Thinking with the body: embodied cognition

Our body thinks more than we would have imagined.

A lot has happened since René Descartes' "I think, therefore I am", and yet his way of understanding the human being seems to have clung to the history of thought.

The body-mind body-mind that Descartes helped to project into the Age of Reason has created a very fertile dualistic tradition in which both psychology and neuroscience have participated. Today it is still common to establish a distinction between brain and body, at least when it comes to explaining cognition and the thinking character of human beings.

Embodied Cognition or thinking with the body

Hence, some lines of research attempt to search inside the skull for the primary causes of human behavior by appealing to neural components components in an infinite progression that is usually called reductionism. reductionism.

However, a rival has emerged to this cerebrocentric conception of thought. The idea of embodied cognitionwhich could be translated as "cognition in the body" or "thinking with the body", emphasizes the coexistence of cognition and bodily functions, two elements that merge and whose relationship goes far beyond the simple container-content scheme.

Breaking down barriers

Whereas a dualistic model would advocate the separation of functions between a central executive in charge of cognition and located in the brain, and data input and output pathways provided by the body, the hypotheses arising from embodied cognition emphasize the dialectical and dynamic nature of cognition. dialectical and dynamic character that is established between many components of the body (including the brain) when remembering, judging, making decisions, reasoning, etc. This current points out the impracticality of distinguishing between a body that sends and receives information to the brain and is a passive agent while the brain processes the data, and a brain that is a passive agent while its orders spread throughout the rest of the body and takes control of the situation when this stage has already passed.

The current of embodied cognition (thinking with the body) has experiments in its favor. In a study at Yale University, for example, it was shown to what extent the application of irrational criteria linked to the most primary sensory perceptions can influence our more abstract categorizations.. The experiment began by asking the experimental subjects to go to a laboratory located on a fourth floor. In the elevator, a researcher asked each of the people participating in the study to hold a cup of coffee while she wrote down their names.

In some cases, the coffee was hot; in others, it contained ice. Once in the laboratory, each participant was asked to give a description of the character of an unknown person. The people who held the hot cup tended to speak of the unfamiliar person as close, friendly, and more trustworthy compared to the descriptions of the "cold coffee" group whose descriptions pointed toward the opposite characteristics.

There are other examples of how physical dispositions that theoretically only concern bodily receptors at the most primitive levels bodily receptors at the most primal levels affect the more abstract cognitive processes, which according to the dualist conceptionwhich according to the dualistic conception are monopolized by agents located in the cerebral cortex. Mark Yates is studying how the simple act of moving the eyes creates response patterns in random number generation: eye movement to the right is associated with imagining larger numbers, and vice versa). Less recently, for example, we have Gordon H. Bower's research on the link between emotions and memory.

Beyond the scientific realm, we could talk about how popular knowledge links certain life habits and body dispositions with certain cognitive styles. We can also admit that the idea of the formation of one or other abstract categories of thought from sensible impressions is rather reminiscent of David Hume.

Matryoshka dolls

The dualistic perspective is nice to think about, because it distinguishes between agents with very specific tasks that cooperate to obtain results. However, any demonstration that variables for which the body should be a buffer not only affect cognition, but modulate it, is potentially heretical to this conception of man.

Not only because it shows to what extent the two parts are related, but because, in fact, it forces us to rethink the extent to which it is right to continue to believe in the distinction between perceptual and rational units. Any explanation of human behavior that needs to appeal to a brain that gives orders unilaterally is throwing balls out of the window on a fundamental issue: Who gives orders to the brain? Who watches the watchmen?