embodied cognition

In this issue, I will read you the embodied cognition, and there is also a subtitle called "How the body affects thinking and behavior".

Virtual reality technology is very popular now. You may have heard the saying that the brain is the control center of the body, and all our emotional feelings can be realized by touching brain neurons. But is the body really just a puppet of the brain? Of course not. The book Embodied Cognition points out that we don't always "know before we act", but we often "know before we act". Our bodies also have great ability in shaping the spirit, and the spirit will also affect our thinking and behavior.

Many keen scientists are good at discovering the hidden truth from nuances, and the author of this book is like this. She went to the kindergarten to pick up her 2-year-old daughter and found that she was very unhappy and asked for cold medicine. Is this sick? The author asked and touched his forehead, and there was nothing unusual. Later, she called the teacher and wanted to know why her daughter was unhappy. It turned out that a little boy took her favorite toy. Is there anything special about this daily life event? As an expert in brain science, I did find something unusual, that is, why did my daughter ask her for cold medicine? She was in a bad mood when the toy was robbed. Why did she think of taking cold medicine? Does this question mean that physical discomfort and bad mood have something in common? Or more generally, is there anything in common between body and mind?

This is actually the core point of this book. The author believes that our body is not just a tool driven by the mind as traditionally thought. On the contrary, the body not only strongly affects the mind, but also participates in shaping our mind, which is also the significance of the title "Embodied Cognition". As the name implies, "embodied cognition" means that our psychological activities are closely related to our bodies. The theoretical basis behind this view is that our brains cannot clearly distinguish between physiology and psychology, and the brain area that manages physiology is usually the brain area that manages psychology. In this case, we can use our bodies to influence and even create ideas.

How to understand it? The titles of each chapter in this book are the best explanations, such as "no wrinkles, no worries", "flexible fingers, strong math", "dancing, learning math" and so on. These sounds seem to go against our common sense. Our daily experience is that we frown when we are in a bad mood. The former is cause and the latter is effect. How can it be the other way around? Also, what is the relationship between mathematical ability and finger inflexibility? Indeed, these are all our common sense. But although common sense has brought convenience to our lives, it sometimes does cover up the truth. This is also true in terms of body and mind.

The author of this book is Sean Bayloc. She is a professor in the psychology department of the University of Chicago. She mainly studies human behavior and brain science. In this book, she used a lot of experimental data and interesting life phenomena to show us the powerful influence of the body on mental activities.

Next, I will tell you the main contents of this book in detail. Let's look at how the body affects our emotions, thinking and understanding of others.

first part

Let's look at the first point, how the body affects our mood.

Does the body affect the mood? The answer is "yes", which has a huge impact. Let's look at facial expressions and depression treatment first. The existing drugs and psychotherapy can help most patients with depression get rid of the pain of the disease, but some patients still can't get help from these two treatments. What shall we do? Let's go back and think about it. In fact, both drugs and psychotherapy have one thing in common, that is, treating the patient's brain. The assumption behind this therapy is that the brain is the root of the disease, so only by targeting the root can the disease be effectively treated.

At first glance, this idea is correct, and it can usually help us get out of trouble, but the root of the problem and the way to solve it are actually two different things. If we realize this, we can imagine whether we can relieve depression through the body instead of the brain.

It's possible. Scientists in Germany and Switzerland have confirmed that Botox can effectively relieve depressive symptoms. You heard me right. It is beauty lovers who use Botox to eliminate wrinkles in order to delay aging. Scientists recruited men and women with severe depression from local psychological clinics and injected them with Botox or placebo. This is a double-blind experiment, which means that neither the scientists nor the patients involved in the experiment know which one to inject. As a result, the severity of depression symptoms such as sadness, despair and guilt of patients who received Botox injection decreased by 47% on average. In contrast, those who received placebo injections did not show significant improvement, and their depression levels did not change throughout the study. In addition, British psychologists have conducted a follow-up survey of people who have undergone plastic surgery, and found that people who use Botox to eliminate forehead wrinkles have more obvious emotional improvement than those who use Botox to eliminate crow's feet, chemically rejuvenate skin and use hyaluronic acid to enrich lips.

Of course, the focus here is not Botox, but the relationship between facial expressions and emotions. When the brow wrinkles expressing sadness disappear, people's mood seems to be better. Why is this happening? One explanation is that when we experience an emotion, such as unhappiness, this unhappy emotion not only appears in the brain, but also extends to facial expressions and body posture, such as frowning, and then sends a signal to the brain to confirm that we are really unhappy.

So now, Botox can't make us frown, that is, we can't give feedback to confirm that we are unhappy. The brain may interpret it as "Ah, there is nothing unhappy." Brain scans do find that when people can't make negative expressions, the brain area responsible for dealing with negative emotions is not as active as before. In this way, if the brain does not receive a signal to confirm unhappiness for several weeks, those unhappy emotional experiences will not be so obvious.

Visible light is the change of facial expression, which will have a great influence on mood. It is not difficult to imagine that other aspects of the body will also have an impact on emotions. For example, holding your head high and walking with the wind, this body posture will send a signal to your brain, "Well, I'm not bad". This is not bragging. Professor Carney of the Haas School of Business at the University of California found that 65,438+0 minutes of inflated body posture can make us feel excited and confident when winning the competition. However, the other side of excitement and self-confidence is adventure, so people who sit with swollen body posture may cheat more easily if they are students, and they may compete more easily if they are drivers.

In addition to understanding the influence of the body on emotions from facial expressions and body postures, let's take a look at the influence of the temperature felt by the body on emotions. There is a saying on the Internet called "loneliness, emptiness and cold". In fact, when these words are put together, there is really some truth. "Loneliness and emptiness" is a psychological feeling, and "cold" is a physical feeling. This sentence inadvertently confirms the relationship between physical feeling and psychological feeling. Cold makes people feel lonely, and warmth makes people feel accepted comfort. The most famous experiment in this field is psychologist Harlow's "contact comfort" experiment. In the past, people thought that a mother was just a walking bottle of a baby, but Harlow designed a very clever experiment to strongly refute this view.

This experiment is like this. Harlow gave the little monkey two fake mothers. One fake mother is made of wire with a bottle hanging on her chest, and the other fake mother is made of wood, which contains a 100 watt light bulb and is wrapped with a soft cloth. If there is milk, the monkeys will take the bottle closer to the wire mother, but as a result, the monkeys will not hesitate to run to the wood mother after drinking the wire mother's milk. When frightened, the monkeys always run to snuggle in the arms of mother Mu. Even if Mumu is removed, monkeys will scatter around and play with each other after drinking Mumu's milk.

Experiments show that milk is not necessarily the mother, but warmth is the mother. Little monkeys need warmth more than milk, because the warm physical feeling gives them psychological comfort. Many sayings we use every day reflect the relationship between body temperature and psychological feelings. For example, when praising a friend, we will say "your enthusiasm is like fire", but when facing the enemy, it is a shivering "autumn wind sweeping the leaves".

So similarly, we may ask, why is there such a connection between body temperature and psychological feelings? I have to mention the "insula" here. The function of insula is to record physical feelings, but also psychological feelings. In other words, if the body feels "cold", the heart is likely to feel "empty and lonely", the body feels warm, and the heart will feel accepted. What does this give us? In other words, we can influence our psychological feelings by changing our physical feelings. For example, if we feel lonely, we will go to bask in the sun, put on comfortable and warm clothes, or drink a cup of hot tea. A warm body will make us feel loved.

This is the first point we want to make. We use facial expressions, body posture and body temperature to explain how the body affects our emotions. Then, will our rational activities, such as vital mathematics, Chinese and even creativity, be affected by our bodies? If so, how is it affected?

the second part

Next, let's look at the second point, how the body affects our thinking. This part mainly talks about the influence of body on mathematical ability, word understanding ability and creativity.

First of all, let's look at the relationship between body and mathematical ability. According to statistics, the winners of national mathematics competitions are usually good at music. There is a long-standing saying that listening to concerts improves children's IQ, especially listening to Mozart's music. So is the relationship between these mathematical geniuses and music really like this? Not exactly. In fact, their extraordinary mathematical ability is related to their fingers playing musical instruments. We know that playing musical instruments requires coordinated finger movements. Scientists have found that the more flexible your fingers are, the better your math is.

Why is this? The existing research believes that there are two main reasons. The first is that fingers and numbers have the same neural entity in the brain. As we mentioned earlier, the brain area where physiological feelings are recorded is also the brain area where psychological feelings are recorded. Physical warmth will make us feel psychological warmth at the same time. Similarly, because fingers and numbers correspond to the same nerve cells in the brain, the flexibility of fingers is likely to make us more acute when thinking about mathematical problems.

The second reason is that the way we use our fingers as children will affect the way our brains process numbers as adults. In retrospect, I learned to count when I was a child. Did I break my little finger? When people ask us how old we were as children, we usually put up our fingers and answer "four years old", but when we count the number of items, we mumble and point with our fingers. There is an experiment that can be used to illustrate the close relationship between finger movement and number comprehension. Imagine that you are now asked to press the number you see on the screen with one finger of your right hand. If you used to learn to count from 1 to 5 with your right hand when you were a child, it can be predicted that it will take you less time to recognize numbers less than 5 than to press the keyboard with your left hand. This shows that finger movements improve our understanding of numbers.

Finger flexibility is closely related to mathematical ability, and we already know the reason. So how does the body affect our understanding of words? Let's look at two phenomena. First of all, when we understand the sentence "Xiao Ming turned up the volume of the TV", if we turn our wrists clockwise at the same time, our understanding of this sentence will be faster; The second phenomenon is that when understanding sentences such as "Li Lei calls me" and "I'll tell Han Meimei a story", it will take less time to understand the sentence "Li Lei calls me" if it is accompanied by something similar to pulling on the chest. On the contrary, if it is accompanied by an action similar to pushing something out, it will take less time to understand the sentence "I will tell Han Meimei a story".

These two phenomena show that whether we are understanding specific concepts, such as turning up the volume, or understanding abstract concepts, such as receiving and transmitting information, body movements will affect our understanding of sentences. When the body movements are consistent with the meaning expressed by the concept, our understanding ability will be improved.

The reasons behind these phenomena can be explained by the great discovery made by biologist Donald Herb in 1949. Donald found that brain cells that are active many times at the same time are easier to connect. What do you mean? That is to say, the activity of one neuron stimulates the activity of another neuron, and some growth or metabolic changes have taken place because they have stimulated each other many times. These changes run through the connections between cells, so that cells can activate each other more effectively. This phenomenon is called "herbal learning". On the specific issue of word understanding, scientists have found that when people make some small movements, such as moving their legs, feet, fingers or tongues, the motor cortex in the brain, which is responsible for moving the body, is activated, with emphasis on the back. When people read words related to legs, arms and mouth, such as kicking, picking and licking, the front area responsible for exercise is also activated. In other words, control the brain area of the "leg" and participate in the understanding of the word "kick".

This close relationship between body and word understanding can actually bring a lot of enlightenment to our education. Modern education is a static education that does not distinguish between things. What do you mean? Children should sit quietly on stools and learn only through their heads. However, when we understand the important role of the body in understanding mathematics and word concepts, we may improve our teaching methods. Psychologist Art Gruenberg devoted his life to studying how people learn. He proved this point forcefully through experiments. He asked the children to read some sentences, and some of them were asked to perform what the sentences said with props while reading aloud. For example, the other children just read the sentence "goats eat hay". As a result, the children who execute sentences have improved their understanding of stories by 50%, which shows that physical participation is helpful to improve their learning ability.

Let's talk about the relationship between body and creativity. If we encounter a problem and sit at the table scratching our heads, the author of this book will advise us to stand up and exercise, even if we walk a few steps in the room, it is likely to have unexpected gains. Sports are more likely to generate inspiration. Of course, there is no persuasion without experiment. Let's look at an experiment related to this.

Suppose you are a doctor, and now you have a patient who can't operate on a stomach tumor. If the tumor is not eliminated, he will die. The good news is that high-intensity laser irradiation can eliminate tumors. The bad news is that high-intensity laser irradiation will destroy the healthy tissue wrapped around the tumor. How can we eliminate tumors without destroying healthy tissues? This is a very difficult problem, so we should have innovative thinking. There are also two groups of college students facing this problem. Their computer screens all showed the same picture of the tumor, but one group of students were also asked to track the dot on the computer screen, which moved irregularly on the edge of the healthy tissue of gastric cancer. As a result, this group of students who are asked to follow the dots are more likely to think of solutions. The solution is to place some independent lasers around the patient, and each laser is aimed at the stomach tumor. If each laser emits a small amount of radiation, it will eventually accumulate enough radiation to destroy the tumor without causing damage to the surrounding tissues. In this way, we may think that the dots remind those students.

But in fact, those students who follow the dot think that the dot distracts their attention and interferes with their thinking. So how do you explain that this group of students have higher innovation ability? That is, by moving the body to simulate the solution, it is easy for people to come up with ingenious methods. In this example, the rotating eyeball simulates a laser placed around it. Therefore, this experiment shows that the agent is more likely to get inspiration than sitting at a desk and thinking hard, because the agent may just capture the solution. That's why innovative companies like Google and Apple prepare sports areas for employees, just to get them moving.

Well, this is the second point of this book. We explain how the body affects our thinking from three aspects: mathematical ability, word understanding ability and creativity.

the third part

Now, we take our attention away from ourselves and look at the people around us. Sometimes we complain that he still doesn't understand after I have spoken for so long, which is simply "casting pearls before swine"; Sometimes we are ecstatic, and he knows everything before I say anything. He is simply a "bosom friend". What role does our body play in understanding others? Next, let's talk about how the body affects our understanding of others.

We can understand other people's behaviors, intentions and even emotions. When you think about it carefully, it is actually a very incredible thing. When Li Lei opened the book, we knew it was an English book. As soon as Li Lei spoke, we knew he was going to say "hello". How did we do it? Of course, it is very likely that you will be tempted to say that this is experience! Wait a minute, the author of this book will reinterpret this phenomenon from the perspective of new scientific discoveries.

We go back to 1996. Giacomo rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma in Italy, and his research team are about to make an important discovery in observing the behavior of monkeys eating peanuts. Researchers have observed that when monkeys reach out and grab peanuts and put them in their mouths, neurons in the premotor cortex of the monkey's brain are activated, which is not surprising, because this area has always been considered to be responsible for arrangement. The theory was verified by observation again, and the researchers went to lunch with satisfaction, leaving the monkey wrapped in wire and unable to move in the laboratory. Everything seems so ordinary, but who knows, the exciting moment has come. A researcher came back early and ate ice cream in front of the monkey. The researchers were surprised to find that the premotor neurons of monkeys were very active. That is to say, although monkeys don't eat, they see others eating, so they react to eating in the depths of their brains.

This remarkable discovery is called "mirror neuron", mirror image, mirror image. As the name implies, such neurons will reflect the actions we see as if they were looking in the mirror, just as they are doing their own actions. It is true that when you see others yawn, you yawn with them. At present, scientists have found such neurons in several areas of the human brain. It is considered as the most important discovery of contemporary neuroscience, and some people even think it can be compared with the discovery of DNA in the history of science.

So what is the significance of this discovery and what does it have to do with our understanding of others? Before mirror neurons were discovered, scientists tended to use empirical logic to explain our understanding of other people's behavior. For example, why do we know that Li Lei will say "How are you" when he opens his mouth? Because we have met many times before, according to empirical reasoning, this time it is probably the same. After the discovery of mirror neurons, scientists tend to think that we can understand Li Lei's behavior because we have read "How are you" with similar actions. Now, when we thunder, the mirror neurons in the brain will immediately play back the initial related experience, and we can understand it instantly without logical reasoning.

The key here is to understand others, preferably we have had similar physical experiences before. For example, scientists have found that people who used to be athletes or have similar sports experiences have different brain reactions compared with keyboard fans. Instead of watching the game with their eyes, they repeated it in their heads.

Mirror theory is not only used to explain how we understand other people's behaviors, but also to explain how we understand other people's emotions. In order to see the important role of the body more clearly, let's put aside the concept of mirror image for the time being and use an experiment to talk about the influence of the body on understanding other people's emotions.

Here's the experiment. AB two groups of college students were asked to watch the facial expressions in the video, and when they found the expression changes, they pressed the button. In this process, students in group A have to imitate the expressions they see, while students in group B have pencils in their mouths and can't imitate the expressions. The results show that the time for group A students to recognize expressions is much shorter than that for group B students ... What does this mean? That is, when we imitate others through some physical movements, we will know more about their emotions. This can be used to explain why couples who have lived together for many years look more and more alike, because in order to understand each other's emotions, they will involuntarily imitate each other's facial expressions, and over time they will become more and more alike. Moreover, according to the survey, the more similar couples are, the more satisfied they are with their marriage.

Finally, let's talk about the opposite situation. Since mirroring other people's actions is so important for understanding others, what if this mirror image is blurred? In other words, what happens when the body can't imitate other people's actions and expressions? The consequences could be serious.

Some scientists believe that the lack of mirror reflection is the chief culprit of autism. Different from children with normal development, autistic children find it difficult to imitate the actions and expressions of others, and accordingly, they are more likely to be unable to accurately understand the actions and expressions of others. Of course, it must be pointed out that some scientists do not admit that mirror loss is the root of autism, because not all autistic people can't imitate other people's actions and expressions. Like mirror neuron theory, these controversies need to be further studied in the future.

However, whether the mirror neuron theory is used to explain our understanding of others or not, it is an indisputable fact that the body is the basis of our understanding of others, just as the earth and the sun are still moving regardless of the geocentric theory or Heliocentrism.

abstract

Having said that, the main contents of this book have almost been said. Next, I will give you a brief summary of three important contents of this book.

First, the body will affect our mood. For example, the face can't frown for a long time, which helps to reduce negative emotions. Inflated body posture will make us more confident and willing to take risks, while warm body feeling will comfort us, otherwise it will be "empty, lonely and cold".

Second, the body will affect our thinking. For example, the agility of fingers is related to the agility of mathematical ability, and cooperating with body movements will improve our ability to understand words. Free-moving bodies are more likely to acquire innovative thinking.

Third, the body will affect our understanding of others. For example, when we watch others yawn, we yawn at the same time, which will make us more empathetic to other people's behaviors and emotions.

The above is the main content of the book Embodied Cognition. Embodied cognition is called the second wave of cognitive science. In contrast, the first wave can be properly called "non-entity cognition", which means that our cognitive activities have nothing to do with the body. It is based on this view that we compare mental activity to the connection mode of computer software for a while and neural network for a while. Both software and connection methods show that mental activities have nothing to do with physical hardware, and our imagination of the future is based on this understanding. As long as the software or connection is still there, even if our bodies are damaged, our thoughts can be copied and uploaded to a new body, which is actually a scientific version of the immortal soul, to paraphrase Descartes.

However, with the rise of embodied cognition, scientists are increasingly aware of the important role of the body in psychological activities. "I think, therefore I am" gradually turned to "I am doing my own thing, therefore I am". This turn may have a comprehensive impact on philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, medicine, linguistics, ethics and other disciplines. However, the study of embodied cognition is still in the primary exploration stage, and how body and mind interact remains to be further studied. The introduction of embodied cognition in this book also focuses on the description of phenomena, without systematic analysis. Therefore, if you want to know more about the theory of embodied cognition, you need more systematic books, and I recommend reading damasio's trilogy Descartes' Errors, Feeling What Happened and Looking for Spinoza.

For us, the topic of embodied cognition has strong practical significance. Since the body has such a great influence on emotions, thinking and understanding of others, should we let the body move at once?