The Medium Is Larger Than the Message

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The environment and non-biological systems are an important part of our cognitive processes. If you work with a tool long enough, that tool becomes embedded as part of your body representation. In these monkey studies where they're using a rake to reach for a piece of food, within a matter of minutes, that rake becomes part of their body representation. And this helps also explain things like phantom limb syndrome? Phantom limb is when you lose a body part. Right. So now if you touch the face of a person who's lost a hand, they often feel it in their phantom hand. Oh, I see. Okay. But that's because the cortex just, it's not going to leave

Brains are important things; they're where thinking happens. Or are they? The theory of "embodied cognition" posits that it's better to think of thinking as something that takes place in the body as a whole, not just in the cells of the brain. In some sense this is trivially true; our brains interact with the rest of our bodies, taking in signals and giving back instructions. But it seems bold to situate important elements of cognition itself in the actual non-brain parts of the body. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh is a psychologist and neuroscientist who uses imaging technologies to study how different parts of the brain and body are involved in different cognitive tasks. We talk a lot about mirror neurons, those brain cells that light up both when we perform an action ourselves and when we see someone else performing the action. Understanding how these cells work could be key to a better view of empathy and interpersonal interactions. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh is an Associate Professor in the Brain and Creativity Institute and the Department of Occupational Science at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA, and has also done research at the University of Parma and the University of California, Berkeley. Home page USC profile Lab home page Google Scholar Talk on Brain and Body See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.