Therapeutic Alliance as Active Inference: The Role of Therapeutic Touch and Synchrony

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome everyone it is actin flab live stream number 44.0 it's may 13 2022. welcome to the actin flab we are a participatory online lab that is communicating learning and practicing applied active inference you can find more information at the links on the slide this is recorded in an archived live stream so please provide us with feedback so we can improve our work all backgrounds and perspectives are welcome and we'll be following video etiquette for live streams if you want to learn more about the live streams or other activities in the lab head to activeinference.org today in 44.0 we are going to learn and discuss this awesome paper therapeutic alliance as active inference gurney from 2022 by zoe mcparland francesco saratelli carl fristen and jorge estevez and the video is just an introductory review slash scoping and contextualizing we're going to have some discussions in the coming weeks on this paper with the authors and some non-authors so we're just going to be overviewing the paper opening up some threads getting excited about it covering what they said so that we can jump into the one and two discussions and let's just get right into it i'm daniel and i'm a researcher in california i was very curious about touch and active inference which is an area that hasn't been explored too much but it's something that is so critical to our daily experience so it sounds like a pretty important area to model or approach with active inference and i'll pass it to ian so thanks for joining and for all the contribution on the slides we'd love to hear any context and welcome hi daniel thanks very much for um having me in your lab so yeah i you know i was drawn to this paper for several reasons i first um saw the paper by some of the authors that got me uh joining the dots between their work and your lab which was that was called osteopathy and mental health and embodied predictive interceptive framework so i've got an interest in um how we sense what's going on inside our body from a research point of view and a personal point of view and then also you know my main what i spend most of my time doing work wise is hands-on therapy so manual therapy which involves touch when i saw the title of this paper which we're talking about today which is um part of their series on inactivism and active inference in the therapeutic alliance i you know what jumped out to me was the um the word synchrony in therapeutic alliance so you know this is something in the therapy world we often talk about synchrony um and i'm intrigued to see how that might fit in with free energy minimization just one thought on what you said there about interception which is something we've talked about i know you've had many conversations and works on it is touch it sometimes feels like it's out there like i'm touching objects on my desk it's how they are out there just like vision is something out there but then touch is actually inside the fingers and so it's actually like it is an interception about the external world so it's kind of like touch is something inside of us but again it's out it's about out external objects and so how does the brain and body do that and then what's the social dynamics of it and then what are the clinical implications i hope those are some questions we can approach with active inference and get some insight into yes yeah and the you know the other thing what you were saying then about um and i think in the interception researchers there is a little bit of debate over whether what types of touch might include as interreceptive or inner felt and there's low effective touch versus maybe different types of touch um but also when you were saying that i was just thinking you know when someone says i felt touched by that piece of music um the music didn't physically touch us apart from oscillating airwaves but touching our eardrums um but again it might be an interceptive experience if we were touched by some piece of…