Embodied Cognition Puns

Embodied cognition was always one of my favorite areas to learn about in my cognitive science classes, but I never got the opportunity to learn more. Now that I’ve graduated, I have some more time to learn on my own. Anyone have any good book suggestions on embodied cognition?

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Hello all! I've recently become quite interested in embodied cognition, and have been reading as much as I can get my hands on. I've always been interested in ideas like how exercise might enhance cognition, and how what to me is clearly an aspect of intelligence can be expressed via movement. I'm wondering if anyone happens to know of any people/labs/companies that are working on problems in this area. As it relates to this I'm particularly interested in whether or not practiced movement can enhance intelligence (or cognition more generally) in humans/animals, and if so how this could help us build intelligence in machines.

As somewhat of an add-on in case people do open this up, does anyone know of any graduate degrees that focus equally on animal/human/machine intelligence? I've found it can be hard to find a program that attempts to cover all three and make connections amongst them.

Thanks for any thoughts! Much appreciated.

Hi,

Has anyone had experience with this subject? I'm taking this subject this semester. Any thoughts / comments / experiences are appreciated!

Thanks

If functionalism says that what's not important for cognition isn't the physical system per se, but the functional profiles that mental states have, then functionalism allows for two mental states with entirely different physical states to have the same functional profiles - me and a dog could both feel pain, even though the specifics of our neurology and nervous systems may differ physically. I think I've roughly understood that right, but please feel free to correct me if I'm missing something.

On the other hand though, embodied cognition seems to imply that the body IS important in giving rise to certain mental states. Empirical studies show for example that people who have botox in their faces to paralyse facial muscles report a lesser intensity of emotion, implying at least that the physical states are correlated strongly with the mental states they correspond with (or, if you're a direct social perception theorist, that the physical act of, say, smiling, partly constitutes the property of 'being happy', and so on). Other examples include phenomenological evidence for the lived body, like how we duck when we enter a room with a low doorway, or even physiological things like the way that we stand on two legs and have two forward facing eyes affects the way we conceptualise and interact with our environment..stereoscopic vision, for example.

Given these two different appraoches then, my question is this - if the physical body is important for embodied cognitivists, but for functionalists emphasise the functional roles that mental states occupy instead of focussing on the specific physical states that instantiate said mental states, then are functionalism and embodied cognition necessarily at odds with one another? Could there be a sort of compromised middle-path position between the two, or are they necessarily opposed and/or mutually exclusive?

I am trying to get my head around embodied cognition and have focused on Glenberg and Kaschaks 2002 study.

Am I right in thinking that an argument against embodied cognition is grounded cognition (ie. Barsalou 1999)?

- Also, in addition to Barsalou, I saw him in a YT video talk about how holding a warm drink can influence how you feel ie. cold = negative and warm = positive. However from my understanding of this idea, tested by (Williams & Barg, 2008) that their experiment testing this is not replicable?

I am very confused about this concept as I am supposed to replicate the glenberg study, but I don't know how to justify this as I don't know if grounded cognition is a good enough argument against this?

Thanks for any help, and sorry about formatting I wrote this in a hurry!

Reading Marshall McLuhan had led me to the theory of embodied cognition. I am curious if anyone else has made this connection.

In my research I try to uncover what media is by understanding the human senses, and how we perceive information. I believe this is what McLuhan intended with his works.

I'm not very familiar with philosophy of mind, but is embodied cognition something similar to Searle's response to computationalism that besides syntax, we still need an agent to interact with environment to generate semantics? I would also appreciate it if you could recommend some books about embodied cognition for starter, could be from any perspective, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience etc. Thanks!

I have a few free ebooks to give away! Message me if you’re interested.

It has to do with creating virtual humans and physical robots by capturing human behavior and putting it into a machine learning model. It's fundamentally an embodied cognition approach.

It’s written in the style of a noir techno-thriller, and features plot elements based on the following patents:

U.S. Patent 9,676,098 Data collection from living subjects and controlling an autonomous robot using the data

U.S. Patent 10,166,680 Autonomous robot using data captured from a living subject

U.S. Patent 10,195,738 Data collection from a subject using a sensor apparatus

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578715902

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My professor didn’t explain it, he just put up some words being unscrambled and I could not be more confused

Have you heard of so-called "embodied cognition"? We have maybe 100 billion neurons in our body, with about one tenth of those being outside of the brain itself. The brain doesn't do *all* the thinking. There are parts of ourselves outside the brain that *literally* think. They process information and send that information to the brain. They've done experiments where they entirely rebuild a person's gut bacteria and that person's personality will completely change. From aggressive jerk to quiet and thoughtful, for example. It's a fascinating phenomenon, and relevant to aspergians in how we keep up our mental health. Motion is not only good for you generally, it can also help to process thoughts in ways not possible with contemplation alone.

Embodied cognition:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-words/201202/embodied-cognition-what-it-is-why-its-important

To clarify the title, by "traditional" I mean what Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, and Extended Cognition (4E) proponents label "classical"/"cognitivist" approaches.

In the introduction to Philosophy in the Flesh, available here (NYT), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson promise to critique "Greek metaphysics, including the pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle; Descartes's theory of mind and Enlightenment faculty psychology; Kant's moral theory; and analytic philosophy" based on research findings summarized thus: "The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.”

The book is from 1999, which sounds old in cognitive-science years. Also, several reviews portray the book as interesting but under-developed and/or inadequately argued. Your reading list's section lists this book and some newer books.

Basically, do you think there is a book that is comparable in ambition - pursuing the above critique in as much detail - but better-argued and/or more up-to-date? Thank you.

P.S. Here are some of the pages that informed my preliminary impression:

*NYT review

*LessWrong review

*EDGE interview with Lakoff

*SEP on embodied cognition

*SciAm on embodied cognition

Past Reddit discussions:

*Philosophy in the Flesh - r/AskPhilosophy

*Opinions about 4E approaches in general - r/AskPhilosophy

*on Metaphors We Live By - Lakoff and Johnson's earlier book - r/Philosophy

*comment on embodied cognition - r/Philosophy

The concept of Embodied Cognition is built upon a decades-long branch of research into how human thinking and learning is rooted in the back-and-forth between the mind’s perceptions and the body’s physical interactions with the world around it. This involves a perception-action cycle in which human behaviors are the result of a series of adaptive motor responses to changes in both the external environment and internal motivations.

The body acts in response to perceptions which, in turn, create changes in the environment that are then perceived and drive further actions. This cycle continues again and again, with sensory and internal signals leading to actions, feedback, and more action. On and on it goes while -- all along the way -- the body is helping the mind learn, and vice versa.

Examples include counting on fingers, using physical and digital manipulatives and immersive VR environments (http://blog.mindresearch.org/blog/digital-manipulatives-infographic).

Do you use this in your math classroom? How?