Thinking with the body (embodied cognition): how do we think?

From the "I think, therefore I am" of Rene Descartes it has rained a lot, and yet his way of understanding the human being seems to have clung to the history of thought.

The approach body - mind What Descartes helped 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 explaining the cognition and thinking character of the human being.

Embodied Cognition or thinking with the body

Hence, some lines of research attempt to search inside the skull for the root causes of human behavior by appealing to neural components smaller and smaller in an infinite progression often referred to as reductionism.

However, this brain-centered conception of thought has come up with a rival. The idea of embodied cognition, which could be translated as "cognition in the body" or "thinking with the body", emphasizes the coexistence between cognition and bodily functions, two elements that merge and whose relationship goes far beyond the simple recipient scheme - contents.

Breaking barriers

While a dualistic model would advocate the separation of duties between a central executive in charge of cognition and located in the brain, and some pathways of entry and output of data contributed by the body, the hypotheses arising from the embodied cognition emphasize the dialectical and dynamic character that is established between many components of the body (including here the brain) at the time of remembering, judging, making decisions, reasoning, etc. From this current it is pointed out how impractical it is to distinguish 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 through the rest of the body and takes the reins of the situation when this stage has already past.

The stream of embodied cognition (thinking with the body) has experiments in its favor. On a Yale University study, for example, it showed to what extent the application of irrational criteria linked to the most primary sensory perceptions can influence our most 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 her a cup of coffee while she wrote down her names.

In some cases, the coffee was hot; in others, it contained ice. Once in the laboratory, each of the participants was asked to make a character description of an unknown person. The people who held the hot cup tended to speak of the stranger as someone close, friendly, and older. Confidence compared to the descriptions of the "cold coffee" group whose descriptions pointed toward the characteristics contrary.

There are other examples of how physical dispositions that theoretically only concern the body receptors at the most primary levels affect the most abstract cognitive processes, which 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 the generation random number of numbers: eye movement to the right is associated with imagining larger numbers, and when reverse). Less recently, for example, we count the investigations of Gordon H. Bower on the link between emotions and memory.

Beyond the scientific field, we could talk about how popular knowledge links certain life habits and dispositions of the body 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 quite reminiscent of David hume.

Matryoshka dolls

The dualistic perspective is nice when it comes to being thought, because it distinguishes between agents with very specific tasks who cooperate to obtain results. However, any display of which variables for which the body should be a buffer does not only affect cognition, but modulate it, it is potentially heretical for this conception of man.

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