one of the things I value about writing, is the act of writing itself. It is an embodied process that connects me to my own humanity, by putting me in touch with my mind, the same way a vigorous hike through the woods can put me in touch with my body.

so that's me trying to do a synoptic integration of all of the four e-cognitive science and trying to get it 00:00:12 into a form that i think would help make make sense to people of the of cognition and also in a form that's helpful to get them to see what's what we're talking about when i'm talking about the meaning 00:00:25 that's at stake in the meaning crisis because it's not sort of just semantic meaning

You may find this book in the “self-improvement” category, but in adeeper sense it is the opposite of self-improvement. It is aboutoptimizing a system outside yourself, a system not subject to you

Jean Clarke, a professor of entrepreneurship and organization at EmlyonBusiness School in France, has spent years watching entrepreneurs like GabrielHercule make their case at demo days, incubators, and investment forums acrossEurope. In a study published in 2019, she and her colleagues reported thatcompany founders who deployed “the skilled use of gesture” in their pitcheswere 12 percent more likely to attract funding for their new ventures.

gesture isimpressionistic and holistic, conveying an immediate sense of how things lookand feel and move.

Researchers who study embodiedcognition are drawing new attention to the fact that people formulate and conveytheir thoughts not only with words but also with the motions of the hands and therest of the body. Gestures don’t merely echo or amplify spoken language; theycarry out cognitive and communicative functions that language can’t touch.

Those who are attuned to such cues can use them to make more-informed decisions. A study led by a team of economists and neuroscientists in Britain, for instance, reported that financial traders who were better at detecting their heartbeats — a standard test of what is known as interoception, or the ability to perceive internal signals — made more profitable investments and lasted longer in that notoriously volatile profession.

The burgeoning field of embodied cognition has demonstrated that the body — its sensations, gestures and movements — plays an integral role in the thought processes that we usually locate above the neck.

It’s no coincidence that we walk when we need to think: evidence shows that movement enhances thinking and learning, and both are activated in the same centre of motor control in the brain. In the influential subfield of cognitive science concerned with ‘embodied’ cognition, one prominent claim is that actions themselves are constitutive of cognitive processes. That is, activities such as playing a musical instrument, writing, speaking or dancing don’t start in the brain and then emanate out to the body as actions; rather, they entail the mind and body working in concert as a creative, integrated whole, unfolding and influencing each other in turn. It’s therefore a significant problem that many of us are trapped in work and study environments that don’t allow us to activate these intuitive cognitive muscles, and indeed often even encourage us to avoid them.

This is equivalent to what Montessori was saying: If you want to live in the 21st century, you’d better embody it. You can’t teach it in a classroom. And so, Papert was saying, “Hey, this is math. It’s not just learning math. It’s an environment. It has all these things.”

Spiders appear to offload cognitive tasks to their webs, making them one of a number of species with a mind that isn’t fully confined within the head.

The body matters to learning.