 I've sometimes felt like my consciousness is held prisoner inside my own body. I guess it makes sense, it is made of cells. In the cyberpunk future of the new Netflix series Altered Carbon, technology has made it possible to convert human minds into pure information. Personality, memories, everything that makes you, you can be backed up and uploaded into a new body, or sleeve, a slang term that highlights just how expendable bodies have become. For most neuroscientists, psychologists, AI researchers, anyone involved in the many fields of science trying to figure out exactly how matter can give rise to thought and consciousness, that attitude probably sounds familiar. The traditional perspective for research about cognition is that brain equals mind. That everything else, all of this stuff, is just sort of a peripheral support mechanism that the brain uses to drive itself around and get nutrients and coffee to do more thinking. If you throw a brain in a jar, or simulate it on a computer, feed it some information about the world, and you'll get pretty much the same thing. But a relatively recent movement in cognitive science challenges that assumption. Embodied cognition is a term used to refer to a few different ideas, but they all share a common sentiment. That this traditional view of thought starting and ending with the brain is ignoring an important part of the picture. That the structure and operation of human cognition is deeply tied to, and dependent on, the subjective experience of being in a human body. Let's look at a couple studies that have motivated this perspective, and see if we can't figure out why these theorists are bent out of shape about sleeves. In 1980, George Lakoth and Mark Johnson published a collection of studies demonstrating that many common metaphors have a sort of universal physical sensation tied to them. Let's try a little experiment here. In the next 10 seconds, try to think of as many metaphors or idioms as you can that you'd use to describe being extremely happy or overwhelmingly sad. Ready? Go. Okay, so what did you come up with? Chances are at least a couple of those idioms fit into a particular pattern. I'm over the moon. I'm on top of the world. I'm on cloud nine. Nothing can bring me down. I'm down in the dumps. I'm feeling low. I feel like dirt. It's not just English either. Many other languages have similar patterns in idioms for feeling happy or sad. People who speak Chinese or Persian also use many metaphors of upness or downness to describe those emotions. Lakoth and Johnson found many other patterns in physical metaphors for cognitive states that also span cultures and languages. Warmth is compassion. Cold is animosity or apathy. Cold is being over. Subjugation is being under. Love is energy or electricity. There are a ton of these sorts of clustered metaphors. That's interesting, but does it really indicate anything important? Let's look at another finding in psychology and see if anything sticks out. We tend to conceive of our moods and thoughts causing our bodies to do certain things. If you find something funny, then you smile. You agree with something, so you nod. You feel confident, so you stand confidently. But there are numerous studies that show that it's possible to make those relationships run backwards by artificially replicating their usual physical manifestations. For example, people who hold pencils between their teeth while watching cartoons as though they were smiling tend to rate those cartoons as significantly funnier than people who hold the pencils between their lips instead. People who are asked to nod their heads while listening to an argument for a particular policy will tend to rate that policy more favorably than people who are asked to shake their heads. And standing in a typical heroic posture can actually lower a person's cortisol levels, a hormone associated with stress, raise their testosterone levels associated with feelings of self-assurance, and make them more comfortable taking larger risks. By themselves, each of these findings might be considered simply charming oddities of human psychology, nothing more. But advocates of embodied cognition see something suggestive and more profound when they're viewed as two facets of the same underlying principle. What if the entire structure of human thought, everything from abstractions and mathematics to values and ideologies to emotions and language, is deeply dependent on the subjective experience of physically existing in the world with a human body? What does that mean? Well, let's consider that physical metaphor thing. Lakoff and Johnson theorized that the physicality of those metaphors isn't some random quirk of language. It's mirroring an underlying framework of how we construct ideas. When we think of happiness as being up, or sadness as being down, it's because our whole concepts of happy and sad are built on a collection of physical sensations. According to this hypothesis, a fundamental part of how we even get to this notion of a thing called happiness requires the physical feeling of being up, or above, or high. Our bodies feel a certain way when we're experiencing that, and our brains use that feeling as a building block to construct the idea of happiness. That might explain why we see these patterns in metaphors for certain concepts. If the sensation of upness is a necessary part of even conceiving of being happy, no wonder there are so many idioms linking the two. Also, if concepts like confidence are built out of certain sensations, like feeling our legs spread wide, our hands on our hips, and our heads tilted up, it makes sense that feeding those sensations into our bodies might well trigger legitimate feelings of self-assurance. We're not deviously tricking the brain and believing we're confident by pretending to be. We're physically building the concept out of its constituent parts, the sensations that make up confidence. Okay. So what? It's a neat idea, but what does it get you? Well, as we noted, many of the scientific fields attempting to decode human thought are operating on an assumption that the only really important thing to replicate is the brain. There's a pervasive sentiment that if we built an accurate computer simulation of a brain, we'd pretty much be done. That getting such a simulation to think like a human would just be details. The idea that you take the time to also simulate a body for that brain, and an accurate sensation of that body, would leave a lot of those scientists looking at you like you had two heads. But the embodied cognition theory suggests that the physical instantiation and experiences of the thinker are essential building blocks for its thought, and if you want to produce a human-like intelligence, you need to give it a human-like body. If you stuffed a functional human brain into a weird alien body, or didn't give it a body at all, it's possible that you'd get a very different sort of thinking, or maybe even an absence of any meaningful thought at all. This idea has been gaining steam, and an increasing number of researchers have found it to be a useful way to think about known psychological phenomena. It's also proven useful in fields you might not expect, like robotics, where, rather than trying to program highly sophisticated control algorithms, it's sometimes easier to build intelligence into the physical shape of the robot. We won't know if embodied cognition is actually true until scientists figure out exactly how cognition works, but until then, it's probably not a bad idea for at least some of those scientists to examine a link between psychology and physiology closely, just in case. Of course, with the number of full frontal nude scenes and altered carbon, it's kind of hard not to. Do you think that embodied cognition sounds like a plausible theory? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe while I share, and don't stop thunking.