BRNet 2026 Communications Post — Session Context

This document is the working context for the BRNet 2026 communications post. Read it at the start of any continuation session before touching files or running commands. It was last updated 2026-06-17 evening after completing photos, four of five lecture transcripts, and preliminary post approach planning.

Draft file (to be created): 02-areas/website/communications/2026-06-brnet.md

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1. What We’re Building

A communications post for baseworks.com/communication/ documenting Baseworks’ attendance and Asia’s poster and panel appearances at BRNet 2026 (8th Annual Body Representation Network Meeting), Padova, Italy, June 8–9, 2026.

This uses WordPress post type communications, not article. It publishes at baseworks.com/communication/.

Goals

• Document the conference appearance factually (Asia’s poster + ECR panel)
• Describe the dominant framing of the field (pathological/clinical) as an accurate observation, not a contrast or critique
• Name the gaps Baseworks observed: body representation research as it applies to healthy populations and systematic training contexts is largely absent from the field
• SEO target: findable by academic and clinical audiences in body representation / embodied cognition research
• Differentiate Baseworks from wellness, movement education, and pathological research without competitive framing
• Asia will add input/feedback once a first draft exists

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2. Files Created This Session

New skill: /write-communications-post

• Skill file: .claude/skills/write-communications-post/SKILL.md
• Guidelines doc: 02-areas/website/communications/_communications-post-guidelines.md
• Skills index: 03-resources/claude-code-skills/index.md — updated with summary table row and detail section
• Commit: dbbab8b0 (vault sync 2026-06-17 11:01:41) + caddb11b
• Available on all machines via git pull

Lecture transcripts (4 of 5)

Vault location: 02-areas/method-admin/core/science-docs/conferences/BRNet-2026-transcripts/ Commit: 530ea163

File	Status
Alkistis Saramandi BRNet.txt	✓ Done — partial quality
Gabriele Vercelli BRNet.txt	✓ Done — poor quality (mostly garbled)
Jamie Feusner BRNet.txt	✓ Done — mixed quality, ~45 min
Manja Engel BNNet.txt	✓ Done — best quality of the four
Olaf Blanke BRNet.txt	⏳ Pending — hit Groq rate limit; retry scheduled for ~23:10

Session context document

This file: 02-areas/website/communications/2026-06-brnet-session-context.md Commit: 499575af (initial) — updated this session

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3. WordPress Technical Reference

Post type:    communications
URL archive:  baseworks.com/communication/
SSH:          bwsite_primo_82@5.180.253.171
WP root:      /var/www/baseworks.com

ACF fields for this post

Field key	Value
location	Italy
project	BRNet
details	See section 7 below
communication_image	WP media ID of chosen photo (TBD when drafting)

Related event on baseworks.com

WP post ID: 49121 (already published at baseworks.com/events/...) CDN folder: https://media.baseworks.com/website/events/2026-06-brnet-body-representation/

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4. Conference Context

Event: 8th Annual Body Representation Network Meeting — “The Uncanny Body” Dates: June 8–9, 2026 Venue Day 1: Aula Magna Galileo Galilei, Palazzo Bo, via VIII Febbraio 2, Padova Venue Day 2: Aula Morgagni, Policlinico Universitario, Via Giustiniani 2, Padova

Asia’s appearances

1. Poster (Day 1 — Poster Session, 13:00–15:00): “Three Trainable Components of Body Representation: Evidence from a Decade of Naturalistic Perceptual Skills Training” Poster CDN asset: https://media.baseworks.com/website/events/2026-06-brnet-body-representation/baseworks-three-components-body-representation.webp

2. Panel (Day 2 — 09:00–10:00 and 11:30–12:15): “Career options and Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity Considerations in Research” (ECR panel)

Conference program

Day 1 | June 8

Time	Session
09:30–10:00	Registration
10:00–10:20	Welcome
10:20–11:05	Short Talks (Chair: Angela Favaro): Manja Engel (Utrecht), Gabriele Vercelli (Roma La Sapienza), Alkistis Saramandi (UCL)
11:05–12:00	Keynote: Jamie Feusner (U Toronto) — “When the Brain Misrepresents the Body”
12:00–13:00	Lunch
13:00–15:00	Poster Session + Coffee Break
15:00–15:50	ECR Award: Valeria C. Peviani (Hamburg-Eppendorf) — “From Sensation to Structure: Inferring the Body in Space”
15:50–16:35	Short Talks: Deniz Yilmaz (Max Planck), Martina Fanghella (Milan), Sara Coppi (Karolinska)
19:00–22:00	Social Dinner — Caffè Pedrocchi

Day 2 | June 9

Time	Session
09:00–10:00	ECR Panel: Career Options and EDI (Asia participates)
10:00–10:50	Keynote: Michela Bassolino (HES-SO Valais-Wallis) — “Body Perception in Neurological Disorders: Tools, Mechanisms, and New Perspectives”
10:50–11:30	Short Talks: Piotr Litwin (Warsaw), Anna L. Vlad (Verona), Maren Born (Lausanne)
11:30–12:15	ECR Panel continued
14:00–14:50	Keynote: Olaf Blanke (EPFL) — “Neuropsychiatry of Invisible Presences”
14:50–15:35	Short Talks: Nicola Brunello (Bern), Michel Akselrod (HES-SO Valais-Wallis), Francesca Genovese (Turin)
15:35–16:30	Poster prize and closure

Field framing — five topic clusters

1. Eating disorders / body image distortion (dominant): Engel, Vercelli, Saramandi, Feusner, Vlad
2. Interoception: Yilmaz (schizophrenia), Fanghella (autism)
3. Predictive processing / computational models: Saramandi, Feusner, Litwin
4. Proprioception / motor integration / neurological: Akselrod (stroke), Brunello (spinal cord injury), Genovese (cerebral palsy)
5. Body ownership / peripersonal space / presence: Coppi, Litwin, Born, Blanke

Baseworks was the only presenter from a healthy populations / movement training / systematic pedagogy angle. All other presenters worked in pathology or illusion paradigms.

Most conceptually adjacent presenters

• Valeria C. Peviani (ECR Award) — “sensation to structure” maps directly to D→A pathway; spatial inference = SPA-D territory
• Michel Akselrod — proprioception + body representation in rehabilitation; direct overlap with PRO component
• Alkistis Saramandi — precision-weighted belief updating; NCA data (D as necessary condition for A, U) is behavioral operationalization of what her computational models describe formally
• Michela Bassolino — keynote on tools and measurement; Asia’s assessment gap section directly relevant to her frame

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5. Video Analysis — asia-talking.MOV

File: /Volumes/Ceva SSD 4TB Baseworks/BRNet Media/Videos/asia-talking.MOV Duration: 5:08 | Resolution: 3840×2160 Watch working dir: /var/folders/kq/tkv20ljn1r7_fzh1gjl_zk300000gn/T/watch-br1de5oq (frames + audio.mp3 still present)

Setting: Aula Morgagni, Day 2. Asia in a green sleeveless top at a rounded wooden panel table. Green chalkboard behind. Bald man with glasses to her left. She is responding to a moderator question during the ECR panel.

Transcript — clean English portion (00:00–02:26)

On the “residential scientist” concept:

“This category of a position, I think it’s actually very, very important because I am being in a certain context which is understudied and I have to collect information about this, I have to identify the needs and I have to, well, study it and communicate with other people. And I think contexts like this, they exist — it’s probably plenty of them. The reason why many experiences are understudied is because there’s no residential scientist who would systematically make sense of them. And, for example, when I go to scientific conferences and I listen to presentations, there’s such a gap between what we need and what is actually being studied in the lab, in any field of science. So I feel like it’s really a requirement to somehow create this category of a residential scientist who gets shipped into a certain environment and brings back what’s actually happening there.”

On building new assessment tools:

“A lot of my work is about developing assessment tools because existing assessment tools just don’t work for what we do.”

“Rather than taking an existing framework and just following it and adding more data to it, you have to build a new framework from scratch, which is very interesting, challenging, not very supportive.”

On the mindset required:

“It’s almost like I’m an early explorer. So it’s very, very interesting. But at the same time, you need to have a very special mindset to be able to handle that because the systems are not set up to support this, and it’s just driven by curiosity, dedication, but also just really being attuned to what exactly the object of your study is.”

On career planning:

“For me it’s a bit of a combination of both — I had a plan but my plan was general, and then I also just sort of took opportunities as they came.”

Whisper failure (02:26–05:08)

Groq Whisper hallucinated Welsh after ~02:26 — known failure mode on quiet/ambient audio. That portion is unusable. To recover: re-run watch with --start 2:26 --end 5:08 and forced English, or Patrick fills in from memory.

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6. Video Analysis — not-asia.MOV

File: /Volumes/Ceva SSD 4TB Baseworks/BRNet Media/Videos/not-asia.MOV Duration: 1:24 | Resolution: 3840×2160 Working dir: /var/folders/kq/tkv20ljn1r7_fzh1gjl_zk300000gn/T/watch-y_mgzeey

Wider shot showing all four panelists. The speaker in this clip is the woman in a red blazer — a researcher sharing her own career path (PhD + postdoc Boston → industry → boredom → back to academia). Useful context: other panelists’ career stories were conventional; Asia’s “residential scientist” framing was notably different.

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7. ACF details Field — Draft HTML

<strong>Format</strong>: Conference | Poster Presentation | Panel Discussion<br>
<strong>Presenter:</strong> Asia (Ksenia) Shcherbakova<br>
<strong>Date:</strong> June 8–9, 2026<br>
<strong>Conference Website:</strong> <a href="https://bodyrepresentation.wixsite.com/brnet" target="_blank" rel="noopener">BRNet</a>

Abstract URL TBD — check whether BRNet site has abstract pages. Abstract also at 02-areas/method-admin/core/science-docs/conferences/BRNet 2026 Abstract.md.

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8. Photo Pipeline — COMPLETE ✓

41 photos processed and live on CDN. Pipeline ran 2026-06-17 evening.

What was done

• Source: NAS /volume1/baseworks/media/incoming/BRNet/ — photos upscaled to 6144px by Patrick before processing
• Downscaled to 3840px on long side (4K) using sips Lanczos
• Three formats compressed:
  • AVIF (quality 20) — 110–189KB per file
  • WebP (200KB target) — 195–196KB per file
  • JPEG (quality 80) — 1.4–2.4MB per file (for newsletter/social; large due to AI upscaling detail)
• EXIF orientation stripped; Baseworks credit embedded in all metadata fields
• 123 files uploaded to B2 — 0 failures
• Processed files copied to NAS final destination
• Originals archived to NAS originals/ subfolder
• Incoming folder cleared
• CDN verified: HTTP 200

CDN base URL

https://media.baseworks.com/website/events/2026-06-brnet-body-representation/

Filename pattern: baseworks-brnet-2026-padova-NNN.{avif|webp|jpg}

Numbers run: 109–144, 149–153 (41 files, gaps at 145–148 which didn’t exist in source).

Example:

https://media.baseworks.com/website/events/2026-06-brnet-body-representation/baseworks-brnet-2026-padova-111.avif
https://media.baseworks.com/website/events/2026-06-brnet-body-representation/baseworks-brnet-2026-padova-111.webp
https://media.baseworks.com/website/events/2026-06-brnet-body-representation/baseworks-brnet-2026-padova-111.jpg

Note on EXIF dimensions in Synology / macOS Get Info

Dimensions are correct in all files (confirmed via exiftool — e.g., portrait shots are 2160×3840). They don’t appear in Synology DSM “File Info” or macOS “Get Info” for NAS-mounted files because:

1. macOS Spotlight/Quick Look doesn’t scan network volumes — so Get Info can’t surface image dimensions for NAS files even for JPEG
2. Synology DSM doesn’t parse AVIF/WebP container headers for metadata display (format support gap in DSM) This is cosmetic only. The files are correct.

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9. Lecture Transcripts

Location: 02-areas/method-admin/core/science-docs/conferences/BRNet-2026-transcripts/ Audio source: /Volumes/Ceva SSD 4TB Baseworks/BRNet Media/Audio:lectures/ Compressed audio in temp: /tmp/brnet-audio/ (may be cleared between sessions — re-run ffmpeg if needed)

All recordings were ambient room audio without a dedicated microphone. Quality varies; transcripts are useful for general context and themes, not for direct quotes. Cross-reference with program abstracts.

Transcript quality summary

Speaker	Talk	Quality	Key usable content
Manja Engel	Feedback-based body size updating in AN — VR experiment	Best	Clear methodology, findings (controls underestimate baseline; tactile feedback helps controls but not AN patients), Q&A
Jamie Feusner	When the Brain Misrepresents the Body (keynote, ~45 min)	Mixed	Framework overview, measurement tool limitations, body size estimation in AN + BDD — partially clear
Alkistis Saramandi	Precision-weighted body belief updating in AN	Partial	AN and belief updating, emotional vs visual body image, feedback integration — garbled in places
Gabriele Vercelli	Interoceptive conditioning for AN	Poor	Almost entirely garbled — use abstract only
Olaf Blanke	Neuropsychiatry of Invisible Presences (keynote)	✓ Done — good quality	966 segments, 53,788 chars, ~54 min; consistently clear

Blanke keynote — content summary

Blanke’s talk moves through four stages:

1. Phenomenology of “invisible presences” — opening with extreme-sport accounts (female duo crossing [mountain, inaudible], Reinhold Messner on Nanga Parbat) and space exploration where people sense another person behind/beside them that isn’t there. Then Karl Jaspers (1913) describing schizophrenia patients with the same experience: “as if this someone always walked next to me, when I stood up, he stood up.”

2. Robotic induction experiment — the core paradigm: participant’s hand presses a robot finger on a board in front; a second robot on the participant’s back touches between shoulder blades. In the synchronous condition (0ms delay), participants feel their own hand touching their back. In the asynchronous condition (500ms delay), participants feel a different person touching their back — an invisible presence. The asynchronous condition breaks the sensorimotor prediction loop, producing the presence hallucination. Built on the ticklishness illusion (Lyskans 1970s-80s).

3. Presence in Parkinson’s disease — a significant portion on Parkinson’s patients who experience persistent, life-altering invisible presences (often positive: “his friends, his protectors, they watched TV with him”). Neural correlate: basal ganglia + insula. Some patients integrate the presences positively; others find them distressing. He compares to voice-hearing in psychosis (citing Ben Alderson Day’s work).

4. Theoretical framing — presence hallucinations as “neuropsychiatric” (his framing, bridging neuroscience + psychiatry): a misrepresentation of the body in space, specifically a failure to correctly attribute a sensed body-in-space to oneself. Related to peripersonal space representation and self-other distinction in sensorimotor integration.

Relevance to Baseworks: The robotic induction paradigm is effectively a disruption of sensorimotor predictability to reveal how body-in-space is normally constructed — the inverse of what Asia’s PRO component describes (deliberate, trained refinement of body-in-space perception). Blanke’s “body schema body” (Leibhaft) distinction from Jaspers maps to the SPA/PRO distinction. The presence illusion only arises because the brain normally integrates proprioceptive + tactile + motor signals into a coherent self-model — Blanke is studying what happens when that integration fails.

Key extractable themes from transcripts

Feusner keynote:

• Body model → perceived body framework; body schema, body image, body image distortion defined
• Measurement critique: existing tools (scaled avatars, photo distortion) are insufficiently body-part-specific; disorders concern specific body parts, not global body size
• His team developed a custom digital tool to measure body part size estimation separately
• AN: specific body parts overestimated, not universal; BDD: high individual variation masks group averages
• Proprioception, interoception, vision all feed body model updates — but you always perceive through the “digital product” (his term for the body model), never directly from inputs

Engel:

• VR paradigm: estimate where abdominal boundary starts, receive tactile feedback, re-estimate
• Controls significantly underestimate abdominal boundary at baseline; AN patients do not show the expected overestimation
• Feedback improved accuracy in controls; AN patients showed ceiling/floor effects
• Whole study female participants only

Saramandi:

• Body image has “envision” (objective size/shape judgement) and “emotional” (felt sense) components
• Patients disregard disconfirming feedback for the emotional body image even when they update the visual/objective estimate
• Precision as a proxy: clinical group shows lower confidence in estimates

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10. Source Files Reference

File	Location	Status
BRNet 2026 program + booklet PDF	iMessage attachment (read via Read tool)	✓ Fully analyzed
asia-talking.MOV	/Volumes/Ceva SSD 4TB Baseworks/BRNet Media/Videos/	✓ Analyzed (partial — Welsh hallucination 02:26–05:08)
not-asia.MOV	/Volumes/Ceva SSD 4TB Baseworks/BRNet Media/Videos/	✓ Analyzed
Lecture audio (5 files)	/Volumes/Ceva SSD 4TB Baseworks/BRNet Media/Audio:lectures/	4/5 transcribed; Blanke pending
Conference photos (41)	CDN + NAS — incoming cleared	✓ Complete
Conference landscape doc	02-areas/method-admin/core/science-docs/conferences/BRNet 2026 Conference Landscape.md	✓ Read
BRNet 2026 Abstract	02-areas/method-admin/core/science-docs/conferences/BRNet 2026 Abstract.md	Not yet read this session — read before drafting
Event note (WP ID 49121)	02-areas/website/events/2026-06-brnet-body-representation.md	✓ Read
Campaign note	02-areas/communications/campaigns/2026-04-proprioceptive-awareness-brnet/	✓ Read

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11. Post Approach Options

Four distinct approaches were identified. Patrick and Asia to choose before drafting begins.

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Option A — The Assessment Gap as Anchor

Lead: Asia’s poster makes a specific, citable claim — existing body representation assessment tools don’t capture proprioceptive discrimination or spatial awareness components, because those components only become legible in a training context. Start there. Build outward to the conference context.

Structure:

1. Opening: Asia presented at BRNet 2026, Padova — poster + ECR panel
2. The poster’s claim: three trainable components; decade of data; the assessment gap (PRO and SPA absent from all existing tools)
3. Why the gap exists: the conference showed that body representation research is organized almost entirely around disorder and illusion; healthy populations are a structural blind spot, not a research priority
4. The residential scientist observation (Asia’s panel): the way to close that gap is to have someone embedded in the training context long enough to build the frameworks from scratch — that’s what the last ten years have been
5. Adjacent research at the conference worth noting: Bassolino on tools and measurement, Peviani on “sensation to structure,” Akselrod on proprioception
6. Closing: link to event page, proprioceptive awareness article, related baseworks.com content

Why this approach: The assessment gap is the sharpest and most academically specific claim. It’s citable, searchable, and directly answers a question researchers in this space already have. The residential scientist observation gives it a human and methodological context without making it sound like a competition.

Best fit: Academic and clinical audiences. Good for SEO on body representation assessment, proprioception measurement, body schema tools.

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Option B — The Appearance Report

Lead: A straightforward conference report. What Asia presented, who else was there, what the program covered, what was observed.

Structure:

1. Opening: Baseworks at BRNet 2026
2. The poster
3. Program overview — dominant themes (briefly)
4. The ECR panel
5. Selected observations from talks
6. Closing

Why this approach: Accurate, modest, safe. Appropriate if the goal is simply to have the appearance documented rather than to make a particular case.

Best fit: General communications archive. Less SEO leverage.

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Option C — The Double Contribution

Lead: Asia contributed in two distinct capacities — researcher (poster) and early-career panelist. These two roles have a single connective thread: what it means to do research from inside a context rather than from the outside looking in.

Structure:

1. Opening: BRNet 2026 — two days, two formats
2. The poster: what it argues (trainable components, assessment gap)
3. The panel: career in research, EDI considerations, what Asia named (residential scientist)
4. The thread: both contributions point at the same thing — you need a researcher who is structurally embedded in the context over time to generate both the data and the frameworks
5. The field backdrop: what everyone else was working on, and why the healthy-populations angle was the exception
6. Closing

Why this approach: Gives the panel contribution equal weight alongside the research. The “residential scientist” framing is genuinely novel and deserves its own space, not just a footnote. This is the most editorial of the four options.

Best fit: Audiences who engage with Baseworks as an organization as well as a method. Slightly less purely academic.

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Option D — The Field Observation

Lead: What the conference revealed about where body representation research is, and what’s not yet there.

Structure:

1. Opening: BRNet 2026 in brief
2. What the program showed: body representation research is almost entirely organized around disorder, pathology, and controlled illusion paradigms. Five distinct clusters. Very few presenters outside clinical populations.
3. What’s absent: research from healthy populations in sustained naturalistic training contexts — not because the question doesn’t exist, but because there’s no infrastructure to study it systematically
4. What Baseworks contributed: the poster, the panel, the position
5. Adjacent work worth watching: Peviani, Bassolino, Akselrod
6. Closing

Why this approach: The most “field-level” view. Good for positioning Baseworks relative to academic discourse without being competitive. Works well for an audience that already understands the field.

Best fit: Researchers and clinicians who attended the conference or follow the field. Less effective for general discovery.

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Recommendation

Option A or C, or a hybrid: anchor on the assessment gap (A’s sharpest argument), but include the panel/residential scientist observation at sufficient length that it gets its own section rather than a passing mention (C’s structure). This gives the post both a specific, searchable intellectual claim and a humanly legible explanation of why the work exists at all.

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12. Still Pending Before Drafting

1. ✓ Olaf Blanke transcript — COMPLETE (966 segments, good quality; saved to BRNet-2026-transcripts/)
2. ✓ Audio files archived to NAS — all five originals at synology:/volume1/baseworks/research/conferences/2026-06-brnet/audio/; external SSD is no longer the primary home
3. ✓ Transcript index created — BRNet-2026-transcripts/index.md with quality ratings and re-transcription instructions
4. asia-talking.MOV 02:26–05:08 — Welsh hallucination; recover with forced English re-run or Patrick fills in from memory
5. Read BRNet 2026 Abstract — 02-areas/method-admin/core/science-docs/conferences/BRNet 2026 Abstract.md — must read before drafting; also cross-reference each speaker’s abstract from the program booklet before citing any transcript content
6. Asia’s lecture notes — Asia took her own notes for each session; she will feed these in when she joins the collaboration. These are the most important supplement for the partial/poor-quality transcripts (Saramandi, Vercelli, Feusner). Do not draft the speaker-by-speaker field observations section until Asia’s notes are in.
7. Patrick + Asia choose post approach — see section 11 (recommendation: A or A+C hybrid)
8. Create draft file — 02-areas/website/communications/2026-06-brnet.md
9. Write draft — incorporating all source material
10. Asia collaboration pass — Asia to review and add input; her notes on each talk will significantly enrich the field observations

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13. Key Terminology Reminders

• Forms, not exercises, movements, or postures
• Practitioners, not students
• Practice, not training or workout
• Baseworks Practice (capital P always when combined)
• Instructors / facilitators, not teachers
• Body representation components per taxonomy: verify exact names in 02-areas/method-admin/core/taxonomy.md before using abbreviations
• Poster title (exact): “Three Trainable Components of Body Representation: Evidence from a Decade of Naturalistic Perceptual Skills Training”
• No em dashes in body copy — use comma, period, colon, or restructure
• No exclamation marks in professional contexts