Embodied Cognition Movement: What Is it and What Is Its Significance?

¶ … Cogition Movement The embodied cognition movement The embodied cognition movement: What is it and what is its significance? The embodied cognition movement in psychology and philosophy seeks to challenge the conventional ways in which the mind-body connection is viewed. "The kind of embodied cognition we advocate is the claim that the brain, while important, is not the only resource we have available to us to generate behaviour.

Instead, the form of our behaviour emerges from the real-time interaction between a nervous system in a body with particular capabilities and an environment that offers opportunities for behaviour and information about those opportunities" (Thompson 2012). Embodied cognition theory can thus be distinguished from previous movements in psychology such as psychoanalysis, with its tendency to emphasize the mind alone and behaviorism, which tends to emphasize the 'shaping' influences of stimuli in the environment upon the mind.

Advocates of embodied cognition theory, in other words, believe that the body has a kind of intelligence of its own: the body can pick up on subtle interpersonal and physical cues to ensure that a person stays in harmony with his or her environment. A good example of this is how a baseball player instinctively knows how to catch a ball or a gymnast knows how to redistribute her weight during a tumble.

This is not a form of classical conditioning but suggests body's physicality has an intelligence to it beyond that of conscious, designed movement and motion, almost like how an automated robot without a brain changes in relation to its environment: "He simply responds to the new force and the details are left up to his anatomy" (Thompson 2012). The implications of embodied cognition are important because they suggest that by changing the person's environment, the person can change in response to it (Thompson 2012).

Embodied cognition is also very different from the concept of genetics, or the idea that the genes we possess determine our behaviors. Instead, every person, regardless of his or her DNA, is in continual dialogue with the exterior surroundings. "Embodied cognition theorists contend that thought results from an organism's ability to act in its environment.

More precisely, what this means is that as an organism learns to control its own movements and perform certain actions, it develops an understanding of its own basic perceptual and motor-based abilities, which serve as an essential first step toward acquiring more complex cognitive processes, such as language" (Cowart 2015). These interactions with the environment, however, are far more subtle than those outlined by theorists of the behaviorist school of thought, who suggest that the actions of all human beings can be predicted based upon previous rewards and punishment.

For embodied cognition theorists, "the point is that an organism's knowledge of the world is primarily through its experiences within the world and these experiences are constrained by the types of functioning sensorimotor modalities it has" (Cowart 2015). Support for embodied cognition lies in the evidence that we are influenced by factors such as our ability to see, hear, feel, taste, and touch things. A person's different experiences in these realms leads them to perceive the world differently from someone who lacks such referents.

Experimental psychology yields some support for this hypothesis: for example, in one experiment simply being prompted to think about the future caused subjects to lean forward while thoughts about the past caused them to lean backwards; in another experiment "squeezing.