Do we think only with the brain?

Your mind is not only in your brain, but also in your body if not in the world around you or at least in some parts of it. I have sustained this view several times in my blogs. It is the main thesis of the so-called extended mind theory and also of the enactivist approach, which goes even a little bit farther. The first theory – defended for instance by Andy Clark and David Chalmers – leaves yet a rather important place for the brain as the centre where the mind processes come together, albeit so that according to this theory also much you know exists outside your brain, such as in your notebooks and your computer. The enactivist approach states that the brain has a rather decentralized function and that many cognitive processes take place outside the brain. This view is defended for instance by Shaun Gallagher. In short, the enactivist thesis says (p. 6; see “Source”) that “[c]ognition is not simply a brain event. It emerges from processes distributed across brain-body-environment.” What we see in this description of enactivism is that the brain is not the central processing unit that constitutes cognition (say “knowledge”, in order to keep it simple) but that it is only one such a unit, besides the body (and then especially understood as action, or intended behaviour) and the world around us, which comprises material objects but especially the people we interact with (significant groups and society in general). Now I could continue to give an abstract summary of the enactivist view, but instead I want to give a few examples in order to make the idea clear.

The first case that comes to my mind is not from Gallagher (whose view I want to discuss here) but it’s one discussed in an older blog (dated 20 July 2009): Holding a warm cup of coffee makes you have more positive attitudes towards a stranger than when you hold a cup of ice coffee. In other words, how we are going to act towards others – friendly, rejecting – is not only a decision taken by the brain but it is also “taken” by the temperature of the coffee we drink. This is in line with an example used by Gallagher (p. 152): A study by Danziger et al. showed that the favourable rulings by judges generally went down during the morning from about 65% to 0. After the lunch it returned abruptly to 65%. So, the fact that the judges gradually became hungry influenced their decisions! Actually it’s a phenomenon that everybody knows: Hunger affects your decisions and what you perceive. The hungrier you are, the more you see food in everything you see, and finally it forces your behaviour. It’s a phenomenon already noticed by William James, so Gallagher, who “noted that an apple appears larger and more inviting red when one is hungry than when one is satiated.” (pp. 151-2) Even the phase of your heart beat – and who is able to perceive the phase of his or her heart beat? – has an impact on what you feel, for “[w]hen the heart contracts in its systole phase, fearful stimuli are more easily recognized, and they tend to be more fearful than when presented during its diastole phase”, so Gallagher (p. 152, referring to an investigation by Garfinkel et al.). A phenomenon that many people know is the connection between the breathing and feeling excited; and that you can become more quiet by slowing down your breathing.

Yet a few other examples from Gallagher (pp. 152-5; for a part my interpretations). After a day of trekking in the mountains the next slope may look steeper than it really is, because you are hungry and tired. The next morning, when you are fresh again, it’s no problem to go up, not because the slope has become less steep, but because your affective state has changed. Intentionality can influence your perception as well. After a day of climbing and trekking you are very tired and you feel that it had been better to stop an hour ago. Or, same situation, you are sitting with your friends around a campfire at the end of the day and you feel satisfied how much you have done this day. Or – my example – after a day of trekking you may feel that the next slope is too steep, because you are tired and that’s better to pitch a camp. But what if you know that a bear is following you or that your love is waiting for you .... ?

My cases are a bit limited, but they exemplify that cognition is not simply a product of the brain. What we perceive and know is to a large extent also determined by our affects, our intentions, the state of the world, and the like. Despite challenges of the idea by some, which I’ll ignore here, I think what stands anyway is that “judgment and perhaps perceptual experience is informed by one’s present affective state” (p. 155). I would rather delete the word “perhaps”, for I think that the affective state does have an impact on perceptual experience, anyway. In more technical terms, we can speak of the “embodied-affective nature of perception” (p. 156), and I would like to add “and of cognition in general”. Cognition is not only in the brain but in the brain, body and natural and social environment together and in their relations. In order to know how we know it’s not enough to know how the brain functions, but we must understand this whole aggregate and its internal dynamic connections.

Source

The page numbers in the text refer to Shaun Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions. Rethinking the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.