It was a different world back then, he explained, “it was the beginning of computer science and A.I and the idea that thought could be described with formal logic dominated much of philosophical thinking. After taking linguistic courses in the 1960s under Chomsky at MIT, where he eventually majored in English and Mathematics, he studied linguistics in grad school at Indiana University. Lakoff was kind enough to field some questions over a recent phone conversation, where I learned about his interesting history first hand. One of the key figures to empirically study embodiment is University of California at Berkeley professor George Lakoff. Its intellectual roots date back to early 20 th century philosophers Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John Dewey and it has only been studied empirically in the last few decades.

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.”Įmbodied cognition has a relatively short history. 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. That is, our cognition is influenced, perhaps determined by, our experiences in the physical world. What exactly does this mean? It means that our cognition isn’t confined to our cortices. Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanism of neural binding. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment. arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experiences.

However, as George Lakoff and Rafeal Núñez explain:Ĭognitive science calls this entire philosophical worldview into serious question on empirical grounds. From it, western thought developed two basic ideas: reason is disembodied because the mind is disembodied and reason is transcendent and universal. the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” In the proceeding centuries, the notion of the disembodied mind flourished.

In sharp contrast is dualism, a theory of mind famously put forth by Rene Descartes in the 17 th century when he claimed that “there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible. Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science.

Lakoff and johnson metaphors we live by