Milo de Prieto Doctoral Research Proposal 

Terms

Meaning-making. The ongoing work by which a person constructs and revises a model of reality. It draws on physiological, affective and integrative processes distributed across the organism, and it operates continuously rather than on demand.

Expression. The phase in which that model is carried outward into utterance, action and made work. Expression participates in the process rather than terminating it: what is made returns as input to the model that made it.

Voice. The individual signature that accumulates across a body of work, in the sense the word carries in the arts. Voice is the observable of an otherwise internal process. It grows more legible over time, and therefore carries information about its own formation. Every person has one, independent of whether they work in any art form. Voice belongs to what Neural Coherence Ecology names cognitive identity, the individual particularity of cognitive patterning, and it is carried outward through the Purpose Throughline.

Neural ecology. The grounding thesis of Neural Coherence Ecology, states that the human being is treated as an internal ecosystem interdependent with an external one, society. The term is used in preference to computational vocabulary, which imports assumptions the framework does not hold.

Divergence.  A relation, and never a property of a person. Divergence describes the separation of paths from a common point, and unless the point is named the word says nothing. Three fields are described below, each naming its own point within the biology. What is constructed as divergence in each is variation within humans. Every person embodies variation, and no person is divergent.

Grounding

Predictive processing. The account associated with Andy Clark treats the brain as continuously generating and revising a model of incoming sensory data against prediction error. Applied to expression, this describes a predictive model turned outward into material and revised through the act of making it. The literature has concentrated on the receptive side. The generative side, what happens when the model is externalised rather than corrected against the world, is comparatively unexamined.

Homeostasis and feeling. Antonio Damasio’s The Strange Order of Things argues that feeling is the mental expression of homeostasis, and that cultures are extensions of homeostatic regulation into the social domain. This supplies the physiological grounding for treating meaning-making as an organism-wide process and for treating the social as a biological condition of it.

Material culture and prediction. Work at the boundary of predictive processing and material culture, including the XSCAPE project and Constant et al. (J. R. Soc. Interface 21: 20240508, 2024), addresses how culturally patterned attention is acquired and how artefacts participate in predictive scaffolding. The present research addresses the complementary side: the production of those artefacts.

Neural Coherence Ecology. The theoretical framework the research develops from, which treats the human being as an internal ecosystem interdependent with society and defines quality of life as sustained homeostasis across the organism.

Constructs & Voice

The question this side of the work asks is what effect constructs have on voice.

Constructs are readings sustained across many cycles and many participants, and they are present throughout the formation of a voice rather than at the point where a work is received. Most work is made and shown in settings where a surrounding norm is locally suspended, and the effect described here survives those settings.

The supposition, which the framework supplies and the doctoral project does not depend on, is that the effect runs through belonging. Feedback from a person’s social ecosystem forms and reforms a sense of belonging within it and a sense of the nature and value of their contribution to it. Belonging is a component of homeostasis rather than an addition to it, and each expression proceeds from the state the previous return left.

The case where this is most legible is the construct taken up from within as a badge of honour. There the construct enters the formation of the voice with no reception event anywhere in the account, and the work itself carries the construct’s terms.

Three fields are described below. They are where the misreading is most sustained and best documented.

Research with these populations requires care in design and in interpretation, and any measurement must be interpreted against the conditions it was obtained under.

Creative dimension

The practice-based component is The Coherence Athenaeum: a traversable artistic universe of narrative film, ergodic literature in digital and physical form, sculpture, painting and prose, existing simultaneously in digital and physical space. The Codex Scroll is its traversal atlas for moving through the work across media.

The Athenaeum is organised by the same thread as the theoretical work: how a singular meaning-making process is sustained over time and becomes legible in what is made.

Scope

The research question and the site of study are specified. The study design is not.

Which measures are informative, which paradigms are tractable, and what can reasonably be brought into laboratory conditions are open questions, to be settled within a research group and against the instrumentation actually available. Sustained creative production across extended time is not directly observable under laboratory conditions, and any empirical work will require reduction to tractable paradigms.

The doctoral project is deliberately constrained. Extension of the framework beyond it falls outside its scope.

Layperson Version

Everyone works out what the world means to them, and everyone does it a little differently. That working-out never stops, it involves the whole body rather than the brain alone, and most of it happens below the level anyone notices.

The process itself cannot be watched directly. What can be examined is what comes out of it: what a person says, writes, makes or builds. Artists have a word for the individual signature that builds up across someone’s work over years. They call it voice. Everyone has one, whether or not they ever make art.

Voice matters here because it is where an invisible process leaves something visible, and because it develops over time, which means it holds evidence of how it came to be.

Fine art is the setting for the study, for two reasons. Someone building a body of work over years gives the process long enough, and enough deliberate attention, to leave a readable record. And devoting oneself to a craft shows something about how a voice takes shape.

Two areas of research sit underneath the question. One holds that the brain constantly predicts what is coming and corrects itself when wrong, which would make expression a prediction pushed out into the world and revised in the making. The other, from Antonio Damasio, holds that feeling arises from the body’s work of keeping itself stable, and that cultures extend that same work outward.

The study also asks what effect socially constructed categories have on a voice. Feedback from other people shapes whether someone feels they belong and whether they feel what they make is worth anything. Categories that hold no substance beyond shared agreement still shape that feedback, and they do so all the way through, rather than only at the point where the work is shown.

How any of this is measured is not yet determined. Establishing that is part of the doctoral work.