right? For instance, uh when I think about this, I always think my favorite team, uh by the way, is the best team ever. Real Madrid, of course. Everybody knows. No. But but you probably know um Vinnie, right? He's one of our main players now. I remember when he came to the team at the age of 18 in uh 2019. He was fantastic in the running, in the in you know taking people off and that kind of stuff, but he never made the right decision in the box. He he didn't have a very good ball kick and made wrong decisions, but after two years he learned, and and that that that that was that's what made him one of the best uh players, maybe the best in his uh position, or if you know, or you know, one one top. It's what to gain the skill of making the right decision and and actually of making more goals because he was able to, you know, to to do the right thing with the ball when he was in front of the goal. So I think this is one thing, right? How we develop skills. There are some theories within the ecological approach that like direct learning or the uh constraint-led approach to skill acquisition. But there's another thing. So let's say now that you have been with those skills, you can use the skills, the new the newly acquired skills, to have the team doing other things, right? Uh so then when you when you can assume okay, this organism has now these skills, there's a different question that is not that much about uh developing skills, although you never stop doing it, right? But you know, it's not that about how I make this organism to have this skill. It's more about now what new opportunities are open in my environment now that I have these skills, and how I can I can uh combine these skills with with other skills and with other people.
SPEAKER_00This is very interesting because sometimes we okay, so there is there can be an idea that I first develop the skills and then I find new opportunities, but could it be also that uh they are a little bit like similar processes that I'm learning to find new opportunities and that helps also my skill to uh develop, or how do you see it?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. I don't think I I put it in these two ways just to try to highlight the different aspects of what I take as you say to be the same issue, right? I mean, you develop skills. Uh I guess a very deflationary way to define skills is uh one set of I don't want to say abilities because then it's just no, but you know, like ways in which you can uh get a grip with your environment, and as these ways change, you can the grip is can be different, but you know, as you change, the grip is uh different, and your environment changes uh for you that leads you to a different grip and that kind of stuff. You can see these kind of things um in cognitive ethology, so in the study of of the intelligence of non-human animals, right? And you see, for instance, work that say the lack of hand dexterity in some animals made them not able to be sensitive to some affordances that are there in the environment, right? Of course, those are for them kind of biological factor. But these highlight the point like as you gain new skills, there are new Opportunities that actually lead you to keep developing those skills or to open you to the possibility of getting other skills. And it's yeah, it's a cycle that that that that can be you know can be analyzed apart, as I as I did, right? To try to look to the development and to the and to the putting the skill uh to use. But this is a kind of an analytical way to look at it. But in the but in the in the in the real world they are uh together.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, true. Let's let's stay in football. You as we understand you are also very fanatical about football. So we now we talked about individual skill, like a little bit individual skill, but also team skills. If we think back a little bit for that resonance concept of yours, what could it bring as a practical application to football coaching if you want to develop help skillful players and teams develop?
SPEAKER_02This is actually a very good question. A question I've I've I've thought about before. And especially since I talked uh to you guys, of course. Um it seems to me that resonance as such, you know, the the process in which the the uh a brain gets so to speak, brain dynamics get constrained by ecological information. The process itself seems to be at the individual scale, and that's okay. I I think one of the one of the main benefits of the of the ecological approach is that we acknowledge that there are different scales and that not you don't need to find everything in all scales either, right? You can find some things across scales. But what is true that the heavy lifting here is is is done by information. And of course, in joint action, uh or in this organism, organism environment system, or or in uh in uh football, I guess it's organism, organism, organism 11 times, right? And and and the other team too, right? So a lot of organism environment system. Um in those uh cases, part of the most important e-information you get is not from it's not from the field, right? It's not from the static environment, it's about the it's about the team itself or the other members in some way. So I guess that the main thing would be something like trying to find that information first, and then see whether we can look at the brain for something, right? So there are a few things here that that we could talk about. So we we do know, or and I mean, or at least we have evidence that when we engage in a joint action, so when we engage in an action with with other organisms, we not only are coupled to the action or to whatever the environmental uh properties we we find them, but we are we get uh coupled to the other organism. There's a very nice example of this. The work by Patrick Nalepka, uh who is also a researcher at Macquarie University. We were both grad students at University of uh of Cincinnati a long time ago. And he was already developing this sheep herding experiment. So the experiment was like you have some some some bowls like like sheps, right? And two, let's say dogs that that that that that are the two participants there. And the task was to get the the balls need uh tend to go out of uh a particular region, and the task was for the for the two dogs, uh quote unquote, right, to get the ships to stay within the region there, right? And they and they start with an strategy that is the dog goes to the far to the to the ship that is farther uh away and pushes back. But eventually they discovered that the most optimal solution was to oscillate on their side of the of the of the field and oscillate in a couple fashion with the other uh participants, right? And then doing that kind of uh continuous oscillation between them, they were able to keep all the ships in. The cool thing here is that if you notice the optimal solution doesn't have to do with the ships anymore, it is the coupling between the two uh participants there. So as they couple between them in the right way, the ships will stay in. So the focus moves from the coupling to the to the let's say to the material environment, to the to the coupling between the two members of the team. So this is this means that, for instance, the information you really need to be tracking, given that you have the skills to move and that stuff, you know, that you need, of course, some skills, but part of the most important information you need to be tracking is your uh uh partner and not the uh the position of the ships, right? To look at this, it this is in some way or in a particular way, is that you need to resonate to your partner, to the other person that is doing the task with you, and not that much to other aspects of the environment itself.
SPEAKER_00Very interesting, because if you think about a football like pressing, you can have uh some players who are very skillful together in pressing, but then you change something in this, like new player comes in, and basically really easy things that you should be able to do together, and somehow something starts to change, those two or three players are not anymore so so good at pressing. So maybe it's something to do with this.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's it's that point that that joint action is actually a different kind of action, right? Join action is not just the sum of three individual actions, right? You can sum three uh individual actions and not to achieve the joint action, which is a different thing, right? Like like uh again, when you try to move a big table with another person, you need to to coordinate with the other person. And it is not anymore moving a table by two individuals, it's a two people uh system acting as a whole, and the system itself to get to that systemic uh action it's it's uh sometimes uh uh complicated.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and in football, the traditional ways to the plus one, plus one, plus one. So one movement, one movement and the next, and then we combine them. So in a way, this suggests that we should have them to work together from the start and not try to add things.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And interesting also when you think about 1v1 situations, like what is the key thing for the defender or the attacker there? So it's the relation, probably there. What is the relation and how how attuned you are, for example, as a striker like Vinnie, like where the defender is going. If he's going that way, maybe Vinnie sees that I will go just that way, and he doesn't have to. Okay, he's very technical and he can do it, but sometimes sometimes they just a little bit like uh avoid obstacles, it uh avoid a avoidance behavior.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's it's it's kind of that. It's uh I mean I think that that's why uh the ecological approach has been successful in trying to model a collective uh behavior. Is that that realization that this is a dynamics that first goes beyond an internal model that tells you what to what to do, and then that goes beyond the linear sum of individual actions. So it's an emerging pattern. The pattern can be join action, which is what you like hopefully within your team you try to do with your with your teammates. Some uh players are not as good as that, but but uh in principle, you hope to have some individual aspects of the game and some joint aspects, right? But also with the opponent, these are also dynamics, right? And these are situations that involve an organism organism environment system, at least, right? So so yeah, I mean it's trying to understand these two dynamics uh at their at their own scale or at the at one of the right scales that you can see, right? To see the whole system.
SPEAKER_00Then the challenge is that uh okay, if you want to understand brain dynamics, for example, in football action, it's a little bit difficult to do. Like, okay, how do we how do we study in live context? But you have been doing that with mobile brain imaging, and uh it's a very interesting approach.
SPEAKER_02Uh could you please tell also that this is uh a community that has been evolving for the last maybe 15 to 20 years, and uh it's mostly um EEG, right? Uh electroencephalogram and FNIRS, which is the optical cap. Um and it's basically these two methods because to move an fMRI, it's so far as uh we can do right now impossible. Uh so these are the two things that you only need a cap and not a whole uh machine, right? And and the idea is that in order to understand behavior uh properly, we need to have it in uh at the lab, right? So we need to have naturalistic behavior in naturalistic environment. You can do experiments with very restricted um movement, with very restricted stimulation, and that can work for some things, but might not tell us a lot about what we are doing when we do more complex stuff and we we do actually natural uh behavior, right? So the main idea here is to try to combine the technologies we can and the and the and the analytical tools, you know, the the the so to speak, the mathematics we know to bring as much as the natural environment and as much naturalistic uh behavior as we can in the lab. So uh what I've been working mostly has been in mobile EEG. And one of the best labs in the world to do that is the Be Mobile Lab at the Technical University of Berlin. Uh they are a lab that has the expertise you need and the equipment you need to do. So they have mobile EG caps, virtual reality environment, motion uh capture, and that stuff. And they combine that. And in my in my own experiment, the the experiment was still sitting on a table, but moving uh around to grasp objects and that kind of stuff. But they have other experiments with people walking around, even running, right? And this this is at least the kind of data you ideally would have if you really want to know what's going on in the brain, in let's say, in uh football. We might not be, I mean, I almost sure we are not still ready to have, I don't know, a whole, you know, a whole team with 11 mobile EEG caps, and you know, that that sounds highly complicated, but you know, we are moving towards that, towards trying to understand dynamics in the natural environment. What you see now, for instance, is um some of these approaches, you know, with mobile EEG and uh and trying to see what are the sign the brain signatures for some aspects of the biomechanics, right? Like um trying to see the way different kinds of movement reflects in brain dynamics and try to see if there's any correlation with some particular brain dynamics and let's say ACL injuries and that kind of stuff. So it's it's it's more it's uh it's a thing that you can still do with just one uh person doing squats or you know. Um I and you can start seeing these kinds of things, like trying to apply these kind of uh ideas, both ecological ideas and mobile brain imaging uh ideas to rehabilitation or to prevention of injuries and that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00That leads us to the closing dots of the of the podcast. So you already talked about that, but what kind of uh future ideas would you see, you know, from your line of research to football and you know can be more global, also like uh sport science and ecological psychology applications to football coaching.
SPEAKER_02I expect in the in the next five to ten years, Real Madrid wins another three or four Champions Leagues, and uh I think that ecological psychology that has been a research framework for the last almost 50 years, has now a very good understanding of itself, so to speak. So I think we have a strong approach to behavioral dynamics. So to try to understand, we have good tools, good theoretical, methodological tools to understand that. We need a little bit of scaling up, right? We need better understanding of teams, of you know, groups. But as we said at the beginning, I think you could you are starting to see some work on that way. So I think part of it is to is to develop more theoretical methodological tools to capture both the ecological information and the skill development that goes in this team. You know, the these these particular aspects of team behavior. And then uh hopefully we will be uh improving our equipment and our mathematical tools to to bring more of that into football, into research there. I mean, I think it's fairly regular right now to have some to have a lot of uh physiological uh data, right? You get uh players both in training and and in and in and in games with with uh measurements of their heartbeat or you know, or many, many things. You have a lot of AI coming in too, right? Both for that and and for you know general uh data, like expected goals and that stuff, that you should uh tell me one day what that means. But anyways, um if we had more data, so if we really could have uh you know an EEG cap and with uh that is not too heavy, uh, because for instance, now we have a mobile EEG, but we need a full laptop in the in as um as a backpack. So maybe that's not the best way to train unless you are doing force or something. Uh um so improving our things, our equipment and our approach to try to gather that data in more and more naturalistic environments, ideally to have that in the training and even in games, right? I mean, at the end, what we want to do, I guess, is to is to better understand how perception and action works, to better train, and to have more fun. Um you know, like to have uh from from the from the outside, right? I only watch the game, so I I don't need to win. Real Madrid almost always wins, but that's another thing. Um but um it's you know to better understand perception and action and group dynamics, to have better training system, less injuries, more more more chances to win, etc.
SPEAKER_01No, it's very interesting to hear hear these thoughts and the research and the ideas where the things are heading right now. So I'm enjoyed enjoyed a lot. A lot to hear these things, and uh I'm sure there's a lot to ground to cover cover in the topics you mentioned. It's not not the ready world yet.
SPEAKER_02Well, that's that that's part of the of the of of the challenge, but also of the excitement, right? I mean, this is thing, all of this, and also the things you do, guys, it's things to be done, right? We need to think about them and to try to do them and see what happens.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. So we with these words we can stay and start to wait how ecological psychology and sports science develop and how many championships Real Madrid will win in the next five years. This was an in the next five years. This was a very interesting interesting and inspiring discussion. Thank you, Vicente a lot, for your own.