Science News - Body in Mind

For centuries, the brain has been seen as the seat of human cognition. Even now, most people who think about the mind equate it with the brain, and for good reason -- neuroscience has placed much of what we consider to be consciousness within the 3+ pounds of gray matter within our skulls.

However, some people, such as myself, have long thought that the mind -- and by extension, cognition -- must also include the body. It seems researchers are starting to think the same way.

Body In Mind

By Bruce Bower

October 25th, 2008; Vol.174 #9 (p. 24)

Long thought the province of the abstract, cognition may actually evolve as physical experiences and actions ignite mental life

THE SMARTEST GREMLIN ENLARGE | Leo (shown here without all of his outer covering) can learn from others. He is programmed to develop thinking skills from what he senses. Sam Ogden

With gargantuan ears, gleaming brown eyes, a fuzzy white muzzle and a squat, furry body, Leonardo looks like a magical creature from a Harry Potter book. He’s actually a robot powered by an innovative set of silicon innards.

Like a typical 6-year-old child, but unlike standard robots that come preprogrammed with inflexible rules for thinking, Leonardo adopts the perspectives of people he meets and then acts on that knowledge. Leonardo’s creators, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Personal Robots Group and special effects aces at the Stan Winston Studio in Van Nuys, Calif., watch their inquisitive invention make social strides with a kind of parental pride.

Consider this humanlike attainment. Leo, as he’s called for short, uses sensors to watch MIT researcher Matt Berlin stash cookies in one of two boxes with hinged, open covers. After Berlin leaves the room, another experimenter enters and creeps over to the boxes, a hood obscuring his face. The mysterious intruder moves the cookies from one box to the other and closes both containers before skulking out. Only Leo can unlock the boxes, by pressing buttons on a panel placed in front of him.

Berlin soon returns and vainly tries to open the original cookie box. He asks Leo to unlock it for him. The robot shifts his gaze from one box to the other, his mental wheels seemingly turning. Then Leo unlocks the second box. The robot has correctly predicted that Berlin wants the cookies that were put in the first box, and that Berlin doesn’t realize that someone moved those cookies to the other box.

Leo sits on the cusp of a new scientific approach to untangling the nature of biological intelligence and cognitive feats such as memory and language.

For the past 30 years, standard theories of cognition have assumed that the brain creates abstract representations of knowledge, such as a word that represents a category of objects. This abstract knowledge gets filed in separate neural circuits, one devoted to understanding and using speech, for example, and another involved in discerning others’ thoughts and feelings. If that’s so, then cognition operates on a higher level apart from more mundane brain systems for perception, action and emotion. Mental life must occur in three discrete steps: Sense, think and then act.

The new approach, often called embodied or grounded cognition, turns standard thinking on its head. It argues that cognition is grounded in interactions among basic brain systems, including those for perception, action, memory, emotion, reward and goal management.

These systems increasingly coordinate their activity as an individual gains experience performing tasks jointly with other people. Complex thinking capacities—in particular, a feel for anticipating what’s about to happen in a situation—form out of these myriad interactions within and between individuals, somewhat like the novel products of chemical reactions.

In short, people often act in order to think and learn, using immediate feedback to adjust their behavior from one moment to the next.

According to this view, bodily states—say, smiling—stimulate related forms of cognition, such as feeling good or remembering a pleasant experience. Researchers emphasize that the ability to think about an observed action or event, such as a friend biting into a peach, stems from neural reenactments of one’s perceptual, motor and emotional states—biting into your own peach.

“It’s really through the body, and the dynamic coupling of neural systems for perception, action and introspection, that cognition emerges,” says developmental psychologist Linda Smith of Indiana University in Bloomington.

Read the whole article.

Tags: Science News, Body in Mind, consciousness, brain, body, Psychology, embodied cognition, Linda Smith, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Personal Robots Group, Matt Berlin, Leo, cognition, thinking, perception