Mind in Body in Mind in Body…xin

People have long drawn a distinction between mind and body. A sense of free will, whether explicit or implied – “if I can think it, I can do it”  –  is too tempting to resist. This ‘mind-body’ duality is  misleading for it neglects to take biology in account for how we think. Of course that makes the ‘mind-body’ duality all the more tempting because it allows us to see ourselves in a superior light, i.e., we’re not mere animals, we’re sapient and thus ’superior’. The Chinese word Xin may offer a more accurate notion of mind and body. Xin (心) translates as: the heart; heart; mind; feeling; intention; centre; core. This blurs the distinction between heart and mind, feeling and thinking. Although, science is now the true force when it comes to debunking long held myths. It relentlessly peels away the ‘make up’ with which we love to adorn ourselves.

The following  research sounds like another small step  towards  taking the ’sapiens’ out of ‘homo’.  In other words, making cognition less exotic and ’superior’ than we idealize it to be.  It also puts another nail in the coffin of free will I expect, and brings us that much closer to full membership in the animal kingdom.

Body In Mind (for the full article)
For the past 30 years, standard theories of cognition have assumed that the brain creates abstract representations of knowledge, such as a word that represents a category of objects. This abstract knowledge gets filed in separate neural circuits, one devoted to understanding and using speech, for example, and another involved in discerning others’ thoughts and feelings. If that’s so, then cognition operates on a higher level apart from more mundane brain systems for perception, action and emotion. Mental life must occur in three discrete steps: Sense, think and then act.

The new approach, often called embodied or grounded cognition, turns standard thinking on its head. It argues that cognition is grounded in interactions among basic brain systems, including those for perception, action, memory, emotion, reward and goal management.

These systems increasingly coordinate their activity as an individual gains experience performing tasks jointly with other people. Complex thinking capacities—in particular, a feel for anticipating what’s about to happen in a situation—form out of these myriad interactions within and between individuals, somewhat like the novel products of chemical reactions.

In short, people often act in order to think and learn, using immediate feedback to adjust their behavior from one moment to the next.

According to this view, bodily states—say, smiling—stimulate related forms of cognition, such as feeling good or remembering a pleasant experience. Researchers emphasize that the ability to think about an observed action or event, such as a friend biting into a peach, stems from neural reenactments of one’s perceptual, motor and emotional states—biting into your own peach.

“It’s really through the body, and the dynamic coupling of neural systems for perception, action and introspection, that cognition emerges,” says developmental psychologist Linda Smith of Indiana University in Bloomington.