I was researching use of hand gestures while speaking and came across this term, embodied cognition. Many of the online descriptions and examples I saw appear to clash or come across as very vague and obtuse. The term is also used in cognitive learning, philosophy, and psychology, which might lend to semantic differences in use. What I thought to be simply something like, “people express their thought patterns through physical presentation” has now left me lost and confused. Also, why do thinkers speak of it as though it were particularly novel? What implications does this show that is worthy of such outlying focus? Edit: basically, what does it mean and why do people talk about it like it’s a big deal?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition
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>”people express their thought patterns through physical presentation” has now left me lost and confused. Also, why do thinkers speak of it as though it were particularly novel?
The novel part, and the main “point” of embodied cognition is the idea that the cause and effect can go the other way: You’re not just expressing your thoughts with physical movements, your physical movements can influence and *create* your thought patterns.
A simple example is an experiment in which an experimental group had to force themselves to smile several times. Like, nothing was done to make them actually happy, they just had to physically move their face into the shape of a smile. Later, when asked to rate their moods, the people who had forced their faces into a smiling expression rated themselves as actually *being* happier than a control group that hadn’t been smiling. The “embodied cognition” interpretation of this data was that the brain, when asked about its mood, doesn’t actually know – it has to check with the body, sees that the body is doing a happy action (smiling) and then concludes “we must be happy”.
That’s the core of “embodied cognition”, the relatively new idea that your body might not just be expressing your brain’s thoughts, it might actually be “*doing* (some of) the thinking” and your brain just “relays” the info.
That’s what it’s getting at on the page you linked where it says:
>Proponents of the embodied cognition thesis emphasize **the** ***active*** **and significant role the body plays in the** ***shaping*** **of cognition** and in the understanding of an agent’s mind
Source: University minor in Brain and Cognition Neuroscience.
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