According to irruption theory, the subjective mind genuinely matters to how we behave.

Our existence is a strange mixture of subjective and objective phenomena that is not fully under our control.

Cognitive effort is associated with increased irruptions that inject noise into physiological dynamics.

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........

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