May 9, 2024, noon UTC // May 9, 2024, noon in UTC
One central feature of organisms as cognitive systems, according to the enactive approach, is their autonomy. But autonomy, in the technical sense, not only applies to organisms as whole self-maintaining systems, it also describes an emergent property of several of their interacting subsystems. The autonomy perspective has convincingly been applied to the immune system and to the nervous system (Varela 1979, Varela 1997) and more recently, to the case of glycemia regulation (Bich, Mossio, and Soto, 2020). As in these cases, autonomy allows us to explore some physiological processes as whole dynamic cycles with active, flexible and selective capacities. I will suggest that autonomy also helps to explore under a new light the menstrual cycle and its traditional questions on how it affects cognition. In concrete, the autonomy perspective would allow us to move from more deterministic questions of how reproduction affects behavior to non-deterministic interactions between the menstrual cycle and the nervous system and how these interactions modulate the whole organism’s affective dynamic states. The first step towards formulating this perspective, then, is to explore and apply the technical concept of autonomy to the menstrual cycle: as an operational definition of closure of constraints, and as an embodied precariousness. By doing so, I suggest that the menstrual cycle itself is an autonomous system and as such it discloses some operational and relational aspects that are relevant to explore the menstrual cycle's influence on cognition from a non-deterministic, non-reductionist perspective.
