Sensing and labeling our internal sensations allows them to function more efficiently as our somatic rudder, steering a nimble course through the many decisions of our days. But does the body really have anything to contribute to our thinking—to processes we usually regard as taking place solely in our heads? It does. In fact, recent research suggests a rather astonishing possibility: the body can be more rational than the brain.
Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (p. 29). HarperCollins.
What we discovered was that these regions are visceral somatomotor cortex, they are the feeling and regulation of the state of your guts and viscera. When people experience deep emotionally engaged thinking about complex issues, they are literally playing out that thinking process, our data would suggest and now many other sources of data would suggest, on the substrate of the cortisone cortical regions that literally also are feeling your guts.
Poets have had it right all along.
Keynote: Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang | Solving the Frankenstein Problem – YouTube
Annie Murphy Paul in The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking outside the Brain shows that bodily knowledge (interoception) can be more accurate, for instance in the work of day traders who must juggle huge amounts of information very rapidly, than conscious analysis of explicit data. “The heart, and not the head, leads the way,” she concludes. Leslie Shelton puts it bluntly: “Emotion is the master over cognition.”
“Nonconscious information acquisition,” as Lewicki calls it, along with the ensuing application of such information, is happening in our lives all the time. As we navigate a new situation, we’re scrolling through our mental archive of stored patterns from the past, checking for ones that apply to our current circumstances. We’re not aware that these searches are under way; as Lewicki observes, “The human cognitive system is not equipped to handle such tasks on the consciously controlled level.” He adds, “Our conscious thinking needs to rely on notes and flowcharts and lists of ‘if-then’ statements—or on computers—to do the same job which our non-consciously operating processing algorithms can do without external help, and instantly.”
But—if our knowledge of these patterns is not conscious, how then can we make use of it? The answer is that, when a potentially relevant pattern is detected, it’s our interoceptive faculty that tips us off: with a shiver or a sigh, a quickening of the breath or a tensing of the muscles. The body is rung like a bell to alert us to this useful and otherwise inaccessible information. Though we typically think of the brain as telling the body what to do, just as much does the body guide the brain with an array of subtle nudges and prods. (One psychologist has called this guide our “somatic rudder.”) Researchers have even captured the body in mid-nudge, as it alerts its inhabitant to the appearance of a pattern that she may not have known she was looking for.
The body not only grants us access to information that is more complex than what our conscious minds can accommodate. It also marshals this information at a pace that is far quicker than our conscious minds can handle. The benefits of the body’s intervention extend well beyond winning a card game; the real world, after all, is full of dynamic and uncertain situations, in which there is no time to ponder all the pros and cons. If we rely on the conscious mind alone, we lose.
The adage mens sana in corpore sano is of renewed interest to cognitive scientists, and thus to educators at all levels. We used to think of the brain as the “chief executive” of the body, but it turns out to be more servant than master. And the conventional image of a chain of processing that runs from perception through memory and thinking to decision-making and finally into action is plain wrong. The body is not just linked to our sensory and motor extremities; it is intricately involved with all stages and aspects of our intelligence. Without it, even our loftiest thoughts become less smart.
One of the best-known streams of this research comes from Antonio Damasio and his colleagues at the University of Southern California. They have shown that records of the personal significance of our experiences are distributed throughout the body, especially through the skin, the major organs — heart, lungs, stomach — and the fluid systems known as the endocrine and immune systems. When we encounter something that reminds us (often subliminally) of a previous experience, that distributed network of visceral reactivity fires up and serves to guide or steer our thoughts, reactions, and decisions. We have a kind of somatic rudder that primes us — intelligently — to refine the range of solutions and responses we consider.
When this system of “somatic markers,” as Damasio calls them, is disrupted through injury, our intelligence falls apart. Far from being a nuisance, these feelings turn out to be essential to intelligent cognition. In a 2007 paper, Damasio and Helen Mary Immordino-Yang argue that human decisions, behaviors, thoughts, and creations, no matter how far removed from survival in the homeostatic sense, bear the shadow of their visceral beginnings. No matter how complex or abstract they become, the researchers say, our repertoires of behavioral and cognitive options continue to exist in the service of embodied goals. In another paper, Immordino-Yang concludes, “Emotion plays a critical role in all of these stages of problem solving, helping the student to evaluate, either consciously or nonconsciously, which knowledge and skills are likely relevant. … [So] we can no longer justify learning theories that dissociate the mind from the body.”
Corporal Thinking: Recent research in cognition gives new meaning to the term ‘carnal knowledge’ by Guy Claxton, The Chronicle of Higher Education • Section B September 25, 2015
Put simply, the poets had it right all along: feeling emotions about other people, including in moral contexts such as for judgments of fairness, virtue, and reciprocity, involve the brain systems responsible for “gut feelings” like stomachache (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Lieberman & Eisenberger, 2009) and systems that are responsible for the construction and awareness of one’s own consciousness (i.e., the experience of “self”; Damasio, 2005; Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, & Zahn, 2008; see also Chapter 2).
Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience
Far from divorcing emotions from thinking, the new research collectively suggests that emotions, such as anger, fear, happiness, and sadness, are cognitive and physiological processes that involve both the body and mind (Barrett, 2009; Damasio, 1994/2005; Damasio et al., 2000).
Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience
