Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In health care as well as in education, a new emphasis on integrative thinking, holistic approaches, and the whole person provides us with an opportunity to reconsider what the body has to offer the brain. The field of embodied cognition draws from phenomenology and neuroscience to explore how the body shapes human perception. A wide range of signals are communicated through nerve endings in the skin, through internal organs and tissues, as well as through hormonal balances and the state of the immune system, each of which interacts with prior knowledge and experience to produce perception. Our brains are not “in charge” in the Cartesian sense, issuing orders to various systems and parts of the body. Rather, the brain acts as a site for hosting and curating conversations; bodily organs like the heart and lungs and brain respond to each other as part of a dynamic ecosystem through a variety of channels, including electrical, hormonal, and mechanical. Our bodies, including our heads, are in a constant state of dynamic interrelation with our environment. Embodied cognition frameworks recognize the body as an ecosystem interacting with other environmental ecosystems, providing an understanding of human thought processes that can usefully inform humanistic studies. This focussed discussion will introduce six key principles of embodied cognition, offering delegates the opportunity to consider implications for interdisciplinary humanities research in the future.