A placeholder post to “A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain,” a Scientific American guest blog post by Samuel McNerney. A direct challenge to Cartisean dualism, embodied cognition argues that not only shouldn’t we believe in a mind/body split, the way we think is structured by the fact that we exist within bodies and is metaphorical in nature. Or, as McNerney explains:

What exactly does this mean? It means that our cognition isn’t confined to our cortices. That is, our cognition is influenced, perhaps determined by, our experiences in the physical world. This is why we say that something is “over our heads” to express the idea that we do not understand; we are drawing upon the physical inability to not see something over our heads and the mental feeling of uncertainty. Or why we understand warmth with affection; as infants and children the subjective judgment of affection almost always corresponded with the sensation of warmth, thus giving way to metaphors such as “I’m warming up to her.”

The post is based upon an interview with George Lakoff, one of the founders of embodied cognition.

There’s nothing new here, at least to me, but I’m sharing this for those who aren’t familiar with embodied cognition and for me to make us of later. As I’ve mentioned many times here on Machina Memorialis, such as in”Conceptual Blending and Metaphor,” embodied cognition and its concepts such as conceptual blending are intimately tied to practices of memoria, the least of not which being the places and images mnemonic of memory palaces and other forms of architectural mnemonics.