Embodied agency and the blindspot of medical science

models for concrete reality, downplaying the role of experience. Medicine commits two versions of this fallacy. First, it abstracts away from subjective experi - ence in a general temporal sense, ignoring the “developmental context of the organ - ism and its environment” (Frank et al., 2024, p. 143). Medicine operates in a vacuum, where it renders metaphysically primary what is an abstraction over many different instances of a person's lived bodily existence as it unfolds over a life time. In this way, the body of medicine becomes a mere snapshot of a present material configuration, artificially freezing life in time. More recent perspectives on neuroplasticity and epi- genetics challenge the notion of the body as a fixed entity, showing for instance that the human brain continues to reshape in response to experience and learning (Fuchs & Flügge, 2014; V oss et al., 2017) and that genetic expression depends on interac - tions with the environment and additional factors such as stress and lifestyle (Cavalli & Heard, 2019). Yet despite these advances, the individual body’s present material state remains the generalised reference point for understanding illness and treatment, corroborating the bias for biomedical causes at the expense of psychological factors. To illustrate, consider research on transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in the context of depression, in which a person’s prefrontal cortex is stimulated through a small current of electricity. Persons undergoing the treatment went into remission for extended periods (Fenoy et al., 2022 , Sonmez et al., 2019). One might conclude, as some neuroscientists do, that this must mean that the mechanisms and real causal factors of depression must be in the person's brain, after all, an intervention there has led to an immediate and lasting change in the persons mental well-being. However, such a conclusion is unwarranted because it presupposes a limited, materialistic view of causality. The existence of neural correlations, in and of itself, explains not much 1 3 M. Kyselo when the explanation leaves the psycho-physical intertwinement of living beings with their environment unaccounted for. 3 Blindspot 2: the imp