Human Mind is Determined by the Body in the Emodiment...

What is embodiment? The embodiment theory holds that the nature of the human mind is largely determined by the form of the human body. Embodied cognition reflects the argument that the motor system influences our cognition, just as the mind influences bodily actions. People could be more effective if they thought/processed and planned and perceived as little as possible. A person’s intelligence would be used towards only handling the minimal amount of information necessary to make their behavior appropriate and more desirable to society. Our physical experience of the world and our spatial awareness, our bodily movement, and the way we manipulate objects provide the pattern for how we reason about the world. Reason is independent of†¦show more content†¦A significant human skill is learning to suppress the overriding contribution of the environment to conceptualization, and it allows the memory to guide conceptualization. The effort used in suppressing input fr om the environment pays off by allowing prediction, recollective memory, and language comprehension. Cognition is situated, time-pressured. Cognitive activity takes place in the context of a real-world environment, and inherently involves perception and action. We are mind on the hoof (Clark), and cognition must be understood in terms of how it functions under the pressure of real-time interaction with the environment. When you’re under pressure to make a decision, the choice that is made emerges from the confluence of pressures that you’re under. In the absence of pressure, a decision may be made differently. We off-load cognitive work onto the environment. Because of limits on our information-processing abilities, we exploit the environment to reduce the cognitive workload. We make the environment hold or even manipulate information for us, and we harvest that information only on a need-to-know basis. This is seen when people have calendars, agendas, PDAs, or anything to help them with everyday functions. We write things down so we can use the information when w e need it, instead of taking the time to memorize or encode it into our minds. The environment is part of the cognitive system. The information flow