137. Embodied Cognition | THUNK

I've sometimes felt like my consciousness is held prisoner inside my own body I guess it makes sense it is made of cells in the cyberpunk future of the new Netflix series altered carbon technology has made it possible to convert human minds into pure information personality memories everything that makes you you can be backed up and uploaded into a new body or sleeve a slang term that highlights just how expendable bodies have become foremost neuro scientists psychologists AI researchers anyone involved in the many fields of science trying to figure out exactly how matter can give rise to thought and consciousness that attitude probably sounds familiar the traditional perspective for research about cognition is that brain equals mind that everything else all of this stuff is just sort of a peripheral support mechanism that the brain uses to drive itself around and get nutrients and coffee to do more thinking grow a brain in a jar or simulated on a computer feed it some information about the world and you'll get pretty much the same thing but a relatively recent movement in cognitive science challenges that assumption embodied cognition is a term used to refer to a few different ideas but they all share a common sentiment that this traditional view of thought starting and ending with the brain is ignoring an important part of the picture that the structure and operation of human cognition is deeply tied to and dependent on the subjective experience of being in a human body let's look at a couple studies that have motivated this perspective and see if we can't figure out why these theorists are bent out of shape about sleeves in 1980 george lakoff and mark johnson published a collection of studies demonstrating that many common metaphors have a sort of a universal physical sensation tied to them let's try a little experiment here in the next 10 seconds try to think of as many metaphors or idioms as you can that you use to describe being extremely happy or overwhelmingly sad ready go okay so what did you come up with chances are at least a couple of those idioms fit into a particular pattern I'm over the moon I'm on top of the world I'm on cloud nine nothing can bring me down I'm down in the dumps I'm feeling low I feel like dirt it's not just English either many other languages have similar patterns in idioms for feeling happy or sad people who speak Chinese or Persian also use many metaphors of upness or downest to describe those emotions lake often johnson found many other patterns and physical metaphors for cognitive states that also span cultures and languages warmth is compassion cold is animosity or apathy control is being over subjugation is being under love is energy or electricity there are a ton of these sorts of clustered metaphors that's interesting but does it really indicate anything important let's look at another finding in psychology and see if anything sticks out we tend to conceive of our moods and thoughts causing our bodies to do certain things if you find something funny then you smile you agree with something so you not you feel confident so you stand confidently but there are numerous studies that show that it's possible to make those relationships run backwards by artificially replicating their usual physical manifestations for example people who hold pencils between their teeth while watching cartoons as though they were smiling tend to rate those cartoons as significantly funnier than people who hold the pencils between their lips instead people who are asked to nod their heads while listening to an argument for a particular policy will tend to rate that policy more favorably than people who are asked to shake their heads and standing in a typical heroic posture can actually lower a person's cortisol levels a hormone associated with stress raised their testosterone levels associated with feelings of self assurance and make them more comfortable taking larger risks by themselves each of these findings might be considered simply charming oddities of human psychology nothing more but advocates of embodied cognition see something suggestive and more profound when they're viewed as two facets of the same underlying principle what if the entire structure of human thought everything from abstractions and mathematics to values and ideologies to emotions and language is deeply dependent on the subjective experience of physically existing in the world with a human body what does that mean well let's consider that physical metaphor thing lake often johnson theorized that the physicality of those metaphors isn't some random quirk of language it's mirroring an underlying framework of how we construct ideas when we think of happiness as being up or sadness as being down it's because our whole concepts of happy and sad are built on a collection of physical sensations according to this hypothesis a fundamental part of how we even get to this notion of a thing called happiness requires the physical feeling of being up or above or high our bodies feel a certain way when we're experiencing that and our brains use that feeling as a building block construct the idea of happiness that might explain why we see these patterns and metaphors for certain concepts is the sensation of up Ness is a necessary part of even conceiving of being happy don't wonder there are so many idioms linking the two also if concepts like confidence are built out of certain sensations like feeling our legs spread wide our hands on our hips and our heads tilted up it makes sense that feeding those sensations into our bodies might well trigger legitimate feelings of self assurance we're not deviously tricking the brain the believing we're confident by pretending to be we're physically building the concept out of its constituent parts the sensations that make up confidence okay so what it's a neat idea but what does it get you well as we noted many of the scientific fields attempting to decode human thought are operating on an assumption that the only really important thing to replicate is the brain there's a pervasive sentiment that if we built an accurate computer simulation of a brain we pretty much be done that getting such a simulation to think like a human would just be details the idea that you take the time to also simulate a body for that brain and an accurate sensation of that body would leave a lot of those scientists looking at you like you had two heads but the embodied cognition theory suggests that the physical instantiation in experiences of the thinker are essential building blocks for its thought and if you want to produce a human-like intelligence you need to give it a human-like body if you stuffed a functional human brain into a weird alien body or didn't give it a body at all it's possible that you'd get a very different sort of thinking or maybe even in absence of any meaningful thought at all this idea has been gaining steam and an increasing number of researchers have found it to be a useful way to think about known psychological phenomena it's also proven useful in fields you might not expect like robotics where rather than trying to program highly sophisticated control algorithms it's sometimes easier to build intelligence into the physical shape of the robot we won't know if embodied cognition is actually true until scientists figure out exactly how cognition works but until then it's probably not a bad idea for at least some of those scientists to examine a link between psychology and physiology closely just in case of course with the number of full frontal nude scenes an altered carbon it's kind of hard not to do you think that embodied cognition sounds like a plausible theory please leave a comment below and let me know what you think thank you very much for watching don't forget to Volvo subscribe bla share and don't stop honking

Channel: THUNK

Views: 17,549

Rating: 4.9223986 out of 5

Keywords: THUNK, embodied cognition, cognitive science, philosophy of mind

Id: NDw_1UyNTKI

Length: 8min 19sec (499 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2018