**4. The dialogic approach**

Communication is more than individual activation of the brain networks of the participants; it creates a dynamic seamless integration of speaker and listener. Any utterance in a dialog is completed, when it is "understood" by the listener; every comprehension entails a responsiveness attitude, and every utterance anticipates an answer [25].

A tension field penetrates communication partners. There is a continuous loop between the expectations as well as between the expectations about the expectations of the speaker and the listener that shapes communication and enables the prediction of classes of behavior [26]. The neural signature of this loop lies in the interaction between posterior and anterior brain networks [27].

Neural activations in speaker and listener are correlated. To capture this interdependency, the method of hyperscanning has been developed, whereby neural activations of communicating partners are recorded simultaneously. Hyperscanning experiments provide evidence that behavioral synchrony and turn-taking are accompanied by brain oscillatory couplings [28].

Meaning is, therefore, not only determined by the activation of the speaker's and listener's simulators, but also created and modified through the situative coupling in a communication act. Verbal exchange and the resulting synchronized activations in the brains of speaker and listener cannot be reconstructed by integrating the isolated individual activations [29]. There is something more: mutual tuning creates a field that co-determines meaning. This includes both the loop of expectations and extralinguistic dimensions of the experienced situation.

Volosinov [30] gives an example of two men, who are in a context of a lingering winter and the start of a new snowfall. One of them says "well" and the other does not answer. The meaning of "well" in this dialog, followed by the silence, is an "agreement" between the participants that they were tired from a long winter and disappointed that the spring did not start. Silence is not devoid of meaning; it is a dialogic move.

*"Hence the movement from silence to speech is not a movement from nothing to something, from non-meaning to meaning. The silence that precedes and surrounds speech is not a void, but a silence with a promise of speech, a silence pregnant with meaning, like a pause in a conversation, or the gap between each ring of the telephone." ([31], p. 51)*

The carrier of meaning is the voice.

*"A voice carries the speaking subject out of himself, decentering and orienting him toward the other(s) (both face to face, and general social others), supporting and leading the contact. What a voice carries and expresses at the same time is that the utterance is as well "mine" as "other's."" ([32], p. 45)*

The voice is also bodily anchored and resonates in the listener, leading to activations in core mentalizing brain areas showing strong functional connectivity with mirror neurons [33].

In every dialog, there are not only the voices of the communicating partners but also the silent voices from others not present, such as

*"… absent friends, deceased or departed parents, associates from work, sleeping children, and the ghosts and echoes of other conversations past and imagined. Even these voices are the product of yet others, the whole polyphony linking the past to the present to the future, and the culture to the individual in a kaleidoscope of what Bakhtin called "unfinalisable" dialogue." ([34], p. 776)*

These imagined interactions form an inner dialog with others, leading to a dialogic self [35]. In contrast to the rationalistic self, the dialogic self can change its stance among different and even antagonizing voices creating dialogical relations between them. Meaning always includes an intrinsic relation to autonoesis [36], meaning is meaning for me. Soliloquy plays—in contrast to the dualistic approach a significant role in the formation of meaning. Linguistic social exchanges are transformed into an internalized "conversation" with the self [37]. Both inner and overt speeches activate similar brain areas. Neuroscience experiments have shown that inner speech is a simulation of speech, including motor planning, but excluding motor execution [38]. The dialogic self creates an autobiographic narrative in dialog with significant others [39].

Meaning is constituted and reconstituted from the resonance of the outer and inner voices of the participants and includes a verbal, a situational and an autonoetic dimension. In the example from Volosinov above, the meaning of "well" in the specific communication act emerges as a Gestalt that balances the mutually experienced situation with the autonoetic voices of the two men; it exists, as such, in *two* brains and it is not a superposition of two individual meanings. Interbrain synchronization goes beyond entrainment to the audio envelope and involves direct mutual interaction between the brains of the speaker and listener [40]. This joint experience is then recorded individually as a neural sedimentation.

Recurrent dialogic encounters with significant others result to an entanglement of the voices of the participants, unfolding a dialogic space of open-ended dialogs that codetermine meaning and the autobiographic narrative. The participating voices complement each other, and this complementarity creates meaning from situated experiences for the dialogic self.

Autonoetic exploration of the dialogic space determines and redetermines a *positioning*, an existential point of view that enables the interpretation of lived experiences and their coordination with an evolving autobiographic plot. Positioning creates a semiotic niche for autobiographic narratives and as such for Dasein: "a reader of its own existence" [41].

In every utterance several voices are floating, some are speaking for one positioning, some for another and some for two or more positioning. Voices are fluctuating along two dimensions: (1) overlapping or conflicting semiotic positions and

(2) intensity. The degree of conformity or conflict to a certain semiotic position creates a conformity horizon, while the intensity of a voice an intensity horizon. Dominant voices possess a high degree of conformity and intensity and suppress less audible voices but suppressed voices can come back and challenge dominant ones.

Meaning from a dialogic point of view emerges as a Gestalt that balances the positioning with the positioning of the other through interbrain synchronization, leading to an interpretation of the experienced situation and to an evolution of the dialogic space, which in turn leads to an evolution of positioning. Meaning is, therefore, both actively co-constituted during communication and always intrinsically coupled to existential positioning of the dialogic self. Starting from an analysis of communication acts as experienced, dialogism dives deeper into the meaningmaking phenomenon.
