This book explores how people's subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action provide part of the fundamental grounding for human cognition and language. Cognition is what occurs when the body engages the physical and cultural world and must be studied in terms of the dynamical interactions between people and the environment. Human language and thought emerge from recurring patterns of embodied activity that constrain ongoing intelligent behavior. We must not assume cognition to be purely internal, symbolic, computational, and disembodied, (...) but seek out the gross and detailed ways that language and thought are inextricably shaped by embodied action. Embodiment and Cognitive Science describes the abundance of empirical evidence from many disciplines, including work on perception, concepts, imagery and reasoning, language and communication, cognitive development, and emotions and consciousness, that support the idea that the mind is embodied. (shrink)

Recreative Minds develops a philosophical theory of imagination that draws upon the latest work in psychology. This theory illuminates the use of imagination in coming to terms with art, its role in enabling us to live as social beings, and the psychological consequences of disordered imagination. The authors offer a lucid exploration of a fascinating subject.

We demonstrate in two experiments that real and imagined body movements appropriate to metaphorical phrases facilitate people's immediate comprehension of these phrases. Participants first learned to make different body movements given specific cues. In two reading time studies, people were faster to understand a metaphorical phrase, such as push the argument, when they had previously just made an appropriate body action (e.g., a push movement) (Experiment 1), or imagined making a specific body movement (Experiment 2), than when they first made (...) a mismatching body action (e.g., a chewing movement) or no movement. These findings support the idea that appropriate body action, or even imagined action, enhances people's embodied, metaphorical construal of abstract concepts that are referred to in metaphorical phrases. (shrink)

Reexamines the Western philosophical tradition, looking at the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self.

Mark Johnson argues in favour of embodied experience as the basis for knowledge. An important implication of his analysis is that these experiences instigate pervasive metaphorical systems. Johnson 's argument involves reductionist problems, chicken-and-egg problems and, at times, unclear criteria for what counts as a basic experience and a metaphor.

Discusses the possibility of reconciling different articulations of intentionality from a neurobiological perspective. The author analyzes the relationship between agency and representation and how representation is intrinsically related to action control. The author also presents a new account of action, arguing against what is still commonly held as its proper definition, namely the final outcome of a cascade-like process that starts from the analysis of sensory data, incorporates the result of decision processes, and ends up with responses (actions) to externally-or (...) internally-generated stimuli. The author discusses recent findings from the investigation of neural mechanisms that are at the basis of sensorimotor integration. (shrink)