Thursday, 26 October 2017
The Brain, The Body and the Environment: We Need All Three To Make Thinking Possible
The third and final session of my course at UPop Montréal started by asking whether our brains really process our most abstract concepts in the way proposed by cognitivist theory: that is, as arbitrary symbols that have nothing to do with the sensory modalities by which these “inputs” are entered. But as early as the 1960s, experiments with the mental rotation of objects seemed to suggest that, on the contrary, when we perform “high-level” mental manipulations of this kind, we employ the sensory regions of our brain to do so. (more…)
Body Movement and the Brain | Comments Closed
Wednesday, 11 October 2017
The Brain and Body Are Really One, Especially When It Comes to Emotions
In April 2017, while preparing a lecture for a course on embodied cognition that I teach in French at UPop Montréal, I had to refresh my memory about the major communication pathways between the brain and the rest of the body, and one thing that struck me was just how many of these pathways there are!
I won’t talk here about the communication pathways that are part of the hormonal and immune systems. Instead, I’ll focus on the pathways in the nervous system alone. (more…)
Emotions and the Brain | Comments Closed
