Embodied cognition, is a hypothesis that proposes that the brain does not naturally understand language.
Have you ever found yourself wondering what exactly is going on when you notice that you are thinking about a particular topic? You frequently see something happening or hear a voice within your head, but how exactly is your brain generating that voice? How exactly is it comprehending what the human voice is saying?
The ability to comprehend one’s mother tongue is one of those things that a lot of people take for granted, but it’s actually a lot more of an astounding and sophisticated effort that’s going on within the brain than it might appear.
Since you were not born with the ability to understand English, your brain must be “translating” the words into some purer form of meaning in order to make sense of what you are reading. The process of translating inputs and the language used to program the computer into machine code is how a computer operates.
What exactly is the computer code that the brain uses?
The traditional theory held that in order for the brain to comprehend words literally, it had to first engage in a process of translation. To be more specific, it was thought that the brain would convert words from English into a kind of ‘basic language’ that was frequently referred to as ‘mentalese.’
However, more recent research has cast doubt on this approach and presented an alternative that is significantly more intriguing…
You Make Decisions Using Your Body
Embodied cognition is a hypothesis that proposes that the brain does not naturally understand language, but rather relies on the body to interpret what is being said. To be more particular, it gains an understanding of the nature of language through the body’s interactions with the outside environment and through previous experience.
We can better comprehend this by thinking back to a study in which participants were asked to undergo brain scans while they were being interviewed by researchers. In this study, it was discovered that giving the patients a narrative would cause their brains to light up just as if they were actually living that story themselves. This was the conclusion drawn from the findings of this particular study.
In other words, if you were to tell someone about the time you walked through the snow, their brains would light up as though they were going through the snow themselves if you were to tell them about the experience. This would include regions of the motor cortex that are linked with the actual motion of walking, as well as regions that are regulated by temperature and feelings received by the skin.
Employing your physical self to picture the event
To put it another way, the only reason you comprehend the details of what is being conveyed to you is because you are employing your physical self to picture the event in question.
As a result, this can explain a lot about how our bodies react when they are subjected to a specific activity. For instance, this explains why we could all of a sudden feel afraid when reading a terrifying novel or why we might feel hungry while being informed about a beautiful meal — our physiological response is the same as if it were occurring to us in real life!
The ramifications of this are wide-ranging, but one of the fields in which it is likely to have the most significant effect is artificial intelligence (AI). If this hypothesis is to be believed, then there is at least a chance that this way of thinking is a contradiction.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can be viewed of as a form of “disembodied cognition.” Maybe an artificial intelligence would need a physical form in order to be able to think!
This, of course, also highlights the significance of interacting with young children and guiding them through the process of discovering their surroundings.
