Embodied cognition

It has a linguistic map of the world, but it has no territory to explore.

It completely lacks embodied cognition.

And this creates cognitive blind spots that are completely alien to the human experience.

Which is why it crushes the egg with the book.

So you're always in a relation with something.

It's embodied cognition, which is so the emotions are always involved, and it's engaged.

It, it really is realized only through communication.

And so there can be a rhetorical dimension to it where...

The only way you can optimize cognitive performance is in the context of the task that you need it for.

Now, where do we stumble, and this is rightfully so a good criticism, is that you cannot train tasks in the context of embodied cognition all the time.

You can't train cognitively under the highest kind of representative environments.

So, and this is where this transfer taxonomy comes in, and this is also something we briefly touched on before, and I touch on in the original article in Sports Medicine, is that the best way to think about transfer, if you want to get to a application task that is dangerous, harmful, whatever it might be, is through the chaining of near transfers.

But just to highlight, the two particular places where they have brought these researchers and ideas together are in two co-edited volumes, both with MIT Press and both Open Access.

In 2020, they published Movement Matters, How Embodied Cognition Informs Teaching and Learning.

And in June this year, they released their second volume entitled Embodied Intelligence, Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Natural, Artificial and Hybrid Systems.

You can find links to both in the show notes.

And I think in my head, I feel like sort of a philosopher and a phenomenologist, along with having a psychometric background.

And that was really frictional for me in my career because, you know, universities really have their disciplinary silos there.

And so doing research in one area and then trying to do the psychometrician stuff that I was trained to do, there was like a clash and I was trying to justify like, how did these two fit together? And of course, you know, eventually it got to the point where I started really writing more about embodied cognition in the early 2000s.

Then I came to UMass in 2011, and I think it was around the time Jennifer came, but we really didn't click or meet and talk until maybe 2015, and we started talking and we both had this real interest in embodied cognition.