Tom Froese is one of those remarkably smart people whose way with complicated topics, and sense of civility, make discussion a real pleasure. His work on “irruption” struck me immediately, and reminded me of a term co-authors and I coined—”irrelationship”—a form of shared relationship dysfunction based on something very like irruption, gaps in awareness creating a confusional state, which drives relationship conflict.1

We had spoken on our podcast (“Doorknob Comments,” link below) and explored how people may be hindered in everyday life by forces of irruption—a sudden or violent invasion, or ecologically, a rapid rise in the population or influx of a species into a territory. After our conversation, Froese was generous with his responses to the questions it raised.

As an interventional psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, I have a strange juxtaposition of perspectives—seeing folks recover often dramatically over 1–5 days of accelerated transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and then progressively develop along a different trajectory in the years following. The profound connection between empiric reality and subjective experience has been sharply underscored. Is there always a sliver of doubt? A black box? Or is the doubt itself the illusion? Right now, we don’t have the tech to answer questions like this, but for the first time in human history, materials and methods appear within our horizons.

Grant H Brenner: What are some of the core ideas we need to know to understand your model—things like embodied cognition, or the basics of what you measure?

Tom Froese: Irruption theory starts from a single, bold axiom: the subjective mind genuinely matters to how we behave—and it does so in a way that can’t be reduced to brain activity alone. The key insight is that genuine mental efficacy means differences will show up as falling outside the body’s local frame of reference. Mental causation is an irruption into state dynamics—it causes deviations from the expected trajectories of physiological inertia.

So if we want to see the mind at work in the brain, we need to perform a kind of figure–ground reversal: It is precisely the spontaneous activity without observable physical causes that is the most likely signature of the mental.

The same logic applies in the other direction. We can trace observable chains of cause and effect from an external stimulus through various brain regions until, at some point, there is an unexpected reduction in downstream variability. That is the moment the subject reports a change: “Oh—now I see it!”

GHB: Why does this matter to someone who isn’t immersed in this field?

TF: It matters because we all have to live with the fact that our existence is a strange mixture of subjective and objective phenomena—and that mixture is not fully under our control.

Take the example of a panic attack. You have the sense that you are losing control, and every attempt to get a better grip feels futile. The paradox is that to regain control, the best thing to do is let go. Irruption theory gives a direct answer: Cognitive effort is associated with increased irruptions, which effectively inject noise into physiological dynamics. We see the same effect in choking under pressure in professional sports—athletes need to train their minds in addition to their bodies.

GHB: OK, let’s get a little jiggy—but not mystical. What is the experience of irruption and absorption actually like, from a subject’s perspective? Say, walking down the street in a big city?

TF: When the mind irrupts into physiological dynamics, this does not feel like an irruption of the body into the mind. Rather, irruption into the body is associated with an absorption of mental variability—increased focus, attention, and intention.

These transactions usually unfold beneath our notice. I can chat with the person in the queue next to me while reaching for my coffee, blissfully unaware of how my hand and fingers need to curl to firmly grab the cup—and yet to my surprise I find I am already holding it, ready to drink. Francisco Varela gave the example of walking down a street, all relaxed, until the hand reaching into the pocket does not find the wallet in its usual place. In that moment, there is a surge of inchoate affectivity irrupting into awareness, and the entire lifeworld gets reoriented with dizzying speed.

GHB: What would happen if I could see my Irruption Coefficient on my smartphone—from a ring or watch—the way I already track steps, sleep quality, and heart rate variability? What would the utility be, and how might it change my relationship to my own consciousness?

TF: Ideally, it could reveal when we are truly mentally engaged in what we’re doing, as opposed to moments of absent-mindedness, passivity, and running on autopilot. And if our irruption baseline shifted notably higher or lower over time, that could serve as an early warning sign—a reason to seek professional help.

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Even before the baseline shifted that dramatically, smaller day-to-day variations could be useful. If I noticed my readings running elevated by the evening, that might be a cue to make sure I get a good night’s sleep. And if the trend persisted, it could prompt me to take some time off, or to invest more seriously in compensatory practices like meditation.

GHB: Is there anything beyond the ken of human imagination? Something a person could only imagine encountering, but could never imagine imagining—something outside our maximum experiential envelope?

TF: Yes—there is always more to reality than what shows up in conscious awareness. The irruption of differences into lived experience depends on the absorption of differences on the side of our embodiment. So, paradoxically, the difference that makes the difference cannot itself be part of what becomes present.

The transactional perspective of irruption theory entails that it takes two to tango—it points to a kind of participatory realism. The imagination can never completely substitute for that contact. Some things just have to be experienced to be known.

GHB: Where are you headed with your work, and what do you hope others will gain?

TF: We are finally in a position to formally stitch our fragmented contemporary reality back together, spanning all kinds of previously insurmountable boundaries and scales. I envision a day when the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences are working on a shared agenda—something akin to a large-scale research effort like CERN, but for all of reality, including life and the human condition.

Tom Froese is an associate professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, where he directs the Embodied Cognitive Science Unit. His research sits at the intersection of philosophy, neuroscience, and computational modeling, investigating how consciousness and agency make a measurable difference in the world. He is the originator of irruption theory, a framework for understanding the mind–body relation that has been featured in venues including Big Think and the Landscape of Consciousness.

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