These models are obviously incomplete. They may be accurate as far as they go, but they could go farther. They should include hands, as well as feet, not as mere “motor processors,” but in a deeper way, and for a simpler reason—we had bodies long before we had computers, or calculators, or even language. Our evolutionary past is rooted in a spatial experience of the world. We move through the world and pick things up and turn our heads. To be alive is to be in motion. So it’s not unreasonable to suspect that cognitive models which ignore, or downplay, the relationship between body and mind are missing something—something vital.
What might this mean for how we understand information? In the Stratton effect, moving the body was needed for the brain to resolve the distortions created by the upside-down lenses. That finding provides us with a clue. Another clue comes from basketball. A group of Italian researchers recorded professional basketball players shooting free throws, and then asked people to watch the video and predict if the ball would go through the hoop or not.10 They asked three groups of people to watch the videos: professional basketball players (expert players), professional basketball coaches and reporters (expert watchers), and students with no experience playing basketball (novice watchers). The researchers stopped the video at different stages of the shot, from when the player was preparing to shoot, to just before the ball reached the hoop. At each stage, people were asked to make their prediction.
As you would expect, predictions got better the closer the ball was to the basket. And as you would also expect, the farther the ball was from the basket, the worse the predictions were, especially for novice watchers. The interesting finding was that expert players, who had the most experience shooting baskets, were surprisingly accurate when making predictions before the ball was released. When the video was stopped just before the ball left the shooter’s hand, expert players were right as much as 60 percent of the time. Shooting free throws again and again, over many years, changed the player’s ability to interpret, make sense of, and extrapolate from visual information. Here, too, as with the Stratton effect, we have a case where action shapes our ability to understand information.
Let’s consider an example from something unlike basketball, something where we don’t expect the body to play any role at all in how we understand information: politics. Dutch researchers wondered if the spatial metaphor of politics—left-wing and right-wing—was more than just a metaphor.11 They gave volunteers a series of generic political statements, such as “rules regarding road safety should be tightened” and “the number of available rental homes should increase gradually.” The volunteers were asked to associate each statement with one of the ten political parties in the Dutch House of Representatives, some on the left and others on the right. The twist? They did this standing on a Wii balance board. Before answering the questions, each volunteer went through a process to level the board, but unbeknownst to them, the calibration process tilted the board slightly, yet undetectably, to one side. When the board was tilted left, people were more likely to rate statements such as “more money should become available to caregivers” as a left-wing position, but if the board tilted right they rated it as more right-wing. The effect wasn’t enormous, but it was measurable and consistent and statistically significant across all the statements, even when the researchers accounted for pre-existing political opinions and affiliations.
In the basketball study, prior physical experience improved the ability to make predictions from visual information. In the balance board study, the finding was that physical states of the body could influence conceptual states of the mind. We don’t perceive information from the world in a clean, unbiased way. Instead, our perceptions are modified and transformed by and through our bodies. This kind of finding has popped up on all kinds of studies. For example, researchers have also found that coffee can influence how you feel about other people. When volunteers were asked to judge another person’s warmth and friendliness, their rating depended on coffee. When people in the study held a cup of hot coffee, they judged other people to be warmer: more generous, more caring, and friendlier. When the cup was full of iced coffee, they rated people as cooler and less welcoming.12
The clothes you wear can make a difference, too. In one experiment, people who wore lab coats paid more attention to their work and made about half as many mistakes when compared with people who wore their own clothes.13 Lab coats are worn by scientists, doctors, and lab technicians—people who cannot afford to be sloppy or lazy in the work. Just wearing a lab coat was enough to make people more attentive. We often wear clothing for the effect it will have on others. Consider how the uniforms of police, judges, and priests serve as useful cues on how to behave. We wear uniforms because they have an outward effect, one directed at the people around us. Yet here we have studies showing that clothes, balance boards, and steaming cups of coffee have inward-facing consequences, too, not only for how we feel, but also for how we think.
Or step away from the lab and reflect on situations from everyday life. Why, for example, do we pick up and rotate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, testing them in various holes? If perception is merely input, and the brain is so impressive, why don’t we just look at the pieces, rotate them in our brain, and then plop them into place? When making pancake batter, why do we mutter aloud while counting out the four cups of flour? Why do we often use paper and pencil, or a calculator, even for modest math problems? Or what about this one: Why do we talk with our hands even when we’re on the phone and nobody is there to see our hands waving about? Again and again, close examination of everyday behavior reveals that we consistently interact with the world in seemingly superfluous ways. Why not just pause, perceive, ponder, and then act? We are not—as a brain-centric model would suggest—“thinking, then doing.” Rather, we are “thinking through doing.”
The assumptions of behaviorism meant that, eventually, it was forced to give way to the computational theory of mind. Now the assumptions of the computational theory are, in turn, leading to a new way of understanding how the mind works.
The Embodied Mind
Taken together, the studies just mentioned, and thousands more, are the basis for a new view of the mind called embodied cognition. Evidence for this view, which is commonly referred to as just embodiment, has been building for decades and is considered “the most exciting idea in cognitive science right now.”14
Embodiment proposes a theory of mind that, at its most broad and blunt, says simply this: Descartes was wrong. René Descartes, you may recall, was a 17th century French philosopher who introduced the idea of mind-body dualism, distilled most famously in his dictum, Ego cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). Everything in the world was made of physical matter, Descartes observed, but the mind was different. You can’t ever point to something and say “that is a mind.” As a result, Descartes reasoned, the body was made of flesh and blood and was part of the world, but the mind was not.15 With this proposition, Descartes changed the course of Western philosophical and scientific thought.
Embodiment is a counterargument to four centuries of mind-body dualism. It contends that we cannot explain the human experience if we have cleaved mind from body, perception from cognition, and action from understanding. We must stitch together what Descartes pulled apart. The psychologist Arthur Glenberg summarizes the embodiment perspective this way: “All approaches to embodiment agree that behavior is produced by more than a disembodied Cartesian mind manipulating symbols according to rules. In other words, embodiment is in strong contrast to cognitive psychology as developed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.”16 The computational theory of mind has produced decades of solid science. The embodied theory of mind says, hold on, that isn’t the whole story.
From Brainbound Minds to Extended Minds
To reconcile these two views, let’s turn to the cognitive philosopher Andy Clark, who has proposed two opposing models of human
