Where does your brain stop and your body begin? Do your mental processes have a boundary? What do we mean by ‘cognition’ anyway?

Great minds from Plato to Freud have long wrestled with the inner workings of our noggins. The eternal question is how our brain works together with our body to interpret and act upon our world.

Cognition itself lies somewhere between our ability to perceive, our ability to interpret, and our capacity to take action. Cognitive mental processes, according to Merriam Webster, “involve conscious intellectual activity (such as thinking, reasoning, or remembering).”

Imagine, if you will, the day-to-day life of one of your prehistoric ancestors. Might their memory have been sharper than yours is today? After all, with no pen or paper, pocket calculator, or slim super-computer in their hand, they would’ve had to keep track of everything important in their minds alone and search for answers via word-of-mouth.

We moderns, however, have a list of tools at our disposal that grows longer every day. As Marshall McLuhan remarked, “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

Which brings us to our term-du-jour: embodied cognition. I ran across it reading an article by Sam Kriss in the Atlantic. In his piece entitled You Think With the World, Not Just Your Brain, he makes the crucial point that “the body codes how the brain works, more than the brain controls the body.”

“Among philosophers, biologists, and cognitive scientists, this exciting new field of study is known as embodied or extended cognition: broadly, the theory that what we think of as brain processes can take place outside of the brain.”

‘Embodied’ is the word I’d like to highlight, as it seems to be the fulcrum in the balance between the soft folds of our brains and the hard edges of the world.

Your mind creates the map. Your body gives you the agency to act. Your tools extend your reach and enhance your abilities. Your body, quietly flexing its muscles in the middle, is the mediator in your grand dance with existence.

It’s an interesting reframe to picture your body poised between the primary poles of reality creation. Kinda makes you want to take good care of it, eh?

Here’s to trusting that your body makes the most of the week to come. Much love till next Monday!

Tous mes meilleurs!

M+

ML #622

Mark Metz
Executive Director :: Dance First Association