7

THE EMBODIED MIND

MIND, n. a mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

Ambrose Bierce

At the end of the previous chapter, we had already started to look at the way the body affects mental performance – especially the way we use the lessons of experience to guide new choices and decisions. In this chapter we will delve into these kinds of effects in more depth. I will show that what we have traditionally thought of as the hallmarks of truly human intelligence also rely absolutely on events and processes in the body.

Human intelligence is traditionally associated most strongly with activities that possess some or all of the following characteristics. They are articulate: that is, they involve the use of language and/or other kinds of symbols such as mathematical or scientific. Second, they are abstract: they involve concepts that are less closely or less obviously tied to concrete experience. Third, they are rational: they involve processes of reasoning or analysis whose validity can be checked by other people. Fourth, they are conscious and deliberate: that is, they seem to take place in the well-lit workroom of consciousness under the control of the internal thinker or critic. Fifth, they are likely to feel effortful, rather than smooth and automatic.

The key question is: how much can we attribute these more intellectual abilities to the workings of the body? The Cartesian answer was: not at all. The science of embodiment offers two alternatives to the Cartesian view: a radical one and a moderate one. The radical view denies that ‘mind’ (in the sense of ‘the organ of intelligence’) is anything other than body. If we understand body well enough, the need for frameworks and languages that appeal to disembodied mental processes disappears. (Philosophers call this view eliminative materialism.) The more moderate view – which is the one I shall draw on here – would agree with Descartes that ‘mind’ in the sense of consciousness is pretty mysterious, but that, however it arises, it is always the accompaniment of a bodily state which is the real workhorse of intelligent activity. Consciousness is not a ‘place’ where intelligent processes happen; it is a particularly odd effluvium of perfectly explicable, material processes in the body-brain.

The moderate view is perfectly happy to retain mind language as a convenient shorthand for talking about complex human processes and experiences. As an analogy, you could, if really pushed, try to unpack the knowledge of biology in terms of the language of subatomic physics. You could. But most of what is interesting about botany and zoology, or even genetics, would be impossibly cumbersome to talk about if all you were allowed to use were terms like quark and lepton and ‘the weak nuclear force’. The same, says the moderate view, applies to body-talk and mind-talk. Some of what is interesting about us humans can be well talked about in body terms, while other aspects are handled more elegantly by mind language. Mind language is particularly useful when we are talking about complex relationships within and between people, and the so-called ‘emergent properties’ that these relationships give rise to. We can happily – and quite legitimately – juggle the two languages as we try to find ways of talking about these interesting aspects of ourselves, without obliging ourselves to believe that there really are two quite different kinds of stuff. Let’s see how this perspective helps us answer our key question.

The mental distillery1

We saw earlier that the body-brain is a compulsive predictor. It is designed to use its experience to adjust its own behaviour, so that, if something happens that resembles something that has happened before, the system anticipates that similar consequences will follow. The system, in effect, asks: ‘If X was one of my current needs, and Y was the state of the world at the time, and I did Z, did Z work?’ Was there a beneficial effect on reducing my hunger, cooling me down, or getting my manuscript accepted? If there was, my body-brain will adjust the strength of the synapses involved so, next time X and Y co-occur, I’m more likely to do Z. If not, it will tinker with the links and the loops so that I’ll try something different next time. If these antibodies were effective at neutralising this kind of virus, I’ll make more of them, so next time I’ll be better prepared. If you smiled back and held me softly when I smiled at you, I’ll smile at you again next time.

To do this, the body-brain system has to create generalisations or abstractions. Imagine a whole lot of people trying to draw freehand circles (of approximately the same size) on transparent sheets. They would all be different. But stack them up on top of each other and look through them, and the overlaps reinforce each other and stand out, while the random variations disappear into a grey background. That’s what the nerves and chemicals of the body-brain are doing all the time. So ‘Timmy here now’ is a single sketch (of next door’s cat); but a whole lot of ‘Timmy here now’ impressions will blend into a more general circuit signifying ‘Timmy’. Timmy isn’t a thing; it’s an abstraction that allows prediction. And ‘Cat’ is the distillation of a whole lot of Timmys and Tiddles, and ‘Animal’ is the distillation of the whole lot of cats, dogs, horses, tigers and so on that I have experienced or seen pictures of in books and on a screen. If I only ever see Timmy in my front garden, the distilled circuitry will correspond to ‘Timmy in the garden’ – and I will have trouble recognising him if he turns up at kindergarten. If I pick up from my mother a fear of cats, every time Timmy comes round, my registered pattern will be ‘Timmy + Be Scared’. Be Scared will be, in Damasio’s terms, Timmy’s ‘somatic marker’. The important point here is that even ‘Timmy’, solid and furry though he is, is an abstraction from experience. There is no abrupt hiatus between ‘concrete things’ and ‘abstract concepts’.

Some of this developing circuitry represents generalised scripts or scenarios for dealing with recurring situations, like the ‘getting up and going to work’ script, or the ‘how to behave and what to expect in a restaurant’ scenario. The scripts and scenarios link together sets of motor habits, perceptual predictions and feelings of value or utility, across widely distributed areas of the brain, so that when one part of the circuit is triggered (by noticing an inviting-looking restaurant, for example) a whole set of appropriate responses are primed and ready to go. You expect to get a menu; food to appear within a certain time period; the waiter to be friendly but not to invite himself back to your place for the night; money to change hands at the end of the meal; and so on. (Any of these expectations could be violated, of course, but in general the script helps life to run smoothly.) The restaurant scenario overlaps with the ‘going round to friends for dinner’ scenario and draws on many of the same skills and sub-routines, but the ‘package’ is distinct. (There would be trouble if you sent your plate back, or tried to tip your hostess as you left. I have a friend who was quite discombobulated by once being asked to write something in a ‘Comments’ book after dinner at a work colleague’s house!)

Some circuits distil out a perceptual core of objects that recur across different scenarios, and attach to them a variety of behavioural options. Next door’s cat shows up at a variety of times and places, but ‘Timmy’ is defined centrally by his size, tabby fur, distinctive mew and tendency to bite you if you tickle his tummy, and on this core I hang a variety of action options. I can stroke him, chase him, tease him, talk to him or offer him some elderflower cordial (in a spirit of enquiry), depending on my mood. These types of core are often called concepts. If a concept has one habitual ‘use’, then whenever I come across an example of it, my circuitry will automatically prime the relevant motor programs. If I see a ‘stapler’, I get ready to staple; if I see a ‘beach’, I get ready to roll out my towel and test the temperature of the water.2

As I learn, my body-brain distils thousands of these abstractions, and we can imagine a number of strata emerging in the memory-laden circuitry of the body-brain. At the bottom are the millions of individual momentary impressions, each one a unique constellation of perception, action and concern. Call it the Impression Bank (or, as I think of it more informally, the Compost Heap). Out of the Impression Bank, through some automatic processes of statistical aggregation, emerges a host of increasingly abstract abstractions which enable me to navigate ever more successfully through the world. Given a new scene, and a recurrent intention, I (hopefully) get better and better at making the right move – one that makes progress towards a looked-for benefit. If I’m a jazz saxophonist, I get better at improvising riffs that satisfyingly express my mood while staying true to the title and motif of the piece. If I am a trader in financial derivatives, I get better at drawing on all my experience to guide me towards the risk worth taking, and away from the risk driven by a rush of testosterone.3

We could imagine the concepts arranging themselves according to various dimensions of similarity into an expanding atlas of maps. Call these the Concept Maps, in which ‘cats’ and ‘dogs’ are closer together than ‘pet mice’ and ‘dinosaurs’, and ‘animals’ includes all of those, but not Mum and Dad or me. In neural terms, this map stretches forwards along the underside of the brain from the back to the front.

A complementary set of abstractions is a compendium of skilled motor programs, somewhat decoupled from the particular concepts with which they were originally associated, arranging themselves into a variety of Habit Maps. As a skill or habit is found to recur across different scenarios, that skilful core becomes increasingly disembedded from any particular setting. It develops a wider sphere of utility, we might say. Instead of being arranged according to similarities between object concepts, this map groups together skills that are alike in their actions: skating is closer to rollerblading than it is to plaiting hair or writing an essay. The habit maps develop along the top or dorsal pathways of the brain through the parietal lobe to the motor and premotor areas.

There is another kind of abstraction that distils out our visceral reactions to otherwise disparate events. We might call this set of visceral abstractions the Values Map, perhaps. Values Maps retain and highlight the emotional or somatic tone that the original experiences had in common. So we can develop concepts that separate out ‘fair’ from ‘unfair’, ‘safe’ from ‘dangerous’, ‘kind’ from ‘unkind’ or ‘reliable’ from ‘untrustworthy’. There is research to suggest that these visceral echoes underpin what we usually consider to be our more abstract concepts. It is not that these concepts are nebulous or ethereal; it is just that they embody a feeling connection rather than a perceptual similarity or a common way of engaging. Out of experiences that involve me being treated fairly or unfairly begins a distillation process that will end up as the abstract concept we know as Justice. Out of a whole range of experiences that involve my being rescued and comforted emerges a core element of Love. Out of the sadness and anxiety that came from experiences of being let down or betrayed may emerge the underpinnings of abstract ideas like Loyalty or Trust.

Doubt, for example, is normally taken to be a rather abstract idea, implying a lack of belief or agreement. But it is also a vividly embodied experience of hesitation, arrested progress, bodily tension, frustration, and anxiety perhaps, which can be felt in the stomach, the pattern of breathing, a furrowing of brows, a pursing of lips or a quizzical cocking of the head. If someone asked you to mime doubt, I don’t think you would find it hard.4 And you would recognise that feeling when someone makes a good challenge to a cherished point of view, when you are not sure how to resolve a conflict with your partner, or when you come to an impasse in a work-in-progress. Mark Johnson suggests that we may become more or less insensitive to such ‘cognitive emotions’, but that ‘once you start to pay attention to how you feel as you think, you will notice an entire submerged continent of feeling that supports, and is part of, your thoughts’.5

In support of this line of thought, a recent study has shown that some abstract concepts do indeed retain relatively more of their somatic savour than do more concrete ones. In an unusually well-controlled study, Gabriella Vigliocco, Stavroula-Thaleia Kousta and their colleagues found, contrary to expectations, that many abstract words were recognised faster than concrete words. We tend to think of abstract things as more difficult, but in this study they turned out not to be so. On closer inspection, they uncovered another surprise: that the reason for the quicker recognition of the abstract words was their greater emotionality. Of course, there are many different kinds of abstract concepts and some are indeed abstruse and bloodless. (I certainly don’t have much emotional resonance with some of the abstract things I learned at school like cosine or past participle – though I do recall the lovely images of a rather fearsome gerund (reproduced as Figure 9 below) from Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle’s 1954 book about school called How to Be Topp.)⁶ But Vigliocco’s list of abstract words included BARGAIN, BEAUTY, LUXURY, PROTEST and WELCOME, and you, like me, will probably have emotional reactions to all of these. Especially when we are learning new abstract words, their resonance with our own somatic concerns may provide the initial anchor-point in our minds, and this feeling-tone stays with it.⁷

Fig. 9 The gerund attacks some peaceful pronouns. From How to Be Topp by Geoffrey Willans, cartoon by Ronald Searle.

Real events always involve a mix of perceptions, actions and concerns, but these maps, with their different kinds of abstractions – concepts, habits and values – enable us to partially decouple those different elements. We become able to look at objects with a more dispassionate eye. We can wander round an art gallery just looking, without needing to do anything about what we see. We develop the ability to ponder on our feelings and motivations in the absence of immediate calls to action (as in a counselling session or a heart-to-heart conversation). We can act ‘for the joy of it’ without having to evaluate the consequences of our actions (as in unselfconscious dancing). We can explore or rehearse possible courses of action ‘off-line’, and run simulations of how we would feel under different conditions (and thus be more considered and more creative). So these different distillates of experience enable a wide variety of ‘higher’ forms of intelligence. The (partial, variable) ability to decouple perceiving from desiring, desiring from acting, and acting from perceiving brings added freedom – and added complexity. If it seems to us that the world is full of more or less neutral ‘objects’ (and people), with which we can engage in various ways, it is because that is one common way in which the body-brain separates out its facets and ingredients. But this is an acquired ability, I suspect, not a fundamental design feature of the body-brain-mind.

*****

Abstractions vary in degree, as well as in kind. Obviously, some of these abstractions retain a good deal of the original sensory and motor detail, as well as the visceral markers of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. ‘Timmy’ retains more of his concreteness than does ‘animal’. Other abstractions, like those thrice-distilled vodkas which claim proudly that they are so pure they taste of absolutely nothing, lose much of their sensory and their motor flavours and retain just the underlying essence of the relationships or structures that were common to different events – the concepts relationship, structure and event, for example. But it seems likely, from the research we will look at in a moment, that even quite abstract abstractions retain their connections with their bodily roots, and these roots are easily – maybe even automatically – recoverable.

We might imagine two kinds of connection that each concept potentially has: lateral ones, that embed it in a network of meanings ‘at its own level’, so to speak; and vertical ones, that enable it to reactivate – or be reactivated by – the concrete actions, feelings, images and impressions from which it may once have been distilled. There might be a host of factors that determine whether, in any particular case, those somatic roots will actually be revived – but they could be.

Language

At this point we need to draw language into the story. Imagine another layer of connections that overlies and links to the planes and maps we have introduced already. Let’s call it the Word-Scape. Words are ways of activating neural circuitry (and altering biochemical processes) through speech and writing. During the first year of their lives, children develop specialised circuitry for recognising and producing the sounds of the language in which they are immersed. Within the world of speech sounds, their powers of abstraction begin to pick out certain recurring sound shapes (called phonemes) and, guided by their parents, children learn to associate (groups of) these with objects and events that are being foregrounded for their attention. So the scenario associated with a toddler’s nightly bath, for example, now has new circuits added to it. There is the sight of a familiar smiling face, the pleasant feel of the warm water on her skin, the need to squash up her face to stop suds getting into her eyes, the behavioural rituals of splashing and being snuggled in a towel, the anticipation of being put to bed afterwards … and now there is another loop connecting that whole package to the sound pattern ‘bath’. When a one-year-old hears that sound, the rest of the package is primed in pleasurable anticipation.

Neuroimaging studies have shown that words like CHAIR (or BATH) are represented in the maturing brain not in some neat cortical dictionary, but in terms of widespread loops of interconnected neurons that knit together (a) the muscle patterns you use to say the word, (b) the perceptual processes you use to recognise it, (c) what most chairs have in common, (d) what various kinds of chair look like, (e) what you typically use them for, (f) how CHAIR relates to THRONE and HAMMOCK, and (g) some memories of special chairs (‘Granddad’s favourite armchair’) which you have personally encountered. Just seeing the word CHAIR primes the bits of the brain that control sitting down.

Having learned to map sounds on to articulatory movements, children can produce increasingly well-understood versions of these sound shapes for themselves, and thus discover the benefits of joining their linguistic community. Soon there will be another circuit, hooked into the BATH scenario, connected to a specific set of actions within the baby’s own chest, lungs, throat and mouth, that can result in an approximate utterance of ‘Bath!’, and a lot of satisfyingly proud attention from the adults around. A little later, the Word-Scape will begin to cluster into ‘thing-naming’, ‘action-naming’ and ‘want-naming’ words, and new frames (the beginnings of grammar) will enable the child to experiment with creating novel combinations of a Thing name, Action name and Want name – and see what happens. ‘More bath!’ ‘Katy bath!’ ‘No Katy – Daddy!!’ And so on.

To get a foothold in the child’s body-brain, words have to point to concepts, actions, feelings and scenarios that are already there. The game of using words to name, point and get others to follow orders is rapidly understood, and the child soon discovers that she can be both the agent and the recipient of these suggestions and injunctions. With the development of syntax, and an expanding vocabulary, however, she can be told about things and events that she has not yet experienced. Other people, through the medium of language, can start to shape and train the concepts to which her words originally applied. Words enable you to joint and assemble experiences in finer ways: not just a horse but a green horse; not just a lorry but a slow lorry. And so you can recombine the named features in new ways. Katy has seen, and named, her toys – a green horse and a pink tiger – and can now generate (and understand) a story about a pink horse. She has never seen a unicorn, but unicorns (and dragons and wizards) become conceivable.

So the Word-Scape begins to take on a life of its own, gradually detaching itself from its exclusive reliance on the experience-based abstractions formed automatically by the body-brain. It can incorporate distinctions made by the culture but not clearly marked in her own experience. At school, she will be told that Mum and Dad are animals and so is she, and she will protest that we aren’t, we’re people. As William James summed it up, in his own gloriously idiosyncratic language: ‘Out of this aboriginal sensible muchness, attention carves out objects, which conception then names and identifies for ever – in the sky “constellations”, on the earth “beach”, “sea”, “cliff”, “bushes”, “grass”’. Out of time we cut “days” and “nights”, “summers” and “winters”.’8 (I love the idea of the ‘aboriginal sensible muchness’, and I am glad we have plenty of it in England and don’t have to go to Australia for it.)

That’s a highly condensed overview of how abstract and linguistic concepts arise in the embodied body-brain. Obviously there aren’t separable ‘planes’ or ‘maps’ to be seen inside the skull. Distinctions are not so clear-cut, and they are all represented functionally, in the way electrical and chemical activity gets shunted around, not (or not much) in terms of structural architecture. But the sketch will give us something on which to hang the ensuing discussions of how embodied abstract cognition can be possible. The body is not only intelligent in its own right; it makes possible the psychological abilities to which the term ‘intelligence’ is more usually applied.

Metaphor

Reason has grown out of the sensory and motor systems of the brain, and it still uses those systems, or structures developed from them … The peculiar nature of our bodies shapes our very possibilities for conceptualisation.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson⁹

So, one way in which abstract concepts might be functionally grounded in bodily concerns and experiences is through their historical (but still potentially active) association with clear somatic markers of various kinds. ‘Injustice’ may make your blood boil; ‘vulnerability’ may be a characteristic that makes you feel warm and caring towards someone; and you may, in the words of singer Alison Moyet, literally become ‘weak in the presence of beauty’.

But there is another way in which this grounding can happen, and that is through metaphor. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have shown just how much of our apparently abstract language is metaphorically derived from the basic properties and experiences of the human body, and of our concrete experience. We have bodies that grow: we used to be small but now we are grown up we are bigger and taller. We use hands to grasp things and feet to kick. We fall over and skip along. We feel heat and cold, softness and roughness, and taste sweet food or smell bad odours. We physically travel through space and go on journeys; we leave things and places behind and arrive at destinations. We get in and out of cars and lifts. Sometimes we are close to home and sometimes far away.

All of these concrete, embodied actions and experiences get metaphorically co-opted by language to help us think and talk about more abstract things. As we grow older, so we know that ambitions grow; that a little money is small change, big issues are important and tall stories are not to be believed. We grasp arguments, kick habits and now and then feel down. We fall in love and skip the boring bits. We get into heated discussions and give people the cold shoulder. Planes (and economies) make soft landings and we have rough nights. People are sweet to us, but sometimes their ideas stink. We go on leave, put our troubles behind us and are destined for better things. We get into hot water and are out of luck. We feel (emotionally) close to people, but are far away in our own thoughts. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have charted exhaustively the extent to which all languages are saturated with what they call these ‘dead metaphors’. (OK, enough with the italics; you can add your own from here on.) We understand increasingly abstract ideas by raiding the vocabulary of the physical, and bending and combining literal meanings into new usages. And we do it all the time. We didn’t use to be able to use a mouse to scroll, or surf the net. Trolls used to live under bridges; they’re now more likely to be found in smelly bedrooms.

Historically, our abstract lexicon has grown over time by cannibalising more concrete images and experiences. Developmentally, children’s entry into their linguistic communities depends on their recapitulating the same process of abstraction and distillation (though much speeded up). But it remains an open question how far these connections remain active. It could be that, as Wittgenstein once suggested, we kick away the ladder after we have used it to climb up to more elevated conceptual planes. (I can feel those italics wanting to creep back …) It is possible that ‘justice’ and ‘gerund’ need concrete experience to get going but can then cut free. Whether they ‘cut the ties that bind’ or stay connected is an empirical question …

Body talk

Arthur Glenberg, head of the Embodied Cognition Lab at Arizona State University, has carried out a number of experiments to explore how much the body is routinely involved in the way we understand language. In earlier studies, he showed that the action that you use to signal your understanding of a sentence interacts with the meaning of the sentence. Suppose you are shown on a screen a number of sentences, and you have to respond one way if they are sensible and another if they are scrambled or nonsense. If it makes sense, Bill has to push a lever away from him, let’s say, while Ben, to indicate the same judgement, has to pull the lever towards him. What happens when the sentence is ‘Anna took the pizza from Jill’? The action of ‘taking’ implies drawing something towards you. Without making any conscious connection between the direction of the action depicted in the sentence and the direction of their response, Ben responds to the sentence significantly faster than Bill. If the sentence was ‘Anna gave the pizza to Jill’, Bill would be faster than Ben. When the action you have to make is compatible with the meaning of the sentence, you speed up. When it conflicts, you are slowed down. Even though the task does not ask you to act out the sentence, or do anything that depends on its meaning (other than move the lever), the motor circuits of the brain cannot help it – they automatically prime themselves to carry out the action described. Simply reading or hearing a word primes its habitual use – even if this use is not referred to or even implied in the sentence. If you read ‘Jane forgot the calculator’, your brain automatically readies itself to make the kind of movements involved in pressing keys. If you read (as you are now doing), ‘Mike spotted the kettle’, your brain quite involuntarily activates the gesture of grasping a handle.10

The same correspondence between word and brain applies to sensory as well as motor language. If you know the smell of cinnamon, just hearing the word (or reading it, as you just did) is sufficient to activate olfactory areas of the brain. Reading the word ‘telephone’ automatically rings bells in the auditory processing region of the temporal lobe. And so on. That automatic priming, says Glenberg, is part of what understanding language involves. There is an involuntary tendency for the activation caused by hearing or seeing the word to shoot back down the vertical links we talked about earlier, and prime the relevant physical associations – and vice versa.

In a well-known study by John Bargh and colleagues, people who had being doing a task that involved unscrambling sentences in which some of the words related to stereotypes of the elderly (grey, wrinkle, forgetful, etc.) actually walked more slowly down the hallway after the ‘experiment’ was over!11 You can show the same relation the other way round as well. If you electrically stimulate the part of the brain that controls leg movements (with a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, TMS) you will more quickly recognise the work ‘kick’ than the word ‘throw’. If you stimulate the hand regions, the difference is reversed. The Word-Scape, Concept Maps and Habit Maps seem compelled to share their activity with each other.

Well, you may not find that very surprising. After all, the sentences used in these two studies described concrete, physical movements, so it is plausible that there might have been some involuntary leakage between the language-processing bits of the brain and the corresponding motor-control bits. But suppose the sentences had been ‘Anna gave the plot away to Jill’, or ‘Jill took the news badly’. Here, the verbs give and take are being used metaphorically; nothing solid actually changes hands and there is no reason for the actors in the sentences to move anything but their mouths. Yet here too Glenberg found the same effects. ‘Giving away’ a plot twist or a punchline does not involve a physical action, yet our brains automatically fire up the circuitry that is involved in moving the hands away from the centre of the body.¹²

You see the same firing-up of the sensorimotor cortex when the critical verb does not even have a literal counterpart, as in ‘Anna delegated responsibility to Jill’, or ‘Molly told Patrick the story’. The brain representations of giving and taking are still activated. Glenberg suggests that, during childhood, we learn a variety of ‘action schemas’, such as giving and taking, that gradually become distilled by the brain into more abstract patterns such as ‘Source – Object – Recipient – Mode of Transfer’. He says: ‘Given that the action schema initially developed to control the arm and hand during literal, concrete transfer, when the action schema is contacted during the comprehension of abstract transfer sentences, areas of motor cortex controlling the hand also become active.’13 Yet again, by the way, we see the motor cortex getting in on the act of perception. We make sense of the world, even when it is rather abstract, by getting ready to act on it or interact with it. The sensori-motor part of the brain provided the original platform for the development of more abstract cognition and comprehension, and continues to do so throughout life.

If you look at the structure of the brain, you can see that the areas that are traditionally associated with understanding and producing language are intricately tied up with concrete actions. One of these is called Broca’s area, and neuroimaging studies have shown that, as well as its involvement in language production, Broca’s area is active when concrete actions are being observed, or even when they are being imagined. When Broca’s area is damaged, people lose the ability to construct grammatical sentences and their speech becomes cryptic and ‘telegraphic’. They also become unable to sequence musical tunes. It looks as if the ability to construct the complex sequences of grammar may well have piggybacked on a pre-existing brain area that performed the same choreography for non-verbal actions – and still does.¹⁴

How the body affects thinking

Our bodies do not just intrude on the way we understand and produce language. They influence our attempts to interact intelligently with the world around us. The interconnection of the abstract and the concrete reveals itself in how we behave, as well as in what is going on in our minds. We can change the way we think, feel and behave just by changing our posture or our breathing, for example. I can quickly make myself feel sad or frightened just by deliberately making deep sighs, or by breathing in a shallow, juddery sort of way. (If you have never tried this, have a go. It can be quite dramatic.) Intriguingly, a study from Turkey has shown that one important aspect of people’s intelligence as measured by a standard test (Cattell’s Culture Fair Intelligence Test) is significantly correlated with the depth of their normal (unselfconscious) breathing.15 Even more startling, another study has found that people make better choices when they are controlling the need to pee! The theory is that the exertion of self-control spills over (as it were) from the physical realm into the cognitive, and enables people to restrain their more impulsive sides.¹⁶

Telling people to adopt different postures has a rapid effect on their bodies and their minds. When people are induced to slump in their chair, they feel less pride in their performance; they think less carefully about problems; they take their own thoughts less seriously; and they show less resilience in the face of difficulty.¹⁷ Conversely, sitting up straight and crossing your arms makes you feel more stubborn. People with crossed arms persevered twice as long in solving anagram puzzles and were more successful than people with their arms by their sides.

Dana Carney and her colleagues had people adopt either a ‘high-power’ (relaxed, upright) or a ‘low-power’ (slumped, constricted) pose for two minutes. Then they took part in a gambling game where they could play either safe or risky. Of those who had been standing or sitting in the high-power posture 86 per cent took the risky bet; only 60 per cent of the low-power people did so. Deliberately adopting the posture makes that association come true. Carney showed that the posturing – only two minutes, remember – also affected hormone levels. In the confident posture, testosterone increased by 20 per cent and cortisol (the stress hormone) went down by 10 per cent. In the submissive pose, the reverse was true: testosterone went down by 25 per cent and cortisol up by 15 per cent. Postures are associated with more abstract personality traits such as confidence or timidity. There is a non-arbitrary relationship between the idea of standing upright, with its connotations of being tall, proud and unashamed, and the metaphorical idea of an upright or upstanding character. And, by the way, the magnitude of these effects is different for different people. Some people seem to have managed to disconnect their minds from their bodies more than others.18

An intriguing example of the way so-called higher faculties are linked to bodily processes comes from another recent study by John Bargh’s lab.¹⁹ They wondered if there was any truth in the old saying ‘Warm hands, warm heart’. Was there a real connection between physical warmth and the psychological state of feeling ‘warmly’ – i.e. friendly and trusting – towards another person? They had students do a product evaluation on either a warm or a cold therapeutic pad (the thing that athletes use for minor injuries), and then, for their help, they were given a small reward that they could choose either to keep for themselves or to give to a friend. The students who had handled the cold pad were three times more likely to keep the reward. Of those who had the warm pad, slightly more than half chose to pass the gift on to a friend.

The effect carried over into how warmly they rated another person’s character. After having been asked to briefly hold a hot cup of coffee for the experimenter while he made some notes, students judged a hypothetical character as more likely to be ‘warm and friendly’ than if they had held an iced coffee. In neither experiment were any of the students aware of the correlation between the physical temperature and their judgement and decisions. This crossover is found in real life, too: people who say they feel lonely take more warm baths and showers. And it also occurs in the reverse direction. People who have experienced being socially rejected rate the temperature of the room they are in as colder than do people who haven’t.

There is direct evidence that the physical and psychological judgements of warmth are processed by the same area of the brain – the insula again. In animals, the insula is clearly involved in processing both temperature and touch sensations. But in human beings, the same region has also been shown to underpin the sophisticated social emotions of trust and empathy on the one hand, and guilt and embarrassment on the other. The insula becomes more highly activated after experiences of social exclusion or rejection, for example. The structure that was designed to regulate bodily temperature now monitors the ‘social temperature’ as well. And it is not hard to imagine how and why this association might have come about. When we were babies, we (nearly) all experienced the physical warmth of our mother’s body as closely associated with the crucial primordial feelings of being loved and secure. Being comforted and reassured usually goes along with the experience of warm bodily contact and stroking. In Harry Harlow’s famous experiments in the 1950s, orphaned baby monkeys preferred to cling on to a dummy mother made of warm cloth than to the wire dummy that was actually the source of their milk. So we learn the metaphorical association between physical warmth and social warmth in our mother’s arms. That association gets welded into our brains – and it stays with us for life.20

New studies are being published every week that demonstrate this cross-talk between body, behaviour, feeling and thinking in a host of ways. We use the word burdensome to refer to something that is weighing heavily on our mind, or which we are finding hard to bear. So it should not surprise us to learn that people carrying what they feel to be burdensome secrets (for example, having had an affair) are less likely to volunteer to help you move boxes of books; and they rate carrying a bag of shopping upstairs as requiring more effort. We talk about washing our hands of responsibility – and sure enough, in what has come to be called the Pontius Pilate Effect, physically washing your hands does actually reduce how guilty you feel about some misdemeanour. And if you have to copy out a passage of text that you find distasteful, you subsequently rate a strange-tasting drink as more unpalatable. To emphasise the reliability of what we are saying, we may use the expression hand on heart and, yes indeed, if we are told to place a hand on our heart, we really do behave more honestly. People who have just come up an escalator give more generously to charity. People touched briefly on the back by an interviewer report having a reduced fear of death.

Mathematics

Doing mathematics is, without question, one of the ‘higher’ forms of human thinking: one of the accomplishments most associated with the Cartesian view of intelligence. Mathematics is a world of abstract entities that make patterns. Yet even here the body and the physical world cannot be ignored. Arithmetic abstracts the property of number – numerosity – from groups of real things, sets up basic rules for manipulating numbers, and then explores how this system of ideas behaves. Geometry deals with mythical beasts – lines that have no thickness but can go on for ever; points that have no size; angles that are perfectly ‘right’ – and uncovers, within this abstracted world, what ‘goes’ and what doesn’t. Algebra takes real objects and peels away everything about them except their very existence, and uncovers the lawful patterns you can make with xs and ys. Who would have thought that the area of a triangle was always half the base times the height – but it is. Who could possibly have imagined that, in Algebra Land, a single formula could tell you the value of x in any quadratic equation ax² + bx + c = 0? Remember this equation?

Abstract though mathematics is, like language, it has its roots in the mud of everyday embodied experience. One such root is counting. There is a region in the parietal cortex which, if damaged, results in acalculia, an inability to manipulate numbers and perform arithmetical computations. This region is intimately connected with the nearby map of the fingers, and George Lakoff and Raphael Núñez have argued that the superstructure of mathematics is indeed underpinned by the childhood foundation of counting on one’s fingers. Set theory and the use of Venn diagrams rely on the everyday experience of putting things inside other things. If I put some marbles in a cup, and then put the cup in a saucepan, the marbles are, visibly and tangibly, all inside the saucepan.

If I have two friends, Jack and Jill, and I know from the evidence of my senses that Jack is taller than me, and Jill is shorter than me, then I don’t need to be told that Jack is taller than Jill. All I need to be able to do, as children can at seven to eight years old, is see that I can replace ‘me’ with anybody – or with ‘x’ – and the same logic applies. By eight, I have become, without any training, an embodied logician. I have mastered what is called ‘transitive inference’. Through stories, children get used to talking and thinking about things they have never seen. Tell a six-year-old a story about ‘wuggles’, and she will very happily tell you that, if three wuggles meet up with two wuggles, they make a group of five wuggles – without having a clue what a wuggle is. (Though, interestingly, if you ask her to tell you what ‘three million’ added to ‘two million’ is, she probably won’t. Why? Because, she will tell you, ‘We haven’t done “millions” yet’. As they say, go figure.)21

When they meet arithmetic in school, children often get confused about the possibility of ‘negative numbers’, because their underlying embodied metaphor for adding and subtracting involves collections of things. Obviously you can’t have less than ‘no things’, so ‘7 – 4’ is perfectly OK – you are left with a smaller group – but ‘4 – 7’ makes no sense at all because how can you have ‘minus three things’? However, if your underlying metaphor for adding and subtracting is different – if it involves steps along a path – you will have a much easier time with negative numbers. If I walk four steps (from my starting point, or ‘origin’) to the right, and then seven steps to the left, I end up three steps to the left of where I started. That’s perfectly sensible – and you can even call it ‘minus 3’ if you want and I won’t mind.

A similar confusion underlies another common difficulty older students often encounter when they are being introduced to differential calculus. It involves how you (unconsciously, metaphorically) think about what a line is. One embodied idea is that a line is the trace left by a moving object – wheel tracks in soft ground, for example – or just a road. We say things like ‘The highway runs from Oxford to Banbury’ or ‘The path goes through Mr McGregor’s garden’. On this view, a ‘point’ is something additional to the line. It is ‘on’ the line, like a stone marker placed on the path. This is the intuitive view that most students have.

But there is another view, which sees the line as made up of points, like flagstones, or pixels perhaps. The line only looks continuous when the paviers are very small and close together. This is the view – technically called the Cauchy-Weierstrass definition of a line – that underpins the way most students are taught calculus. But they are not told that they will need to shift their ‘embodied metaphor’ for thinking about what a line is. They are told that the new view is more ‘rigorous’ or ‘formal’; not just different from their intuitive view but somehow ‘truer’. But because they continue to try to make sense of the idea of a differential in terms of the old metaphor, it doesn’t make sense.

Actually, it is worse than that, because the whole idea of space changes. In Calculus Land, space isn’t a continuous dynamic arena in which things happen (and leave traces); it is a static grid made up of numbers. Calculus turns space from geometry into arithmetic: ‘y = x²’ isn’t a track in a field; it’s a way of defining a very large set of pairs of numbers, x and y, that are linked by the rule. (I can still remember the confusion of trying to follow Mr Leonard’s attempts to explain that there were two points P and Q ‘vanishingly close together’ on a curve. The atmosphere was lightened for a class of teenage boys only by his insistence – I can’t now remember why – that ‘this point Q has a certain Q-ness about it, while the other point P retains its characteristic …’ You get the idea.) The point is: calculus is difficult precisely because it contradicts an unrecognised, but powerful, set of embodied assumptions; and this contradiction is not acknowledged and addressed because everyone is busy pretending that mathematics doesn’t have such underpinnings.22

Creativity and imagination

One last area of ‘higher mental processes’, in which body and mind are obviously linked, is imagination. Using our imagination to solve problems, fantasise possible futures, rehearse presentations or see other people’s point of view is clearly a valuable and highly intelligent asset. Scientists can show what is happening in the brain when we learn through imagination, and why. When we look at a situation ‘through other people’s eyes’ we know which bits of the brain become active; and people who have damage to those bits of the brain are unable to show empathy. (Remember the Botox experiment in the previous chapter.) When we mentally rehearse a skill, brain networks specific to that skill become active and are modified as a result. You can literally improve your physical strength just by imagining yourself exercising the relevant muscles.23 The potential of mental rehearsal in the context of practical learning has hardly begun to be tapped, yet it is clearly significant.²⁴

Creativity also relies on physical hunches and promptings. Albert Einstein famously described his creative thinking in a letter to fellow mathematician Jacques Hadamard, writing that

The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined … The above mentioned elements are, in my case of visual and some of a muscular type … Conventional words or other signs [presumably mathematical ones] have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the associative play already referred to is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.²⁵

(italics added)

People often get their best ideas when they are moving rhythmically or in very familiar ways. If you ask people ‘when they get their best thoughts’, they often say ‘in the shower’, ‘walking the dog’, ‘doing my lengths in the pool’, ‘driving to work’, and so on. There seems to be something about repetitive activity that puts the brain into a state conducive to creative thinking. Philosophers are known to jump up and pace about in the middle of a vigorous discussion. (My old college at Oxford even had a special woodland trail known as the Philosophers’ Walk.) Creative cognition often seems to work better when it is accompanied by some kinds of physical movement. My friend John Allpress, ex-Head of Youth Player Development at the English Football Association, says that footballers are often the kinds of people who ‘can only think when they are moving’. The same is often true of dancers.26

People actually become more creative when they are encouraged to pay attention to their bodies. Can you find the fourth word that links eight, stick and skate? These so-called ‘remote associates tests’ require you to access unlikely associates of each word until you find one that overlaps – and this ability is characteristic of creative solutions to more real-life problems. If you are told, ‘The best way to do this task is to go with your gut feeling’, you do better. Just this simple suggestion is enough to redirect your attention from more rational to more intuitive strategies. (You are also better at such creative problem-solving when you are slightly drunk, by the way, probably for the same reason.)²⁷ Adopting a facial expression or physical posture that is the opposite of how you are really feeling improves your creativity. The physical dissonance seems to help break mental assumptions.

*****

The embodied view opens up the radical possibility that all our mental functions and capabilities evolved out of this primarily somatic nature of the brain. Don Tucker makes the case strongly in his book Mind from Body: Experience from Neural Structure:

The brain evolved to regulate the motivational control of actions that are carried out by the motor systems and guided by sensory evaluations of ongoing environmental events. There are no faculties of memory, conscious perception or musical appreciation that float in the mental ether, separate from the bodily functions … [All] our behaviour and experience must be conceived of as elaborations of primordial systems for perceiving, evaluating and acting. When we study the brain to look for the networks controlling cognition, we find that all of [them] are linked in one way or another to sensory systems, motor systems and/or motivational systems.28

What we think of as our higher kinds of intelligence – the distinctly human ones, like linguistic articulation and reasoning, mathematical and logical deduction, creativity, and social and emotional sophistication – are outgrowths of our bodily intelligence. What goes on in our bodies, and our sensitivity to those goings-on, are the roots and trunk of all the other forms of intelligence. Bodily intelligence gave birth to them, holds them firm, and continues to nurture and support them throughout life. There are no ‘cognitive’ regions of the brain that are not also of the body. If we took away the bits of our brain that are coordinators of bodily processes, there would be nothing left – no brain, and also no wordplay, no poetry, no algebra and no imagination.

One of the major errors of twentieth-century psychology was to suppose that there are childish ways of knowing which are outgrown, and ought to be transcended, as one grows up. The childish ones are the bodily ones, and are to do with concrete action and experience. The grown-up ones are abstract, logical and propositional. But it is a Cartesian mistake to think that, once you have mastered logic, you don’t need the body any more. Yes, new ways of thinking and knowing do emerge. But they emerge from more immediate, embodied ways, and are continuous with them. We should think of the developing mind as a tree that grows new branches, not as a spaceship whose booster rockets fall away for ever once they have done their job and are spent.