By Lorimer Moseley in Body In Mind:Research into the role of the brain and mind in chronic pain, 21 March 2011
There is a very large body of data that show that the body affects the mind. That is, bodily processes and responses to stimuli affect our thoughts about those stimuli and our behavioural responses to them. Some of the most intriguing research in this area has been done by Antonio Damasio – most famously the Iowa gambling project[1]. They have primarily investigated people who have damage to their emotional system – ventromedial prefrontal cortex - yet seem to function very well on language and intelligence tests. They do, however, act in a socially inappropriate manner and make stunning judgement errors. One of the earliest studies showed that while healthy volunteers began to choose advantageously before they worked out which strategy was in fact advantageous, patients with damage to their prefrontal lobe chose disadvantageously the whole time – even if they had worked out which strategy was in fact advantageous. The study also showed that normals would have a galvanic skin response, a sign of sympathetic activation, before they realised they were about to make a risky choice. Damasio’s group has done a bunch of studies that underpin their Somatic Marker Hypothesis – “Somatic markers are events or chemicals in your body, detection of which evokes particular feelings or emotions. A note here that, according to Damasio – check out his very readable book ‘The feeling of what happens’, emotions are brain representations of body states. That is, you see a scary looking man approaching you, your sympathetic nervous system is activated, this sends feedback to your brain and your brain registers this feedback and you feel frightened). So, the essence of the somatic marker hypothesis is that when a “negative somatic marker is linked to a particular future outcome it becomes an alarm bell and when a positive somatic marker is linked to a particular future outcome it becomes an incentive” [2].
So, people who have damage to the part of the brain that registers feedback from the somatic markers, don’t ‘read the signals’ from their internal environment. The somatic marker hypothesis argues that this is why they make errors of judgement and do socially inappropriate things – they can’t process the shift in the somatic markers. So, next time you join the poker game, remember what the somatic marker hypothesis says: it is your body that tells you when to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em, when to walk away and when to run, not Kenny Rogers. So, clearly there is bottom-up influence on cognition – the embodied cognition people talk about this a great deal. We have shown (see here for BiM discussion on‘Rubber Hand makes your real hand go colder‘ andvisual distortion) a top-down effect of cognitive representations on the body [3, 4]. The next blog will raise the stakes even further, albeit rather speculatively…..
1.Bechara, A. (1997). Deciding Advantageously Before Knowing the Advantageous StrategyScience, 275(5304), 1293-1295 DOI:10.1126/science.275.5304.1293
2.Damasio AR (1996). The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 351(1346), 1413-20 PMID:8941953
3.Moseley, G., Olthof, N., Venema, A., Don, S., Wijers, M., Gallace, A., & Spence, C. (2008). Psychologically induced cooling of a specific body part caused by the illusory ownership of an artificial counterpartProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(35), 13169-13173 DOI:10.1073/pnas.0803768105
4.Moseley, G., Parsons, T., & Spence, C. (2008). Visual distortion of a limb modulates the pain and swelling evoked by movementCurrent Biology, 18(22) DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2008.09.031
The brain may manage anger differently depending on whether we’re lying down or sitting up, according to a studypublished in Psychological Science that may also have worrying implications for how we are trying to understand brain function.
Anger experiments that have measured electrical signals from the brain (using EEG) or that have altered neural activity with magnetic pulses (using TMS) have found that the left frontal lobe is more active than the right, but studies using fMRI functional brain scans have found no differences.
Psychologists Eddie Harmon-Jones and Carly Peterson wondered whether the brain might be working differently in EEG and TMS experiments because the participant is usually sitting upright, while in fMRI, the person is usually lying flat on their back.
If this seems like a trivial distinction as far as emotion is concerned, it actually has some sound theory behind it. A field of study called 'embodied cognition' has found lots of curious interactions between how the mind and brain manage our responses depending on the possibilities for action.
For example, we perceive distances as shorter when we have a tool in our hand and intend to use it, and wearing a heavy backpack causes hills to appear steeper.
Anger is a prime example where we feel motivated to ‘do something’. In the sitting position we’re much more ready to approach whatever’s annoying us than when we’re flat on our backs, and the researchers wondered whether these body positions were interacting with our motivations to change the brain’s response.
So Harmon-Jones and Peterson asked 46 participants to write a short essay before wiring them up to an EEG that measured the electrical activity across the brain.
The participants then put on headphones and listened as someone else read their essay and rated the author on personal characteristics, such as intelligence and competence. Some participants listened while lying down, others while in the sitting position.
What they didn’t know was that the ‘raters’ were actually pre-recorded audio, and while some heard a benign commentary on their work, other participants heard the other ‘person’ slagging-off them off and harshly rating the participant and their personality.
In line with the ‘ready to respond’ theory, when the participants were angry and sitting up, the left frontal lobe was much more active than the right – but when angry and lying down, there was no difference.
First off, the findings provide evidence that body position interacts with how the brain processes emotion, perhaps depending on which actions are immediately possible.
But more importantly, the experiment might also indicate that different neuroscience techniques may be throwing up varying results because of the differing body positions needed to take the tests.
Although this is only an initial study, it could be a major spanner in the works for cognitive science which often assumes that clumping together evidence from a whole range of techniques gives a better idea of what’s going on.
Applying for a job? The weight of the clipboard to which your CV is attached may influence your chances of getting it. Negotiating a deal? Sitting in a hard chair may lead you to drive a harder bargain. Those are two of the surprising conclusions of a study published in today's issue of Science, which shows that the physical properties of objects we touch can unconsciously influence our first impressions of other people and the decisions we make about them.
Josh Ackerman of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and psychologists Chris Nocera and John Bargh of Harvard and Yale Universities, respectively, performed a series of six experiments designed to investigate whether or not the weight, texture and hardness of objects can influence our judgements of, and decisions about, unrelated events and situations. Their findings provide yet more evidence for the embodied cognition hypothesis, which states that bodily perceptions can exert a strong influence on the way we think.
In the first experiment, 54 passersby were asked to evaluate a job candidate on the basis of a CV attached to either a light (0.34 kg) or a heavy (2 kg) clipboard. Those given the CV on the heavier clipboard generally rated the candidate as being better and having a more serious interest in the position than those given the lighter clipboard, even though the CVs used in both cases were identical. Those given the heavy clipboard also rated their accuracy on the task as more important than those given the lighter one, but did not report putting more effort into it. They did not, however, rate the candidate as more likely to get along with co-workers. This suggests that the weight cue affected their impressions of the candidate's performance and seriousness, but not the irrelevant trait of social likeability, and that the observed effects were not due their perception of their own actions.
The effect of an object's weight on decision-making was explored in a second, smiilarly designed experiment. Again, 43 passersby were asked to complete a "social action survey", asking whether various public issues should receive more or less government funding. And again, the weight of the clipboard was found to affect the participants' responses, although an interesting sex difference was observed: men allocated more money when given the survey on the heavier clipboard than when handed the lighter one, whereas women chose to allocate as much funding as possible in both the "heavy" and "light" conditions.
Next, the researchers looked at the effects of an object's texture on participants' perceptions of a social interaction. Participants read a passage describing an ambiguous interaction between two people, and were then asked about their impressions of the situation - whether it was confrontational or friendly, competitve or co-operative, a discussion or an argument. Beforehand, they were asked to complete a five-piece jigsaw puzzle; in one version of the puzzle, the pieces were covered in rough sandpaper, and in the other, they were smooth. Those who completed the rough puzzle perceived the situation as being confrontational and more competitive than those who completed the smooth puzzle.
Texture was also found to affect the decisions made in a social situation. Participants completed either the rough or the smooth puzzle before playing a version of the Ultimatum game. They were given 10 tickets for a $50 lottery, and made to give any number of them to a second anonymous participant. If the second participant rejected the offer, all the tickets are forfeited. Those who had first completed the rough puzzle offered more tickets to the second participant than those who did the smmoth puzzle. The roughness of the puzzle pieces apparently made them perceive the situation as being more difficult and consequently caused them to behave in a compensatory way - they offered more tickets to increase the chances that their offer would be accepted.
The researchers then investigated the effects of an object's hardness. Another group of participants was asked to watch a magic trick, and to try to figure out how it was done. Beforehand, they were asked to examine the object to be used in the trick - either a soft pice of blanket or a hard wooden block. They were then told that the trick was to be postponed, and asked to give their impressions of two individuals (an "employee" and the "boss") involved in an hypothetical interaction. Those previously given the blanket evaluated the employee as being kinder than those given the wooden block.
Finally, texture was also found to affect peoples' behaviour in a bargaining situation. But whereas the other five experiments examined the effects of actively touching an object, this one investigated passive touch. The participants were seated in either a hard wooden chair or a soft cushioned chair, and asked to perform two tasks. In one, they gave their impression of an hypothetical employee. In the second they were required to imagine shopping for a new car priced $16,500 and to negotiate a lower price. In this bargaining task, they were allowed to make two offers on the car, the assumption being that their first offer would be rejected. The participants who sat in the hard chair judged the employee to be more stable and less emotional than those seated in the soft chair. They also deviated less from their first rejected offer.
These experiments show that touch sensations have a strong influence on our impressions of people and the decisions we make about them, even when the people and events are completely unrelated to the objects being touched. Thus, hardness is associated with rigidity, roughness with difficulty, and heavy objects with seriousness. Our metaphors reflect these associations: we sometimes describe people as having a "hard hearted", "rough day", and serious matters are often said to be "weighty". The weight, texture and hardness of touched objects evidently has a strong priming effect on the thought processes that immediately follow, and can trigger the associated concepts. These findings suggest various "tactile tactics" that could be very useful to job seekers, marketers and negotiators.
Reference: Ackerman, J., Nocera, C. John A. Bargh, J. (2010). Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions. Science 328: 1712-1715. DOI: 10.1126/science.1189993.
Abstract: Touch is both the first sense to develop and a critical means of information acquisition and environmental manipulation. Physical touch experiences may create an ontological scaffold for the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal conceptual and metaphorical knowledge, as well as a springboard for the application of this knowledge. In six experiments, holding heavy or light clipboards, solving rough or smooth puzzles, and touching hard or soft objects nonconsciously influenced impressions and decisions formed about unrelated people and situations. Among other effects, heavy objects made job candidates appear more important, rough objects made social interactions appear more difficult, and hard objects increased rigidity in negotiations. Basic tactile sensations are thus shown to influence higher social cognitive processing in dimension-specific and metaphor-specific ways.
For a greater understanding of the encultured brain and body
Neuroanthropology is a collaborative weblog created to encourage exchanges among anthropology, philosophy, social theory, and the brain sciences. The aim is to explore the implications of new findings in the neurosciences for our understanding of culture, human development, and behaviour. What is neuroanthropology? Sometimes it’s straight-up neuroscience, sometimes it’s all anthropology, most of the time it’s somewhere in the middle. It is about intersections and convergences, about meshing the insights of neuroscience and anthropology into a more cohesive whole. Often with some psychology, philosophy, evolution and human biology thrown into the mix.
In general, according to the web contributers, cultural anthropology has not kept abreast of new research in the neurosciences so that our theories of culture do not sufficiently take into account what we now know about the brain. A more open exchange is likely to produce a cultural anthropology that is not only more scientifically plausible, but also much more scientifically engaged with those interested in cultural variation (although they might not call it that) in a host of fields. We may find new evidence to work with on cultural theory, but we may also find new collaborators and new audiences, as long as we learn to speak their languages.
They also believe that neuroanthropology will help shape biological anthropology, where scholars have become increasingly interested in biocultural and integrative approaches. A firm grounding in neuroscience aids in the examination of behavior; in understanding how the environment, including culture, impacts people; and in developing novel approaches to human evolution. With links to social, cultural, and psychological anthropology, neuroanthropology also brings a critical perspective on how biological ideas are often used to essentialize and naturalize what are largely sociocultural processes.
"Neuroanthropology is a broad term, intended to embrace all dimensions of human neural activity, including emotion, perception, cognitive, motor control, skill acquisition, and a range of other issues. Unlike previous ways of doing psychological or cognitive anthropology, it remains open and heterogeneous, recognizing that not all brain systems function in the same way, so culture will not take hold of them in identical fashion. Although we believe that human neural structure is biological and the product of evolution, we also recognize that the development processes shaping each individual include a host of other forces as well, so that we cannot privilege any single cause over all others."
By Natalie Angier Published: February 1, 2010 in The New York Times
The theory of relativity showed us that time and space are intertwined. To which our smarty-pants body might well reply: Tell me something I didn’t already know, Einstein.
Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time.
As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings, amounting to some two or three millimeters’ shift one way or the other. Nevertheless, the directionality was clear and consistent.
“When we talk about time, we often use spatial metaphors like ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you’ or ‘I’m reflecting back on the past,’ ” said Lynden K. Miles, who conducted the study with his colleagues Louise K. Nind and C. Neil Macrae. “It was pleasing to us that we could take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.” (Summary of this study at end of post)
The new study, published in January in the journal Psychological Science, is part of the immensely popular field called embodied cognition, the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own.
“How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body,” said Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam. “We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.”
Research in embodied cognition has revealed that the body takes language to heart and can be awfully literal-minded.
You say you’re looking forward to the future? Here, Ma, watch me pitch forward!
You say a person is warm and likable, as opposed to cold and standoffish? In one recent study at Yale, researchers divided 41 college students into two groups and casually asked the members of Group A to hold a cup of hot coffee, those in Group B to hold iced coffee. The students were then ushered into a testing room and asked to evaluate the personality of an imaginary individual based on a packet of information.
Students who had recently been cradling the warm beverage were far likelier to judge the fictitious character as warm and friendly than were those who had held the iced coffee.
Or maybe you are feeling the chill wind of social opprobrium. When researchers at the University of Toronto instructed a group of 65 students to remember a time when they had felt either socially accepted or socially snubbed, those who conjured up memories of a rejection judged the temperature of the room to be an average of five degrees colder than those who had been wrapped in warm and fuzzy thoughts of peer approval.
The body embodies abstractions the best way it knows how: physically. What is moral turpitude, an ethical lapse, but a soiling of one’s character? Time for the Lady Macbeth Handi Wipes. One study showed that participants who were asked to dwell on a personal moral transgression like adultery or cheating on a test were more likely to request an antiseptic cloth afterward than were those who had been instructed to recall a good deed they had done.
When confronted with a double entendre, a verbal fork in the road, the body heeds Yoggi Berra’s advice, and takes it. In a report published last August in Psychological Science, Dr. Jostmann and his colleagues Daniel Lakens and Thomas W. Schubert explored the degree to which the body conflates weight and importance. They learned, for example, that when students were told that a particular book was vital to the curriculum, they judged the book to be physically heavier than those told the book was ancillary to their studies.
The researchers wanted to know whether the sensation of weightiness might influence people’s judgments more broadly.
In a series of experiments, study participants were asked to answer questionnaires that were attached to a metal clipboard with a compartment on the back capable of holding papers. In some cases the compartments were left empty, and so the clipboard weighed only 1.45 pounds. In other cases the compartments were filled, for a total clipboard package of 2.29 pounds.
Participants stood with either a light or heavy clipboard cradled in their arm, filling out surveys. In one, they were asked to estimate the value of six unfamiliar foreign currencies. In another, students indicated how important they thought it was that a university committee take their opinions into account when deciding on the size of foreign study grants. For a third experiment, participants were asked how satisfied they were with (a) the city of Amsterdam and (b) the mayor of Amsterdam.
In every study, the results suggested, the clipboard weight had its roundabout say. Students holding the heavier clipboard judged the currencies to be more valuable than did those with the lightweight boards. Participants with weightier clipboards insisted that students be allowed to weigh in on the university’s financial affairs. Those holding the more formidable board even adopted a more rigorous mind-set, and proved more likely to consider the connection between the livability of Amsterdam and the effectiveness of its leader.
As Dr. Jostmann sees it, the readiness of the body to factor physical cues into its deliberations over seemingly unrelated and highly abstract concerns often makes sense. Our specific clipboard savvy notwithstanding, “the issue of how humans view gravity is evolutionarily useful,” he said.
“Something heavy is something you should take care of,” he continued. “Heavy things are not easily pushed around, but they can easily push us around.” They are weighty affairs in every tine of the word.
The cogitating body prefers a hands-on approach, and gesturing has been shown to help children master math.
Among students who have difficulty with equations like 4 + 5 + 3 = __ + 3, for example, performance improves markedly if they are taught the right gestures: grouping together the unique left-side numbers with a two-fingered V, and then pointing the index finger at the blank space on the right.
To learn how to rotate an object mentally, first try a pantomime. “If you encourage kids to do the rotation movement with their hands, that helps them subsequently do it in their heads,” said Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago, “whereas watching others do it isn’t enough.”
Yesterday is regrettable, tomorrow still hypothetical. But you can always listen to your body, and seize today with both hands.
By Lynden K. Miles, Loise K. Nind and C. Neil Macrae from the University of Aberdeen
Setting humans apart from other species is the ability to travel subjectively through time process termed chronesthesia. Mental time travel enables people to tailor their behavior to satisfy the challenges of daily life. Besides studies that show the neural basis of retrospection and prospection and those that document the effect of aging and mental illness on mental time travel (These insights aside, however, very little is known about the wider psychological characteristics of this pivotal social-cognitive activity. One intriguing question is, how is temporal information processed when one revisits the past or anticipates the future?
According to the authors, one possibility is that mental time travel may be represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. Specifically, the metaphorical “arrow of time” may be grounded in a processing architecture that integrates temporal and spatial information in a directional manner (i.e., past = back, future = forward). Given that abstract mental constructs can be revealed motorically, or embodied, this viewpoint gives rise to an interesting hypothesis:
If chronesthesia entails a coupling of thought and action, episodes of retrospection and prospection may be accompanied by backward and forward motion, respectively. To explore this possibility, the authors measured spontaneous fluctuations in the magnitude and direction of postural sway while individuals engaged in mental time travel.
“ Our findings demonstrate that mental time travel has an observable behavioral correlate—the direction of people’s movements through space (i.e., retrospective thought = backward movement, prospective thought = forward movement). Thus, like other exemplars of embodied cognition and emotion chronesthesia appears to be grounded in the perception-action systems that support social-cognitive functioning. In this way, the embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioral marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation.
Examination of the current effects at more precise temporal and phenomenological scales will be a useful task for future research. For example, it is possible that the magnitude of postural sway may be modulated by temporal distance (e.g., close events may produce less sway than distant events). In addition, systematically varying the sequential ordering or evocativeness of chronesthetic episodes may influence people’s movements when traveling mentally through time. “
By Barbara Isanski and Catherine West, APS Staff Writers
The cold shoulder. A heavy topic. A heroic white knight. We regularly use concrete, sensory-rich metaphors like these to express abstract ideas and complicated emotions. But a growing body of research is suggesting that these metaphors are more than just colorful literary devices — there may be an underlying neural basis that literally embodies these metaphors. Psychological scientists are giving us more insight into embodied cognition — the notion that the brain circuits responsible for abstract thinking are closely tied to those circuits that analyze and process sensory experiences— and its role in how we think and feel about our world.
APS Fellow and Charter Member Art Glenberg (Arizona State University) says embodiment “provides a counterweight to the prevailing view that cognition is something in the head that is pretty much separate from behavior. We are animals, and so all of our biology and cognition is ultimately directed towards literal action/behavior for survival and reproduction.” And, he adds, “Explicitly recognizing this will help us to develop better theories.”
Cold Hands, Warm Heart
When someone is described as “chilly,” we understand it means “unfriendly” and not that they should put on a sweater. But using low temperature to capture social remoteness is more than just a convention of language. According to a number of studies, there may be a psychological reason for connecting temperature and social relationships.
In a 2008 study, when volunteers were asked to think about a time they felt socially rejected, they described the temperature in the room as being significantly colder than did volunteers who recalled an experience in which they felt socially included, even though the room temperature was actually the same for both groups. In a separate experiment, volunteers played an online version of a ball-tossing game with three other opponents (unbeknownst to the volunteers, they were the sole participants — a computer program controlled the throws). The game was rigged in a way that some of the volunteers never had the ball tossed to them while other volunteers were able to actively participate in the game. After the game, the volunteers were asked to rate the desirability of various foods and beverages. The volunteers who never had a turn in the ball-tossing game (that is, they were excluded) tended to desire soups and hot coffee more than did the volunteers who played a lot in the game. University of Toronto psychological scientists Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli, who conducted these experiments, suggest that the excluded volunteers craved warmer food and drinks because they felt cold (Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008).
The link between social isolation and physical sensations of cold may work in the other direction, too. A study by APS Fellow Gün R. Semin and his Utrecht University colleague Hans IJzerman suggests that temperature can affect how we feel towards others. Volunteers were handed a hot or cold beverage at the start of the experiment and then were asked to think about their relationships with friends and family. The volunteers who had held a warm beverage tended to rate themselves as being closer to the important people in their lives, compared to volunteers who had been given a cold beverage (IJzerman & Semin, 2009).
Cleanliness = Godliness
Just as feeling distant from other people makes us feel cold, feeling immoral makes us feel physically unclean. Shakespeare dramatized this link vividly: Feeling guilty about the murders she had precipitated, Lady Macbeth scrubs her hands as though she literally had blood on them: “Out damn spot, out I say!” Zhong and Katie Liljenquist (Northwestern University) coined the term “the Macbeth effect” to describe people’s increased urge to wash themselves when their morals become threatened — in other words, an attempt to cleanse ourselves of our sins (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006).
A recent study by University of Plymouth psychological scientists Simone Schnall, Jennifer Benton, and Sophie Harvey showed that just thinking about concepts related to cleanliness (words like “washed” and “pure,” for example) can influence moral decisions. When volunteers thought about clean concepts, they considered hypothetical moral transgressions to be more acceptable than did those volunteers who thought about neutral concepts. In a follow-up experiment, volunteers who washed their hands rated a moral dilemma as being less severe than did volunteers who didn’t wash their hands (Schnall, Benton, & Harvey, 2008).
Zhong says that the most surprising finding from the temperature and cleanliness studies “is the reciprocal relationship between physical and psychological experiences that are typically considered independent.” He adds, “Not only that our concrete experience of the physical world (e.g., cleanliness and coldness) can directly impact our conception of higher order, abstract constructs such as morality and social relations, but also that these abstract constructs can alter the way we experience the concrete and physical.”
Color My World
Studies have suggested that colors can be linked to morality as well. In a recent study conducted by APS Fellow and Charter Member Gerald L. Clore and Gary D. Sherman (University of Virginia), volunteers responded faster during a Stroop Test when words in black were associated with immorality (e.g., “greed”) than if they were associated with moral words (e.g., “virtuous”). Conversely, there were faster response times when words in white were linked with morality rather than immorality. A subsequent experiment revealed that study participants showing this moral Stroop effect also tended to desire cleaning products (e.g., Lysol disinfectant) over non-cleaning products (e.g., Post-it notes).
These results corroborate those of an earlier study by Clore and his colleagues APS Fellow Michael D. Robinson (North Dakota State University) and Brian P. Meier (Gettysburg College) finding that volunteers were much quicker to categorize positive words (e.g., “gentle”) when they were presented in white lettering than if they were presented in black lettering. The opposite was also true — responses toward negative words (e.g., “sloppy”) displayed in black were much faster than responses to negative words shown in white (Meier, Robinson, & Clore, 2004).
In addition to being connected with immorality, the color black and darkness more generally, are linked with danger and uncertainty (don’t movie villains and mysterious strangers always wear dark clothes?). We have evolved to be wary of what we cannot see, and adults are frequently scared of the dark, even if they consciously know there is nothing to be frightened of. However, a new study by Zhong, Vanessa Bohns (University of Toronto), and Francesca Gino (University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill) suggests that darkness is not just scary — skulking in dark corners may actually make us more prone to dishonest behavior. In their study, volunteers who were in a dimly-lit room were more likely to cheat (and end up with undeserved money) than were volunteers in a brightly-lit room. In addition, volunteers wearing sunglasses behaved more selfishly than did those wearing untinted glasses. These results suggest that when people are in the dark, they feel they are unnoticed by others, and therefore think that they have a better chance of getting away with bad behavior (Zhong, Bohns, & Gino, in press).
That’s Heavy, Dude
Everyday metaphors are not just linked to social relationships and issues of good versus evil — they can be “perceptually grounded” as well — that is, connected somehow to physical space. We “weigh” important objects or consider difficult topics to be “heavy.” In a recent study by Nils B. Jostmann (University of Amsterdam), Daniël Lakens (Utrecht University), and Thomas W. Schubert (Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa, Lisbon), volunteers holding a heavy clipboard assigned more importance to opinions and greater value to foreign currencies than volunteers holding lighter-weight clipboards did. A lot of physical strength is required to move heavy objects around; these results suggest that in a similar way, important issues may require a lot of cognitive effort to be dealt with (Jostmann, Lakens, & Schubert, 2009).
In addition to influencing opinions, heavy things (physically heavy, that is) can also play tricks with our visual perception. When participants in APS Fellow Dennis Proffitt’s lab at the University of Virginia wore heavy backpacks, they judged hills as being steeper than they really are. Heavy backpacks also made volunteers perceive distances as being longer. Keep this in mind next time you set out for a hike.
Do the Locomotion
Forward movement, weighed down or not, is typically associated with progress or achievement. We value “forward thinkers” and call visionaries “ahead of their time.” Our ancestors would have only moved forward if it were safe to do so; one glimpse of a threatening obstacle and they would retreat — that is, they would hasten backward. Over time, our brain has encoded emotions with these impulses to approach or retreat. According to Radboud University psychological scientist Severine Koch, “body locomotion constitutes the purest and most ecologically valid form of approach and avoidance behavior.”
We may not be running away from lions and tigers anymore, but is it possible that the very action of retreat triggers the same hypervigilance experienced by our ancestors ages ago? Koch and colleagues tested this possibility in a simple experiment. Hypothesizing that it would require significantly more cognitive control to walk backward than to walk forward, the researchers instructed students to walk backward and then perform the Stroop Test. The backward walkers were far more accurate with the test than those who took a few steps forward. Instead of conjuring up panic or uncertainty, it seems that our brains have prepared us for difficulty, rewarding us when we “take a step back” to think about a situation (Koch et al., 2009). Our bodies have also installed a buffer for extreme emotions. For example, when we are angry, our left prefrontal cortex — an area of the brain implicated in self-regulation — becomes more activated than the right prefrontal cortex. In an interesting experiment by Eddie Harmon-Jones at Texas A&M, volunteers were criticized as they sat in a chair or lay down. The participants who were lying down showed less left precortical activation than did those who were sitting (Harmon-Jones & Peterson, 2009). In other words, if you need to tell somebody bad news, make sure they are lying down when you talk to them.
The body-brain link doesn’t end there. Although we can’t technically travel through time (yet), when we think of the past we engage in a sort of mental time travel. It is a uniquely human ability to reflect on the past and look toward the future to help us act in the present. Researchers have recently looked at how this mental time travel is represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. It turns out our perceptions of space and time are hardwired together.
University of Aberdeen psychological scientist Lynden Miles, did a simple study to measure this in the lab. He fitted participants with a motion sensor while they imagined either future or past events. He found that mental time travel actually has an observable behavioral correlate: the direction of people’s movements through space. Those who thought of the past swayed backward and those who thought of the future moved forward. “The embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioral marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation,” explains Miles (Miles, Nind, & Macrea, in press).
Mind Readers
Humans are a social species. During interactions with others, our brain works ferociously to decode the other person’s intentions, behaviors, and emotions in hopes of shaping our own view of a situation. Our tendency to pool our experiences with others has served an important evolutionary role, making us uniquely adaptive and able to meet complex challenges. When we interact with others, our neural circuitry is engaged in a series of unconscious tasks, including mirroring the other person’s motor movements. Louis Armstrong sang, “When you’re smilin’, the whole world smiles with you.” Romantics everywhere may be surprised to learn that psychological research has proven this sentiment to be true — merely seeing a smile (or a frown, for that matter) will activate the muscles in our face that make that expression, even if we are unaware of it.
APS Fellow Piotr Winkielman ( UC San Diego) and Jamin Halberstadt (University of Otago) and colleagues revealed that the way we initially interpret the emotions of another person biases our subsequent perception and reaction to their facial expressions. Research volunteers looked at photographs of ambiguous facial expressions that had been labeled as either happy or angry. The, volunteers were later asked to identify the photos that they had originally seen while the researchers measured the volunteers’ facial movements. When viewing a facial expression they had once thought about as angry, people expressed more anger themselves than did people viewing the same face if they had initially recognized it as happy (Halberstadt et al., 2009). “The novel finding here,” said Winkielman, “is that our body is the interface: The place where thoughts and perceptions meet. Our corporeal self is intimately intertwined with how – and what – we think and feel.”
Avid readers describe “getting lost in a book,” and a new study suggests there may be some truth to this. As we read, our mind mentally simulates what we are reading about: As a character grabs something, areas of our brain involved in grasping objects become activated, and as a character is running, motor areas in our brain will light up. APS Fellow Jeffrey M. Zacks and his colleagues Nicole K. Speer, Jeremy R. Reynolds, and Khena M. Swallow from Washington University in St. Louis suggest that these mental representations may actually help us make sense of what we are reading. In addition, these representations are being updated in real-time (as we are reading), so that changes in our brain activation correlate to changes we are reading about (Speer, Reynolds, Swallow, & Zacks, 2009).
There is also evidence that these simulations may be tailored to how a specific individual would actually perform the actions — left and right handers show different patterns of activation. When left-handed individuals read manual-action verbs (e.g., throw, grasp), their right premotor cortex becomes activated. Conversely, when right-handed individuals read those verbs, there is activation in the left premotor cortex. According to Roel M. Willems (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands), Peter Hagoort (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands), and Daniel Casasanto (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands), these findings lend support to the body-specificity hypothesis: If our mental simulations are based on our own personal experiences, then those simulations should differ for individuals who act differently than we do (Willems, Hagoort, & Casasanto, 2009).
Reading about emotions can affect our behavior and thought too. Semin and VU University Amsterdam psychological scientist Francesco Foroni examined this by testing whether emotion language has an influence on facial muscle activity. A group of students read emotion verbs (e.g., “to smile,” “to cry”) and adjectives (e.g., “funny,” “frustrating”) while the researchers measured the zygomatic major and corrugators supercilii muscles (the smiling and frowning muscles, respectively.) They found that when the students read the action verb “to laugh,” the smiling muscle was activated and there was no measured change in the frowning muscle (Foroni & Semin, 2009).
Can this innate bodily reaction to emotion verbs affect our judgments? In a follow-up experiment, volunteers were shown a series of cartoons with subliminal emotion verbs and adjectives spliced in. They were asked to rate how funny they thought the cartoons were. Here’s the catch: Half of the group held a pen with their lips, preventing them from smiling, while the others were free to move their mouths. The volunteers found cartoons to be funnier when they were preceded by smiling verbs, but this effect was only present in those who did not have their muscle movements blocked. By stifling their innate ability to smile — to connect with the material — researchers altered the viewer’s experience of the cartoon.
References
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By Margaret Wilson, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
Abstract
The emerging viewpoint of embodied cognition holds that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body’s interactions with the world. This position actually houses a number of distinct claims, some of which are more controversial than others. This paper distinguishes and evaluates the following six claims: 1) cognition is situated; 2) cognition is time-pressured; 3) we off-load cognitive work onto the environment; 4) the environment is part of the cognitive system; 5) cognition is for action; 6) off-line cognition is body-based. Of these, the first three and the fifth appear to be at least partially true, and their usefulness is best evaluated in terms of the range of their applicability. The fourth claim, I argue, is deeply problematic. The sixth claim has received the least attention in the literature on embodied cognition, but it may in fact be the best documented and most powerful of the six claims.
Swinging their arms helped participants in a new study solve a problem whose solution involved swinging strings, researchers report, demonstrating that the brain can use bodily cues to help understand and solve complex problems.
The study is the first to show that a person's ability to solve a problem can be influenced by how he or she moves.
"Our manipulation is changing the way people think," said University of Illinois psychology professor Alejandro Lleras, who conducted the study with Vanderbilt University postdoctoral researcher Laura Thomas, his former graduate student. "In other words, by directing the way people move their bodies, we are – unbeknownst to them – directing the way they think about the problem."
Even after successfully solving the problem, almost none of the study subjects became consciously aware of any connection between the physical activity they engaged in and the solution they found.
"The results are interesting both because body motion can affect higher order thought, the complex thinking needed to solve complicated problems, and because this effect occurs even when someone else is directing the movements of the person trying to solve the problem," Lleras said.
The new findings offer new insight into what researchers call "embodied cognition," which describes the link between body and mind, Lleras said.
"People tend to think that their mind lives in their brain, dealing in conceptual abstractions, very much disconnected from the body," he said. "This emerging research is fascinating because it is demonstrating how your body is a part of your mind in a powerful way. The way you think is affected by your body and, in fact, we can use our bodies to help us think."
In the study, the researchers asked study subjects to tie the ends of two strings together. The strings dangled from ceiling rafters and were so far apart that a person grasping one could not reach the other. A few tools were also available: a paperback book, a wrench, two small dumbbells and a plate. Subjects were given a total of eight, two-minute sessions to solve the problem, with 100 seconds devoted to finding a solution, interrupted by 20 seconds of exercise.
"Our cover story was that we were interested in the effects of exercise on problem-solving," Lleras said.
Some subjects were told to swing their arms forward and backward during the exercise sessions, while others were directed to alternately stretch one arm, and then the other, to the side. To prevent them from consciously connecting these activities to the problem of the strings, the researchers had them count backwards by threes while exercising. (To see videos of the problem-solving and exercise sessions, click on the video links.)
The subjects in the arm-swinging group were more likely than those in the stretch group to solve the problem, which required attaching an object to one of the strings and swinging it so that it could be grasped while also holding the other string. By the end of the 16-minute deadline, participants in the arm-swinging group were 40 percent more likely than those in the stretch group to solve the problem.
"By making you swing your arms in a particular way, we're activating a part of your brain that deals with swinging motions," Lleras said. "That sort of activity in your brain then unconsciously leads you to think about that type of motion when you're trying to solve the problem."
Previous studies of embodied cognition have demonstrated that physical movements can aid in learning and memory or can change a person's perceptions or attitudes toward information, Lleras said.
Other studies by Lleras and his colleagues also have shown that directing a person's eye movements or attention in specific patterns can also aid in solving complex problems, but this is the first study to show that directed movements of the body can, outside of conscious awareness, guide higher-order cognitive processing, he said.
"We view this as a really important new window into understanding the complexity of human thought," he said. "I guess another take-home message is this: If you are stuck trying to solve a problem, take a break. Go do something else. This will ensure that the next time you think about that problem you will literally approach it with a different mind. And that may help!"
Journal reference: 1. Alejandro Lleras and Laura Thomas. Swinging Into Thought: Directed Movement Guides Insight in Problem Solving. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, (in press)
This review by Dan Lloyd, Professor of philosophy at Trinity College, Connecticut on two new books on the embodied mind appeared in the American Scientist.
SUPERSIZING THE MIND: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Andy Clark. xxx + 286 pp. Oxford University Press, 2008.
OUT OF OUR HEADS: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. Alva Noë. xvi + 214 pp. Hill and Wang, 2009.
Sum res cogitans. “I am thinking substance.” With these words, written in about 1640, René Descartes simultaneously created the modern mind and gave it a huge philosophical headache. Cartesian dualism opened an abyss between mind and matter, which was good news for mechanistic physics. But “thinking substance” was thereby expelled from nature, and psychology has labored ever since to bring the mind back into the scientific fold—an effort that has culminated with the rise of cognitive neuroscience. A modern-day Descartes would perhaps say, “I am synaptic substance,” or, to be more accurate, “I am the information transmitted across neural networks.” Sum cerebrum.
Swapping brain for mind bridges the metaphysical gulf, but lesser dualisms still haunt cognitive science. The popular thought experiment of a “brain in a vat” captures the intuition that cognition and consciousness depend exclusively on the machinery between our ears. In the standard vat tale, one is asked to imagine that one’s brain has been removed from one’s body and placed in a vat of nutrient fluids, and that all of its normal neural inputs and outputs are being simulated by a supercomputer. The brain has no way of knowing whether it is in a skull or in a vat. Can we be sure that this is not our current situation? How do we know that anything beyond our brains is real rather than virtual? The moral of the thought experiment seems to be that the neural representations of body and world are only indirectly related to real external things. Is this state of affairs an anachronistic “Cartesian materialism,” with a neural computer on one side, and the body and world on the other?
A contemporary movement in cognitive science looks beyond this lingering dualism, promoting “extended cognition” and “embodiment” as crucial components of the science of mind. Andy Clark, author of Supersizing the Mind, and Alva Noë, author of Out of Our Heads, are preeminent expositors of extended and embodied cognition, and their two books represent the state of the movement, complete with its internal tensions.
Clark critiques what he calls the “brainbound” model, which depicts the mind “as essentially inner and, in our case, always and everywhere neurally realized.” He puts forth a contrasting model, which he refers to as EXTENDED, “according to which thinking and cognizing may (at times) depend directly and noninstrumentally upon the ongoing work of the body and/or the extraorganismic environment.” He further characterizes this model as follows:
According to EXTENDED, the actual local operations that realize certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward, and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body, and world. The local mechanisms of mind, if this is correct, are not all in the head. Cognition leaks out into body and world.
The first section of Supersizing the Mind surveys work in which considerations of embodiment and extended informational resources have transformed theories of perception, cognition and motor control. Consider the problem of walking—easy for us, but a challenge for robots, especially if their walking is highly engineered via exact mechanical control of every joint, precalculated in a central controller. Such highly motorized and micromanaged movement is inefficient both physically and computationally. Biological walking, in contrast, exploits the “passive dynamics” of the material body. We ride on springy, free-swinging limbs. Once set in motion, animal bodies like ours saunter on their way with minimal shoving and shaping from the brain.
Our bodies lighten the load for our brains in many other ways as well. Expressive gestures, including words, Clark observes, are not merely communicative output but may also “function as part of the actual process of thinking.” Gestural information can interact with language. As we talk (to others and to ourselves), we also listen, using our bodies and words as reminders and abbreviations. Outsourcing is truly powerful, however, when we exploit the myriad cognitive scaffolds of the world around us, particularly the world of artifacts. In general, when information is available in the environment, we will use it instead of framing a “brainbound” thought. For example, to play the video game Tetris, one must anticipate whether moving shapes will fit together. To test for a match, one can manipulate the shapes mentally or try out the rotations on screen. Skilled players use on-screen manipulation rather than tax their minds.
The picture of mind that emerges in Clark’s treatment, although not “brainbound,” remains neurocentric. He portrays the brain as a lazy genius at the center of a loose confederacy of tricks and tweaks. Some of the outsourcing involves symbol manipulation and some involves shortcuts that eliminate the need for language (or other symbols) altogether. Clark’s vision loosens up cognitive science itself: Good old-fashioned computational models still have a place, albeit a diminished one. We need to be alert to every kind of computation (including dynamical systems of distributed representations) and, more important, to the diversity of vehicles for computation, many of which are outside the head.
One consequence of the extended approach is a “hypothesis of cognitive impartiality”:
Our problem-solving performances take shape according to some cost function or functions that, in the typical course of events, accord no special status or privilege to specific types of operation (motoric, perceptual, introspective) or modes of encoding (in the head or in the world).
Cognition doesn’t care how or where it occurs! Extended theorizing in the spirit of this hypothesis could reshape cognitive science, embedding embodied human life in an ecology of useful and symbolic objects, a flow in which neural activity is one eddy among many.
Extended cognition entails a supersized mind, and much of the second part of Clark’s book defends the philosophical idea that mind itself leaks into the world. The core argument is really “Well, why not?” Worldly activity with cognitive scaffolding accomplishes many of the same ends as neural computation and evidently saves the brain a lot of bother, so why not let the mind be where the work is done? In particular, philosophical views about beliefs, regarding both what they are and how they fit in the life of the mind, seem neutral about where a belief is located. It might be spread among the synapses, or on a microchip hardwired into the brain, or in a handy notebook—any of those media could preserve all the features of the belief. Critics search for some “mark of the mental” that will keep thinking inside the skull, but Clark counters that in some cases these lines in the sand are the result of mistaken analyses of the mental, and in other instances, they are lines easily crossed by extended minds.
Alva Noë’s target is consciousness, and in broad terms his position is compatible with Clark’s. Noë writes that in Out of Our Heads his central claim is that to understand consciousness—the fact that we think and feel and that a world shows up for us—we need to look at a larger system of which the brain is only one element. Consciousness is not something the brain achieves on its own. Consciousness requires the joint operation of brain, body, and world. Indeed, consciousness is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context. I deny, in short, that you are your brain.
Even in this passage we see an ambiguity that runs throughout the book. (Unlike Noë’s thoughtful and thorough Action in Perception [The MIT Press, 2004], Out of Our Heads is a manifesto of hyperbolic claims resting on sketches of argument.) Is it that we are not merely our brains (which is Clark’s view as well), or that we are not our brains at all? How completely “out of our heads” are we? The radical possibility runs through passages like this one, in which Noë describes what he refers to as a “sensorimotor, enactive, or actionist approach”:
Seeing is not something that happens in us. It is not something that happens to us or in our brains. It is something we do. It is an activity of exploring the world making use of our practical familiarity with the ways in which our own movement drives and modulates our sensory encounter with the world. Seeing is a kind of skillful activity.
This theory of perception has strong echoes of J. J. Gibson’s “ecological approach” to perception, along with the embodied phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Seeing is certainly skillful activity, but is that activity mediated by anything like an inner representation, or by a state of conscious awareness that either guides the activity or results from it? Noë repeatedly edges toward elimination of inner states, only to hedge:
We ourselves are distributed, dynamically spread-out, world-involving beings. We are not world representers. We have no need for that idea. To put the point in a provocative way, we are, in Merleau-Ponty’s memorable phrase, “empty heads turned toward the world.” And as a result of this, our worlds are not confined to what is inside us, memorized, represented. Much more is present to us than is immediately present. We live in extended worlds where much is present virtually, thanks to our skills and to technology.
We have no need for representation—at all? Or is it that our worlds are not confined to what is inside us, those innards nonetheless enacting cognitive, computational and conscious processes?
There is much to be gained by recognizing the intricate embedding of consciousness in the body and the world. Cognitive science (including the study of consciousness) has been shackling itself with its brainbound assumptions. Consciousness depends on its embodied embedding, but should it be identified entirely with the myriad couplings and loops the brain surely exploits?
This question is in play between Clark and Noë. Each disputes the other in passing. For Clark, one of the distinctive features of conscious awareness is the capacity to disengage from enacted specifics. Driving a car, for example, requires precise enactive sensorimotor coupling for beginners and experts alike, but for the practiced driver the details drop out of awareness. Noë’s view identifies consciousness with all the activities of the extended mind and thus implies that skilled enactors remain aware of everything engaged by their performance.
Clark also enlists clever experiments and reports of brain deficits that suggest a dissociation of awareness from sensorimotor knowledge. Familiar optical illusions make objects that are in fact identical look as though they differ in size, but when one reaches to grasp them, one’s fingers open to the same (correct) extent regardless of context. The eye-to-hand loop is not fooled by appearances, however things may seem to the conscious mind. Similarly, some brain lesions can impair the ability to describe a scene while sparing the capacity for fluent sensorimotor interaction, whereas other lesions have the opposite result. Thus there seem to be two partially distinct systems, one mediating fluent behavior and the other generating the model of the world available to consciousness.
From Noë’s point of view, to supersize the mind while leaving consciousness inside the head seems arbitrary, if not fainthearted. Any such distinction regards one fantastically complex information processing system as conscious, while declaring another, equally complex system, not. What’s the difference?
An expansive, totalized theory of consciousness like Noë’s solves the problem by dissolving it:
The problem of consciousness, then, is none other than the problem of life. What we need to understand is how life emerges in the natural world.
Descartes framed the modern mind with a sentence beginning “I am . . . ,” launching centuries of debate about how to complete the thought. But until now, that first-person grammatical form has been the eye of the storm, a nexus of subjectivity to which a world appears. In a truly post-Cartesian world of looping, evanescent, chattering, clattering networks, the problem of consciousness may simply disappear. The sum may turn out to be less than the whole of its parts.
Dan Lloyd is the Thomas C. Brownell Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College, Connecticut. He is the author of Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness (The MIT Press, 2004) and is currently working on a book-length philosophical dialogue titled Ghosts in the Machine.
