Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Feb 02, 2010, 10:13 AM

I'm fascinated by experimental psychology experiments that reveal that we know almost nothing about ourselves--or that our "selves" reveal far more about "us" than we ever imagined in our rationalist paradigms.  The West has been clinging, against odds, to the mind v. body dualism for thousands of years, gave it a few booster shots in the Enlightenment, and now requires psychologists with cagey experiments to trick us into seeing that the mind and body are, in fact, not opposites but all part of the same thing.

 

A recent article in the New York Times, "Abstract Thoughts?  The Body Takes Them Literally," shows us many different ways that mind and body go together.  Here's the url:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/science/02angier.html?emc=eta1

 

And here's a sampling:  If you ask subjects to travel ahead in time, they lean forward.  They don't know that they do, but psychologists measure them and have the numbers to prove it.  If you ask them to travel mentally back in time, they lean back.   The metaphors ("I look forward to seeing you") are right there, embodied.  

 

If you offer people a cup of hot coffee, and then ask them to evaluate the personality of an individual (imaginary) based on a portfolio of information, such as a resume and other data, they are more likely to think the individual they are evaluating is warm and friendly than if you'd just handed them iced coffee before the same test.   So we're not really objective in our evaluations?  Even a cup of warm coffee makes us judge differently?   That's worth taking in.

 

If you are asked to think about something you've done in your past that you are ashamed of, and then a while later casually offered a Handi Wipe, you are more likely to accept it and to wipe your hands than if you were asked earlier to remember a glorious and ethically moral event from your past.   Out, out damn spot! as Lady MacBeth would say.

 

Give some students a very heavy clipboard to write on and others a light one, and it will influence their answers about various things you ask them ranging from the value of unfamiliar foreign currencies, to their influence on university decision-making, to satisfaction with a city or the mayor of that city.

 

I'm reminded of the experiments on IQ and achievement by Prof Timothy Salthouse of the University of Virginia, who tests subjects of all ages over an extended period of time, using all the available tests and under different conditions--sometimes with external distractions, other times with internal ones (delayed lunch schedules and so forth).  He found that there was more individual variation depending on the kind of test taken and the conditions under which it was taken than there were variations between individuals.  We're each our own bell curve, in other words, depending on the kind of test, or the absence of lunch, or the heaviness of the clipboard. 

 

The point is that we process information not just with our mind, not just with our brains, but with all of our being, because all of our being is interconnected.   Experiments that make us feel stupid (e.g. I think you are nicer because I have a warm cup of coffee in my hands?) help us to get over the mind-body dualism we inherited from birth on, and that virtually all of our training reinforces.  These cagey experiments help us realize there is much about ourselves that is not rational at all.  They help us realize there is much to learn about ourselves that is different than our inflated, rationalist view of ourselves.  To do this, we have to begin at the beginning again, really thinking about those things we assume are true, obvious, self-evident, and universal.   Questioning how rational we really are is a good place to start on the road to becoming smarter.

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I'm going to start carrying hot cups of coffe...
Posted on Feb 02, 2010-10:35am by JennaMcWilliams

If it's true that humans are this obvious in how we think about abstract notions like "the future" and "human warmth," then I wonder about our fascination with computation: with creations that are designed to make cold, a-metaphoric decision and judgments. Of course, the West has held up the notion of the rational, detached philosopher/scientist, liking that image so much that it's become part of what we think of as the ideal "male" character. Emotion, embodiment are seen as innately feminine, as signs of intellectual weakness.

I wonder if we might start using objects as calling cards: I might, for example, hand out chunks of iron before I speak, thereby establishing myself as strong and inflexible. Or I might clear all ice cubes from the room before introducing myself. Could it really be that easy?

Metaphors and cognition
Posted on Feb 02, 2010-11:11am by Richard Guy
Richard Guy
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You've reminded me that I must get around to reading George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.

In other cases where some influence on or hegemonic assumption about the basis of our thinking has been pointed out, the next step has been to ask cui bono? - not only whom does this assumption support but whom does it disadvantage, what does it conceal, how does it affect our collective ability to think about issues. Do you know of any work on the social/political implications of body-mind dualism? Has anyone done an anatomy or history of it, I wonder, that would make us hesitate to shorthand it as "Cartesian"?

Lakoff and Johnson
Posted on Feb 02, 2010-12:01pm by Michael Widner

Lakoff's book is great and his collaborator, Michael Johnson, has written several books on this topic. My favorite is The Meaning of the Body, which examines the fact of our embodied cognition in great detail to construct an aesthetics of the body that is quite convincing. One of the things I find so striking about this sort of research is the challenge it represents to arguments against anything resembling a universal human nature. As a medievalist, I'm regularly confronted with claims about the radical alterity of the medieval subject. There have been well-received arguments that, for instance, romantic love wasn't invented until the troubadour poets. Embodied cognition and, more broadly, evolutionary psychology offer a strong case against such non-scientifically grounded conceptions of what it means to be human. Our bodies have not changed in any fundamental ways in thousands of years (though, of course, how we relate to and understand our bodies changes all the time, as Cathy points out). Since the mind arises from the body and, as Johnson and Lakoff argue, even our most abstract conceptual metaphors ultimately derive from our lived experiences of having a body, it seems reasonable to agree with the common sense that people 1000 years ago were recognizably like ourselves. But it takes a focus on the body-mind connections Cathy discusses here to help make this case persuasively (at least, for humanities folks).

Interesting conversation
Posted on Feb 03, 2010-07:21am by Cathy Davidson

Hi,everyone,  Thanks for these interesting and thoughtful comments.  I have a lot of resistance to evolutionary psychology but none at all to an embodied version of history of ideas.  

Evolutionary Psychology
Posted on Feb 03, 2010-09:02am by Michael Widner

I'd like to hear your objections to evolutionary psychology. I know it can sometimes be overly reductionist, but in careful hands I've seen it be very persuasive (to me, at least).

careful hands
Posted on Feb 03, 2010-09:50am by Cathy Davidson

Hi, Michael,  I need to look at individual arguments.  I should not have been so sweeping about a whole field.  I think it is the abuses to which the field is prone that bother me---there are a lot of "just so" stories that have a very thin experimental basis and are based on a lot of culturally-specific contexts extrapolated to universal human evolution.  On the othe hand, I was very impressed by the recent public television series "The Human Spark" where some exceptionally smart evolutionary scientists were revising many of the older ideas proposed by evolutionary psychologists to argue, for example, that cooperation, not competition, is the key evolutionary component or that learning, not innate qualities, was key to evolutionary success or that language and especially espression of symbols was key.  It was very well done for a general audience, with Alan Alda as a most personable and delightfully inquisitive narrator.