“Embodiment is a topic that has greatly influenced the recent multidis-

ciplinary study of human minds. Nancy Dess’s new edited book offers
a vivid, fresh look at the ways embodiment unfolds within many forms
of human action and meaning-making. Embodiment is not just the
brain or the biological body, but a dynamic organization that includes
brains and bodies interacting with the cultural, historical world in the
service of adaptive action. These essays are all a delight to read and of-
fer many new insights into the ways embodiment defines who we are as
unique human beings in shared worlds of embodied inter-subjectivity.”
—Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., former Distin-
guished Professor of Psychology, University of
California, Santa Cruz, USA

“A decade ago, I thought I was being radically inclusive when

I wrote an essay entitled, ‘Embodiment as a unifying perspective for
psychology.’ But this delightfully readable volume of short essays
greatly expands the embodiment program by documenting contri-
butions of embodiment to anthropology, biology, communication,
education, gender studies, geology, kinesiology, performing arts,
philosophy, physics, political science, psychology, and sociology.
I recommend it to all who are interested in human being.”
—Arthur Glenberg, Director of the Laboratory for
Embodied Cognition at Arizona State University,
USA and member of INICO, Universidad de
­Salamanca, Spain

“This collection of essays takes up the difficult challenge of approach-

ing embodied existence from different perspectives while breaking
away from the domination by the usual viewpoints. A very welcome
opening up of the wealth of perspectives, with the unifying ambition
to bring out the multifaceted character of the embodied human life.”
—Helena De Preester, Professor of Philosophy,
University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Ghent)
and Ghent University, Belgium

“This dazzling volume takes multidisciplinarity to a new level. From

cells to stars and from anxiety to avatars, leading researchers and
emerging luminaries offer an expansive and inspiring exploration
that will have much to teach anyone interested in embodiment.”
—Jesse Prinz, Distinguished Professor of
Philosophy and Director of the Committee for
Interdisciplinary Science Studies at the City
University of New York, Graduate Center, USA
“A Multidisciplinary Approach to Embodiment: Understanding
Human Being stands out from the crowd. This highly original
collection achieves true interdisciplinarity, bringing together con-
tributions from the social sciences, humanities, and biomedical
sciences to summarize current thinking on body, mind and world,
from multiple perspectives.”
—Daniel Casansanto, Associate Professor of Human
Development and Psychology and Director of the
Experience and Cognition Laboratory at Cornell
University, USA
A Multidisciplinary
Approach to Embodiment

This is a collection of pithy and accessible essays on the nature and

implications of human embodiment, that explore the concept of
“human being” in the most unprecedented manner through seem-
ingly disparate academic disciplines.
With contributions from key researchers from around the world,
this book takes up embodiment through the lens of “new mate-
rialism.” It eschews the view that human beings are debased by
materiality and creates a vision of humans as fully embodied crea-
tures situated in a richly populated living planet. The essays in this
volume will illustrate and foster new materialist thought in areas
including psychology, astrophysics, geology, biology, sociology,
philosophy, and the performing arts. The book’s engaging and en-
lightening content is made accessible to readers with relatively little
background in the various academic disciplines.
This is an important and fascinating text which invites readers to
explore and expand their understanding and experience of embod-
iment. It will be particularly useful for postgraduate students and
scholars of theoretical and philosophical psychology, philosophy of
the mind, and social and cultural anthropology.

Nancy K. Dess, PhD, is Professor of Psychology at Occidental

College, USA, with primary expertise in experimental and com-
parative psychology. Beyond her empirical research, she advocates
for multilevel integrative approaches to complex phenomena, the
democratizing potential of science, and fully embodied conceptu-
alizations of the lives of humans and other animals.
Advances in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology
Series Editor: Brent D. Slife, Brigham Young University

Editorial Board

Scott Churchill Jeffrey Reber

University of Dallas West Georgia University
Blaine Fowers Frank Richardson
University of Miami University of Texas
Mark Freeman Kate Slaney
College of Holy Cross Simon Fraser University
James Lamiell Jeff Sugarman
Georgetown University Simon Fraser University
Jack Martin Thomas Teo
Simon Fraser University York University
Mary Beth Morrissey
Fordham University

Subjectivity in Psychology in the Era of Social Justice

Bethany Morris, Chase O’Gwin, Sebastienne Grant,
Sakenya McDonald

The Ethical Visions of Psychotherapy

Kevin Smith

Therapeutic Ethics in Context and in Dialogue

Kevin Smith

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Embodiment

Understanding Human Being
Nancy K. Dess

From Scientific Psychology to the Study of Persons

A Psychologist’s Memoir
Jack Martin

[Link]
A Multidisciplinary
Approach to Embodiment
Understanding Human Being

Edited by Nancy K. Dess

First published 2021
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Taylor & Francis
The right of Nancy K. Dess to be identified as the author
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual essays, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may
be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used
only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dess, Nancy Kimberly, editor.
Title: A multidisciplinary approach to embodiment:
understanding human being / edited by Nancy K. Dess.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020019082 (print) | LCCN 2020019083 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367370275 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429352379 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Mind and body. | Social psychology. | Ethnology.
Classification: LCC BF161 .M865 2020 (print) |
LCC BF161 (ebook) | DDC 128—dc23
LC record available at [Link]
LC ebook record available at [Link]

ISBN: 978-0-367-37027-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-35237-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
Contents

List of Contributors x
Foreword by Series Editor xiii
BR E N T D. SL I F E
Preface by Book Editor xvi
NA NC Y K . DE S S

Introduction: Face It or Replace It?: Why

Computational Metaphors Fall Short and Why We
Need a New Approach 1
L OU I SE BA R R E T T

PART I
Being 7

1 The Matter of Life and Death: How Humans Embody

the Universe 9
IRIS SCHRIJ VER AND K AREL SCHRIJ VER

2 At Home in Deep Time 14

M A RC I A B JOR N E RU D

3 The Secrets of Life: The Vital Roles of RNA

Networks and Viruses 20
LU I S P. V I L L A R R E A L A N D GU E N T H E R W I T Z A N Y

4 A Brief History of Death 27

SH E L D ON S OL OMON
viii Contents

PART II
Engaging 33

5 Attentive Bodies: Epigenetic Processes and Concepts

of Human Being 35
SA M A N T H A F RO S T

6 Uncovering the Living Body: Bodies and Agents in the

Cognitive Sciences 40
FRED K EIJZER

7 Approaching Learning Hands First: How Gesture

Influences Thought 46
SUSA N G OL DI N - M E A D OW

8 Digitization, Reading, and the Body: Handling Texts

on Paper and Screens 51
A N N E M A NGE N

PART III
Coordinating 57

9 Embodied Time: A Shared, Ancient Heritage 59

BA R BA R A H E L M

10 Rhythm and the Body 65

G R E G ORY A . BRYA N T

11 The Embodiment of Emotion 71

GIOVA N NA C OL OM BE T T I

12 Body Focus in Expert Action 77

BA R BA R A GA I L MON T E RO, JOH N T ON E R ,
A N D A I DA N MOR A N

PART IV
(Re)Locating 83

13 How Bodies Become Viscous 85

A RU N SA L DA N H A
 Contents ix

14 Embodiment, Plasticity, Biosociality, and Epigenetics:

The Politics of a Vulnerable Body for Toxic Times 91
M AU R I Z IO M E L ON I

PART V
Healing 109

17 Vital Energy, Health, and Medicine 111

SH I N L I N A N D GA E TA N C H E VA L I E R

18 The Power of Touch: Oxytocin, the “Love Hormone,”

Is Released by Massage Therapy 118
T I F FA N Y F I E L D

19 Traumatic Embodiment: Traumatic Exposure and Healing 121

PAU L A T HOM S ON

Index 141
Contributors

Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, PhD, is co-founder and publishing director of

one of Africa’s leading publishing houses, Cassava Republic
Press and co-founder of Tapestry Consulting, a boutique re-
search and training company focused on gender, sexuality, and
transformational issues in Nigeria.
Louise Barrett, PhD, is Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Cogni-
tion, Evolution and Behaviour at the University of Lethbridge,
Alberta, Canada.
Marcia Bjornerud, PhD, is Professor of Geosciences at Lawrence
University in Appleton, Wisconsin, USA.
Gregory A. Bryant, PhD, is Professor of Communication and Mem-
ber of the Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture at the
University of California at Los Angeles, California, USA.
Anthony Chemero, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology
at the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.
Gaetan Chevalier, PhD, is Senior Research Scientist of the Lab-
oratory for Mind-Body Signaling and Energy Research in the
Department of Developmental & Cell Biology and the Su-
san Samueli Integrative Health Institute at the University of
California, Irvine, California, USA.
Giovanna Colombetti, PhD, is Associate Professor of Philosophy in
the Department of Sociology, Philosophy, and Anthropology at
the University of Exeter, UK.
Nancy K. Dess, PhD, is Professor of Psychology at Occidental Col-
lege in Los Angeles, California, USA.
Tiffany Field, PhD, is Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics,
Psychology, and Psychiatry, and Director of the Touch Research
 Contributors xi

Institute at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine,

Miami, Florida, USA.
Samantha Frost, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Political
Science, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and
the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA.
Susan Goldin-Meadow, PhD, is Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Ser-
vice Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Compara-
tive Human Development at the University of Chicago, Chicago,
Illinois, USA.
Patricia Adair Gowaty, PhD, is Distinguished Professor Emerita in
the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the Uni-
versity of California at Los Angeles, USA, and Distinguished
Research Professor Emerita in the Odum School of Ecology at
the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA.
Barbara Helm, PhD, is Professor for Biological Rhythms of Nat-
ural Organisms in the Groningen Institute for Evolutionary
Life Sciences (GELIFES) at the University of Groningen, The
Netherlands, and Visiting Professor in the Institute of Biodi-
versity, Animal Health & Comparative Medicine, University of
Glasgow, UK.
Fernanda Herrera, PhD, is a researcher in the Department of
Communication at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California,
USA.
Fred Keijzer, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Philoso-
phy of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.
Shin Lin, PhD, is Professor and Founding Director of the Labo-
ratory for Mind-Body Signaling and Energy Research in the
Department of Developmental & Cell Biology and the Susan
Samueli Integrative Health Institute at the University of Califor-
nia, Irvine, California, USA.
Anne Mangen, PhD, is Professor in the Norwegian Reading Centre
at the University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway.
Maurizio Meloni, PhD, is ARC Future Fellow and Associate Pro-
fessor at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Global-
isation (ADI) at Deakin University, Australia.
Barbara Gail Montero, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy at the City
University of New York, USA.
xii Contributors

Aidan Moran, PhD, was/late Professor of Cognitive Psychology and

Director of the Psychology Research Laboratory at University
College Dublin, Ireland.
Arun Saldanha, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Geography,
Environment and Society, University of Minnesota, USA.
Iris Schrijver, MD, a physician specialized in laboratory medicine
and molecular genetics, Adjunct Professor of Pathology in the
School of Medicine at Stanford University, California, USA. She
also is Medical Director of Clackamas Volunteers in Medicine in
Oregon City, Oregon, USA.
Karel Schrijver, PhD, is an astrophysicist and science writer whose
work focuses on how the magnetic activity of stars shapes the
environments of stars and the habitability of planets. He headed
the investigations for two of NASA’s most powerful instruments
observing the Sun and led educational programs about star–
planet connections for young researchers.
Sheldon Solomon, PhD, is Professor of Psychology at Skidmore
College, Saratoga Springs, New York, USA.
Paula Thomson, PsyD, is Professor of Kinesiology at California
State University, Northridge (US) and Professor Emerita/Senior
Scholar at York University (Toronto, Ontario, Canada). She is
also a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice in Los
Angeles, California, USA.
John Toner, PhD, is Lecturer in Sports Coaching and Performance
at the University of Hull, UK.
Luis P. Villarreal, PhD, is Professor Emeritus in the Department
of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the University of
California, Irvine, California, USA.
Guenther Witzany, PhD, is an independent philosopher at Telos –
Philosophische Praxis, in Vogelsangstraße, Buermoos, Austria.
Foreword by Series Editor

Brent D. Slife

Psychologists need to face the facts. Their commitment to empiri-

cism for answering disciplinary questions does not prevent pivotal
questions from arising that cannot be evaluated exclusively through
empirical methods, hence the title of this series: Advances in Theoret-
ical and Philosophical Psychology. For instance, such moral questions
as, “What is the nature of a good life?” are crucial to psychothera-
pists but are not answerable through empirical methods alone. And
what of the methods themselves? Many have worried that our current
psychological means of investigation are not adequate for fully un-
derstanding the person (e.g., Schiff, 2019). How do we address this
concern through empirical methods without running headlong into
the dilemma of methods investigating themselves? Such questions are
in some sense philosophical, to be sure, but the discipline of psychol-
ogy cannot advance even its own empirical agenda without address-
ing questions like these in defensible ways.
How then should the discipline of psychology deal with such dis-
tinctly theoretical questions? We could leave the answers exclusively
to professional philosophers, but this option would mean that the
conceptual foundations of the discipline, including the conceptual
framework of empiricism itself, are left to scholars who are outside
the discipline. As undoubtedly helpful as philosophers are and will
be, this situation would mean that the people doing the actual psy-
chological work, psychologists themselves, are divorced from the
people who formulate and reformulate the conceptual foundations
of that work. This division of labor would not seem to serve the
long-term viability of the discipline.
Instead, the founders of psychology — thinkers such as Wundt,
Freud, and James — recognized the importance of psychologists
in formulating their own foundations. These parents of psychology
xiv Foreword by Series Editor

not only did their own theorizing, in cooperation with many other
disciplines, they also realized the significance of psychologists con-
tinuously re-examining these theories and philosophies. This re-
examination process allowed for the people most directly involved
in and knowledgeable about the discipline to be the ones to decide
whether changes were needed, and how such changes would best be
implemented. This book series is dedicated to that task, the exam-
ining and re-examining of psychology’s foundations.

Book Foreword
The present book exemplifies this re-examination process beau-
tifully. One of the long-neglected foundations of psychology is its
dualism, in all its forms. Indeed, one of those forms is a prominent
aspect of many books in this series, the duality of fact and value or
objectivity and subjectivity. Here, a set of facts — the “objective”
realm — is considered separable from values or subjectivity. This
type of dualism is perhaps most easily seen in many conceptions of
science (or perhaps scientism, Gantt & Williams, 2019). The sub-
jectivity of researchers (values, assumptions) is thought to be sepa-
rable from the objectivity of data. Most psychological researchers
will readily admit that subjective and objective factors are difficult
to separate, but they presume through many modern methods that
such factors should be separated (Gantt & Williams, 2019).
The fascinating thing about the present book is that it challenges
an entirely different type of dualism, the separability of mind
and body. Now this dualism has long been viewed as a problem,
especially in the neurosciences. However, few of those who have
problematized mind–body dualism have actually offered viable
solutions to the problem. Either the “solution” is what some have
called a “one-sided dualism” (Hedges & Burchfield, 2005; Slife &
Hopkins, 2005) where a variation on materialism is offered that
contains hidden non-materialist factors and assumptions. Or the
so-called solution does not lead to alternative psychological re-
search and practices that are useful.
On these issues in particular, I invite the reader to consider the
embodiment conception of the present book as a more viable solu-
tion to the problem of mind–body dualism (which can itself imply
many other dualisms, such as nature-nurture). Embodiment is not
only conceptually and philosophically rigorous but also pregnant
with heuristic insights and practical ramifications. No conception
is unassailable, of course, but even a modest scan of the book will
 Foreword by Series Editor xv

reveal its intellectual rigor and pragmatic relevance. Its chapters are
wonderfully diverse, with authors from widely divergent disciplines
and nationalities. Yet what is nicely thematized across the book’s
many accessible chapters is a reclaiming (from Merleau-Ponty) of
not only the mind as embodied but also perhaps a “mentalized”
body with a kind of wisdom and rationality. Suddenly the brain is
no longer the center of information processing, and the body is no
longer merely inert meat.
So buckle your seatbelt, dear reader, because you are in for a
wild ride of “ah-has” and “wows” — a grand combination of revo-
lutionary perspective and practical implication that will doubtless
establish this book as a profound resource for years to come.

References
Gantt, E., & Williams, R. (2018). On hijacking science: Exploring the nature
and consequences of overreach in psychology. London: Routledge.
Hedges, D., & Burchfield, C. (2005). The assumptions and implications
of the neurobiological approach to depression. In Slife, B., Reber, J., &
Richardson, F. (Eds.), Critical thinking about psychology: Hidden as-
sumptions and plausible alternatives. Washington, DC: APA Books.
Schiff, B. (2019). Situating qualitative methods in psychological science.
London: Routledge.
Slife, B., & Hopkins, R. (2005). Alternative assumptions for neuroscience.
In Slife, B., Reber, J., & Richardson, F. (Eds.), Critical thinking about
psychology: Hidden assumptions and plausible alternatives. Washington,
DC: APA Books.
Preface by Book Editor

Nancy K. Dess

It is dangerous to show man [sic, hereafter for he/his/him] too

clearly how much he resembles the beast without at the same
time showing him his greatness. It is also dangerous to allow
him too clear a vision of his greatness without his baseness. It
is even more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both. But
it is very profitable to show him both
(Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1669)

In this passage, Pascal builds on René Descartes’ distinction

between the material body and the immaterial mind: The body
debases humans by connecting them to the beast; the mind ele-
vates humans by separating them from the beast. Yet Pascal warns
against what can be termed hegemonic human exceptionalism – a
dominant discourse that perpetuates fascination with the human
mind and its presumed specialness. That exceptionalist spotlight
banishes to darkness other animals and human creatureliness.
A Multidisciplinary Approach to Embodiment rejects Pascal’s
view that humans are debased by similarities to other animals or
made great by differences from them, but it embraces his warn-
ing about ignorance of human creatureliness. Collectively, the es-
says articulate a vision of humans as fully embodied creatures on
a richly populated planet derived from stardust. In so doing, they
aim to transform how readers think and feel about being human,
alive, and earthly.
Why heed advice from hundreds of years ago? Body troubles sur-
vived the 17th century. In Denial of Death (1973), anthropologist
Ernest Becker described how humans everywhere cope with the
body’s troublingly temporary nature by denying mortality in cre-
ative ways. Two 20th-century intellectual movements can be read
 Preface by Book Editor xvii

as death-denying or, at least, as side-stepping the deep implications

of embodiment:

• A central trope in the Cognitive Revolution was the human

mind as information processor. Whereas ancient Egyptian
morticians preserved most of the body while discarding the
brain, cognitive scientists revered the brain as the hardware for
a computer-like mind and discarded the rest of the body as an
inert input/output device.
• Postmodernism brought forward the idea that through human
meaning making, the body comes into being as a symbol or po-
sition in decentralized webs of norms and power. Inquiry into
human bodies in terms of other-than-discursive processes was
irrelevant, if not prohibited on grounds that it “biologized” or
“naturalized” humans.

For all these movements accomplished, neither unsettled venera-

tion of the human mind. Other animals remained in shadow and
the human body remained ethereal, more an avatar than a large,
bipedal animal who, in addition to deciding, remembering, and
making meaning, also breathes, bleeds, bellows, and births babies.
Today, Cartesian mind/body dualism still leaks out in phrases
such as “mind/body relationship” and “mind over matter.” Uttering
“humans and animal” telegraphs that humans are not animals, and
referring to persons as “animals” usually aims to insult and “dehu-
manize.” These taken-for-granted meanings expose the thinking hu-
man as an implicit norm from which fully embodied animals deviate.
In academe, dualism lingers in the “nature/nurture” dichotomy
and its kin (“biological/social,” “innate/learned”) despite con-
sensus that they are profoundly flawed. They reinforce and are
reinforced by scholarly fragmentation. Humanities carry on in de-
partments, buildings, and conferences separate from sciences. “So-
cial” sciences are separated from “natural” sciences as if sociality
is not natural, and “life” sciences are separated from “physical”
sciences as if living things are not physical. Moreover, scientific
disciplines comprise a status hierarchy, with disciplines focused on
the inanimate – the “hard sciences” – at the top and status declin-
ing as demographic diversity and concern with complex sociality
rise. Scholarship transcending these sociostructural boundaries
remains rare.
xviii Preface by Book Editor

Change is afoot. Thinkers across the scholarly landscape are

engaging embodiment in fresh ways. The new approaches depart
from both reductionistic views of the body and human-centric men-
talism. Bodies are being viewed as at once universal and varied,
solid and permeable, stable and mutable, eternal and ephemeral.
An overarching principle is that the living human body has been
and continues to be shaped and deployed through recursive inter-
actions within and between bodies, embedded in dynamic inter-
secting ecologies.
This emerging view infuses the following collection of essays by
an international constellation of scholars in anthropology, biology,
cognitive science, communication, education, gender studies, ge-
ology, kinesiology, performing arts, philosophy, physics, political
science, psychology, and sociology. Humans receive more attention
than other animals, but not as a distraction from debasement or
annihilation. Here, the focus draws purposeful attention to one
kind of animal – our kind – living among others, with myriad lenses
aimed at levels of organization from subcellular to cosmic and on
time scales from deep time to momentary.
The exploration herein begins with an Introduction that lays out
the justification for an approach to embodiment of unprecedented
scope. The ensuing essays are organized around five themes: Being,
Engaging, Coordinating, (Re)Locating, and Healing. Each essay be-
gins with a concise statement that orients readers to the thesis and
concludes with a short list of resources (For Sources and Further
Reading) containing source materials, technical details, and sup-
porting evidence that supplement the text, along with more food
for thought. The Epilogue conjures the future by tracing the trajec-
tory from modern cognitivism through the emergence of embodied
cognition enthusiasms to a conceptualization of embodiment that
charts for the scholarly community a rich, integrative path forward.
This book invites readers to expand their understanding and
experience of embodiment. It also reveals academic disciplines as
seemingly disparate as psychology, physics, and performing arts
to be interconnected via hubs and bridges, not contained within
siloes. By literally “fleshing out” humans for tomorrow’s scholars,
this book plants seeds for a transdisciplinary metatheory of human
being – and for the nimble, diverse, just academy needed to fulfill
its promise.
Introduction: Face It or
Replace It?
Why Computational
Metaphors Fall Short and Why
We Need a New Approach
Louise Barrett

We are living creatures, so comparisons to machines and com-

putational devices will always fall short as metaphors for how we
make sense of the worlds in which we live.

When Shakespeare wrote that Juliet was the sun, he didn’t mean
she was a giant ball of flaming gas, or that she lived eight million
miles away from earth. He meant she was the center of Romeo’s
world, the life-giving force without which he could not survive.
That’s how it goes with metaphors. We don’t apply them literally;
we use them to capture a certain quality of the object in question, a
way of seeing through one thing to gain a fresh appreciation of an-
other. Similarly, in science, we use metaphors to help us think about
the things we don’t understand in terms of the things we do. With-
out the metaphor, we would have no name to describe the abstract
concepts and complex processes we have to grapple with. Using a
metaphor turns the abstract into something concrete and provides
us with a guide to discovery.
I raise this issue because we seem to have lost control of our met-
aphors when thinking about brains and cognition. Descriptions of
brains as computers, and neural activity and associated psycholog-
ical processes as information processing, are now taken quite liter-
ally. For example, in an op-ed for the New York Times, published
a few years ago, Gary Marcus bluntly told us all to “face it, your
brain is a computer,” strongly implying that using metaphors is not
a means to kick-start new ways of thinking, but a way to identify
the “right” way of thinking about things. For Marcus, Descartes’
idea of the brain as a hydraulic pump, for example, was just one
in a long list of failed metaphors that could never give us the right
2 Louise Barrett

answer. But Descartes was not wrong as such, he was simply using
the best metaphor he had at his disposal to make familiar what
was otherwise deeply unfamiliar and difficult to grasp. Obviously,
times change, knowledge grows, we think differently, and we adopt
new and better metaphors. Descartes was a man of his time, and if
we have a better metaphor than he did, it’s because we have gained
more knowledge of the brain. Marcus goes further than this, how-
ever, suggesting that the computational brain is not simply a more
useful metaphor than a hydraulic pump, but precisely the right
comparison: Brains are computers, and those who object to this
idea are, quite simply, wrong. All we have to do, he says, is figure
out what kind of computers they are.
But here’s the thing: The objections that Marcus raises and then
dismisses against the computer metaphor – that computers are se-
rial, stored-program machines whereas brains are parallel; that
computers are digital and brains are analog; that computers can-
not generate emotions like humans – is like assuming Shakespeare
was, in fact, referring to Juliet’s resemblance to a giant ball of gas.
Such objections make his argument sound more plausible but fail
to capture the metaphor’s essence. The heart of the original com-
puter metaphor is the idea that brains construct an internal model
of our environment, and that this internal representation is what
allows us to act efficiently and effectively. Like computers, brains
take certain inputs, manipulate these in various ways to generate
our perception of the world, and then compute a set of outputs that
instruct our bodies how to act. This is the job of the brain, so the
argument goes, because the inputs our senses receive are too im-
poverished to allow us to cope with the world around us. The flat,
upside-down image on our retina, for example, has to be converted
into our dynamic three-dimensional view of the world. Our contact
with reality is therefore indirect, via the representational model our
brain builds, and not with the world itself. This view, as it turns
out, was more or less what Descartes suggested as well, so the gap
between Descartes’s and the computer metaphor is not so great as
Marcus makes it seem.
The idea that brains are biological computers and that cognition
is a process of computation is a legacy of the original artificial intel-
ligence project of the 1950s. Its guiding assumption was that intel-
ligence could be modeled by computers, and it focused on precisely
the kinds of representation-heavy abilities, like language skills and
mathematics, that were thought to epitomize intelligent behavior.
This approach failed to deliver on its promise. As Marcus admits,
 Face It or Replace It? 3

we are no closer to understanding the brain in computational terms

than we were 60 years ago. So perhaps we should change our meta-
phors, and so change the job description of the brain.
Instead of thinking of brains as representational, we can view
them as “performative”: Their job is not to model the world around
us, but to guide and control the actions of our bodies in an inherently
dynamic, unpredictable world. Rodney Brooks, the MIT roboticist,
makes the argument this way: Four billion years of evolution were,
in the main, spent refining the perception–action mechanisms that
guide effective action in the world. It took an enormously long time
to build insect-level intelligence, while those things we think of as
highly intelligent human capacities – language, logic, mathemat-
ics, chess – evolved very rapidly in less than a blink of evolution’s
eye. These distinctively human, representation-heavy capacities
must therefore have been pretty easy to implement once the for-
mer was in place, Brooks argues. This means we would do better
trying to understand how whole animals cope with changeable en-
vironments, rather than assuming that investigating the computing
power of brains in isolation will allow us to understand how flexi-
ble, adaptive behavior is produced.
Brooks was the pioneer of an alternative behavior-based ro-
botics, which demonstrated convincingly that flexible, adaptive,
intelligent behavior does not require a representation-heavy com-
putational model to achieve. He built robots with bodies that could
sense and act in ways that allowed the robot to “use the world as its
own best model” and didn’t worry about providing them with any
kind of central processing unit or “brain.” After all, why go to the
expense of representing the world, when the world itself contains
all the information needed? As inventor of the Roomba, the vac-
uum cleaner that uses precisely these principles to clean your house
all by itself, the strength of Brooks’ approach is clear: Ten million
Roomba owners can’t be wrong.
Rather than viewing the brain as the only factor responsible for
adaptive behavior, this “embodied” view of cognition regards the
brain as part of a dynamic system in which brains, bodies, and en-
vironment all come together to generate intelligent action. That is,
cognitive processes are grounded in action, and are not purely brain-
based phenomena, but also exploit both the body and environment
so that problems can be solved more cheaply than via energetically
expensive brain tissue. If you’ve ever wondered why a seahorse looks
so boxy and square, for example, it is because a tail with a square
cross-section enables firmer anchoring to marine plants than does
4 Louise Barrett

a circular one, which reduces the need for fine motor control. The
importance of bodies is also apparent among animals that are well
endowed with brain tissue, such as New Caledonian crows. These
birds have the ability to both make and use tools, but it is not appar-
ent that their brains are any larger or more complex than those of
the other members of the crow family. What New Caledonian crows
do possess, however, are very straight bills and forward-facing eyes
that improve their ability to grasp and visually guide the stick-like
tools they use to acquire food, giving them the edge over other crow
species.
Marcus, and other proponents of the standard cognitivist view,
give the impression that the representational–computational brain
is the only game in town. Although we humans can and do deal
with representations (after all, by reading the words on this page,
this is precisely what you are doing now), we need to entertain the
possibility that this is a nifty trick that humans developed over
the course of our own particular history, and not something that
all brains everywhere have evolved to do. It may also be useful to
continue using computational–representational models in certain
areas of neuroscience and psychology, while recognizing that such
models are, in all probability, wrong about the way brains actu-
ally work. Brains are not magical, as Marcus rightly says, but that
doesn’t mean they must obey the laws of computation. Work in ar-
tificial life, behavior-based robotics and embodied cognition sug-
gests we are reaching the limits of the computer metaphor, and it
may be time to try something new.
Perhaps another useful metaphor, as Daniel Nicholson suggests,
is to think of organisms as more like candle flames than machines.
A flame has an enduring and stable form, but this comes about as a
result of a continually ongoing set of dynamic processes. This met-
aphor highlights a crucial difference: Machines can only take part
in processes, but organisms are processes. You can turn a machine
off, and it will still be there, but not so an organism (well, it will for a
bit, but we call that being dead). In this alternative view, organisms
are thus seen as leaky processes spreading out across brain, body,
and world. Similarly, we may be able to advance our understanding
of ourselves and other organisms – and hopefully improve all plan-
etary life – by recognizing the need for a similarly leaky process of
knowledge production, one that regards disciplinary boundaries as
entirely porous and focuses on examining common areas of interest
from a variety of intersecting perspectives. The essays in this book
make for an excellent start.
 Face It or Replace It? 5

For Sources and Further Reading

Barrett, L. (2015). Beyond the brain: How body and environment shape
animal and human minds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Barrett, L. (2016). Why brains are not computers, why behaviorism is not
satanism, and why dolphins are not aquatic apes. The Behavior Analyst,
39(1), 9–23.
Brooks, R. (2002). Robot: The future of flesh and machines. London: Pen-
guin Books.
Leary, D. E. (Ed.). (1994). Metaphors in the history of psychology. Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Marcus, G. (2015). Face it, your brain is a computer. New York Times, June
27, 2015. [Link]
[Link]
Nicholson, D. J. (2018). Reconceptualizing the organism: From complex
machine to flowing stream. In Nicholson, D. J., & Dupré, J. (Eds.), Ev-
erything flows: Towards a processual philosophy of biology (pp. 139–166).
New York: Oxford University Press.
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
[Link] ndfra [Link]
Part I
Being

Of what is a human body made? How does it appear when viewed

through lenses of deep space, deep time, or a microscope? What
makes a body alive, or dead? How big or complicated do bodies
need to be for social life to emerge? How much of a human body is
actually human? The essays in this section take up these questions
at levels of organization from cosmic to subcellular and on time
scales from geological to momentary.
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
[Link] ndfra [Link]
1 The Matter of Life and Death
How Humans Embody
the Universe
Iris Schrijver and Karel Schrijver

The human body and the network of terrestrial life that enables
its existence are always in flux, creating and exchanging countless
molecules, made mostly of elements forged inside stars or in the ex-
plosions that end their existence. Captured from interstellar space
as the solar system took shape, these essential elements are shared
by all life on Earth, shattering the notion of independent existence
and highlighting universal interconnectedness.

The unfathomable vastness and the staggering hierarchy of scales in

the Universe defy immediate experience, complete understanding,
and even our imagination because astronomical numbers reach be-
yond any sense of practical reality. Yet, they fascinate. They spark
scientific research as much as philosophical discussion and compel
us to consider how human life fits in. An exploration of the myriad
connections between life and the Universe leads to a startling, per-
haps unsettling conclusion: We are nothing even as we encompass
everything. But how, exactly, is that manifested?
All measurable time originated 14.6 billion years ago with the
Big Bang that hurled the Universe into existence. The ensuing in-
ferno of expanding and collapsing gaseous clouds eventually gave
birth to uncounted galaxies, of which we can see only a trillion or
two. In each of these, in cycle after cycle of successive generations,
billions of planetary systems took shape around stars that sustain
nuclear fusion until they fade away or explode. The Universe may
seem ageless, but the countless individual objects contained in it,
from entire galaxies to individual rocks, have materialized in on-
going processes of formation to obliteration. By current estimates,
our own Milky Way Galaxy alone contains 100–400 billion stars
and a multiple of that number in planets. Out of those, perhaps ten
billion might have Earth-like characteristics, with some potentially
10 Iris Schrijver and Karel Schrijver

harboring life. All are located lightyears beyond the Solar System
and remain out of reach for humanity.
At 4.6 billion years old, the Solar System is the home of Earth and
seven other planets. Earth is a mid-sized planet, currently support-
ing about 7.7 billion people and the only place, anywhere, known
to sustain life. Based on microfossils of the earliest single-celled
organisms, life on Earth began at least 2.5 billion years ago, but
ancillary evidence suggests that life emerged around 3.9 billion
years ago. Quite possibly on a random Tuesday afternoon. Earth
orbits a sole star, the Sun, which is a middleweight star projected
to continue its nuclear fusion for another five billion years. Given
its life-sustaining energy, that should come as a relief! Apart from
the Sun and the planets, the Solar System includes other heavenly
bodies such as comets, which are frozen time capsules made of gas,
dust, and rock from interstellar space. Comets date back to the for-
mation of the Solar System and are made from the same materials.
Although usually unnoticed, comet matter continues to sprinkle
onto Earth at a rate that is currently about 260,000 pounds per day.
As inhabitants of Earth, human beings have a body that mirrors
the complexity of the Universe. With a ballpark figure of 50 trillion
cells per average body, the cells in a single human body outnumber
the stars in our Galaxy 500 to 1 and Earth’s population around
10,000 to 1. Within each cell reside approximately the same as-
tounding number of atoms, a fraction of which make spiraling clus-
ters that contain our DNA, an extremely thin string some two yards
long so tightly coiled up that, if unfolded, it could wrap around
its cell thousands of times. Analogous to events elsewhere in the
Universe, human existence is characterized by cycles of arising and
passing – not only in the literal sense of birth and death but also in
terms of what happens in the body during a lifetime. The tissues and
their constituent cells that shape human bodies enable countless as-
tonishingly coordinated functions. However, the stresses within the
functioning body and those imposed from outside frequently cause
cells to fail. In order to keep things running smoothly, entire cells
and their building blocks are replaced and regenerated in a process
that involves millions of cells every second, although this renewal
becomes less efficient over time as evidenced by the aging process.
Hidden in the background of each lived life, the inner workings of
the human body are always in motion, taking care of a continuously
occurring vast number of adjustments. The hundreds of different
cell types have life spans ranging from days to years but overall are
replaced about every seven years. This cell turnover amounts to
 The Matter of Life and Death 11

the weight of an entire human body each year! Cell contents turn
over with an even greater frequency. Take water, for example, which
makes up the largest bulk of body weight and volume and is com-
pletely exchanged in a matter of weeks, at most. Water is but one of
an immense collective of molecules found in every cell that includes
the four major classes of organic compounds: carbohydrates, pro-
teins, lipids, and nucleic acids. These facilitate functionality, enable
energy usage and storage, and balance all of life’s chemical reac-
tions. But the human body does not make all of these itself, and
those that it does make require building blocks and energy to be
put together. That energy is supplied by combining the oxygen we
breathe with the food we eat, but not directly. Between ingestion
and use sits digestion that is enabled by the microbiome: Human
beings are colonized by hundreds of species of bacteria. These or-
ganisms, on surface areas outside and inside the body, exist with
us in a symbiotic relationship. Astonishingly, they outnumber the
human cells of the body. And whereas bacteria are most promi-
nently known for their disease-causing capacity, the microbiome
categorically deserves more positive press. Not only does it process
our food at the molecular level, it affects mind-states such as mood
and helps strengthen our immune defenses. Ultimately, it critically
contributes to the maintenance of health.
The energy in our food is stored there by other life forms that
take it from yet another source: Almost all life on Earth depends
on electromagnetic energy that is generated by nuclear fusion in
the core of the gas ball that is our Sun. This energy ultimately es-
capes the Sun as warming, energizing light. Sunlight increases the
planet’s temperature well above the deep-freezing background of
the Universe and supports the growth of plants, thus sustaining the
animals that use oxygen and consume food. Plants use the Sun’s en-
ergy to change electromagnetic bonds in organic compounds that,
among other things, enable the growth and ripening of fruits and
vegetables. Only weeks after leaving the Sun, the energy may be
harvested and enjoyed as food.
The human body is always in a profoundly transient state of be-
ing. Accordingly, it is more similar to a relatively constant pattern
that allows the perception of a degree of continuity than it is to a
static entity with any measure of actual permanence. What out-
lasts the constant changes is a collection of energy and matter, all
of which is steadily replicated to preserve the characteristics of an
individual during the span of a lifetime. It will be evident by now
that anyone’s chronologic age is a practical concept useful for daily
12 Iris Schrijver and Karel Schrijver

life but in fact amounts to nothing more than an illusion. All of this
provokes the question: What is the essence of the human body, and
indeed of life? All life on Earth is integrated with replacement and
recycling processes on multiple levels. On the level of the organism,
the chemical matter consumed by eating, drinking, and breathing
may become integrated for a while to (re)build and power the body,
only to be discarded and replaced in due time. As amazing as that
is, it represents a narrow view. There is a much larger perspective
on life that begins to take shape as we consider the energy on which
life depends.
The human body is not solely composed of stardust bound by
energy coming from the Sun: It exists by the grace of elements that
make up, and are made by, the Universe. Only the body’s hydrogen
is as old as the Universe. All other elements originate from nuclear
fusion inside stars and from explosions that ensued upon the end of
their existence. Eventually, gravity trapped enough matter to con-
figure our corner of the Universe. The matter that forms us partic-
ipates not only in cosmic events but also in organic and inorganic
Earth cycles such as continental drift, the water cycle, and the ni-
trogen cycle. A small amount of matter is added whenever comets
hit the Earth or when invisible showers of ultrafast particles enter
the atmosphere, and some matter is lost because the atmosphere
slowly escapes into space. All life on Earth is composed of elements
that are billions of years old, and one of these (hydrogen) has been
around as long as the Universe has existed.
It seems a cliché to say that we are made of stardust as if it were a
platitude only useful for the lyrics of the 1970s song Woodstock by
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. But dismissing this notion would
negate that human beings are a very small piece of an unfathom-
ably large puzzle, in which the elements that build our bodies are
inexorably intertwined with other animals, plants, single-celled
organisms, general biological and geological processes, and with
the Solar System, the Milky Way Galaxy, and all of the Universe
that stretches out to infinity. The diversity in the connections and
all their processes is achieved by variation among molecules and
the particular assembly of the millions of atoms from which these
molecules are made. Life on Earth is based on the elements that
are accessible in a form that supports chemical reactions and that
are most readily available. Therefore, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon,
and nitrogen comprise almost all of our body weight. What the hu-
man body is made of, the origin of its components, how it is main-
tained yet always changing, and how it is intimately connected with
 The Matter of Life and Death 13

everything around it and with the history of time and space may
remain obscure most of the time, yet human beings are never sep-
arate from a magnificent, all-encompassing, universal ecology. We
embody the Universe in a literal sense.
Becoming conscious of the profound interconnectedness of life
and the Universe is not inconsequential: That awareness makes it
difficult if not impossible to maintain a position along the lines of
a strict “self” versus “other,” or even “humans” versus “nature.”
It affects the consideration of other human beings as much as it
impacts the views held about other species. It challenges the no-
tion of human existence separate from nature and highlights the
futility of unquestioned human superiority. The pretense and hu-
bris of human existence during its relatively minimal presence in
the Universe have been revealed for what it is and, if life matters,
then actions matter. Life is determined by Earth’s climate, which is
undergoing unprecedented changes as a result of human activity.
During common astronomical and geological cycles, the biosphere
has been able to adapt to change by way of stabilizing feedback
loops on time scales beyond human lifespans that supported grad-
ual adaptation. At present, however, profound and rapidly unfold-
ing environmental changes may not be curbed prior to irreversible
effects. Our own existence is threatened as much as that of the life
forms and biological networks that nurture us. Does it matter? The
Universe will continue its cycles and recycling, its violent outbursts
and subtle changes, with or without human beings. What will it
take to awaken to the mystery and wonder? When will humans
truly embody the immense privilege of being part of the diversity
that is our home?

For Sources and Further Reading

Schrijver, K. (2018). One of ten billion Earths: How we learn about our plan-
et’s past and future from distant exoplanets. Oxford, UK: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Schrijver, K., & Schrijver, I. (2019). Living with the stars: How the human
body is connected to the life cycles of the Earth, the planets, and the stars.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
2 At Home in Deep Time
Marcia Bjornerud

Geology, with its focus on tangible records of the past, offers a

bridge between human experiences of the world and the abstract
existential perspectives of philosophy and physics. Becoming fa-
miliar with the narratives of natural history – the plots and protag-
onists that shaped the Earth – can provide a feeling of meaningful
“embeddedness” in the cosmos and help us make peace with our
embodied selves.

Among the sciences, geology has long been regarded as a second-tier

discipline. While institutions of higher education would be con-
sidered incomplete without physics, chemistry or biology depart-
ments, many colleges and universities have no programs in geology
or Earth sciences. Geology – the science certainly most relevant to
Earthlings – is not deemed worthy of an Advanced Placement test,
or a Nobel Prize. The roots of this attitude are complex. Geology is
a relatively young discipline, emerging as a distinct field only in the
mid-19th century, and lacking a unifying paradigm (plate tectonics)
until the mid-20th. As an applied science that has been propelled
largely by the ravenous pursuit of mineral and fossil fuel resources,
it has no claim to the cool intellectual purity of physics and chemis-
try. As a historical, time-and place-bound science, it until recently
has not been laboratory-based, carried out instead in the unruly
natural world where precision and certainty are rarely attained.
But there may be subtler psychological reasons that geology has
been treated as the unloved stepchild within the family of sciences.
Apart from its obvious threat to creationist and “young Earth”
worldviews, geology is radically transgressive because of its engage-
ment with physical artifacts of the distant past challenges long-held
ideas about the nature of matter, the mind/body divide and human
exceptionalism.
 At Home in Deep Time 15

The very fact that “embodiment” is a topic worthy of academic

scrutiny reveals how deeply the illusion of disembodiment is rooted
in western culture. This conviction is a strange amalgam of ideas –
philosophical, theological, scientific, technological – that accreted
in an almost physical way (a nice irony) over two millennia in west-
ern culture. The foundation of disembodiment is arguably Plato’s
concept of ethereal “forms” – the view that the true essences of re-
ality hover somewhere beyond our sensory experience of the world
and that physical objects we can see or touch are imperfect replicas
of these pure and inaccessible entities.
Centuries later, early gnostic Christians regarded all matter as
not merely imperfect but as defiled, as the antithesis of the divine. As
Christian monks and missionaries sought to purge every vestige of
nature worship from the populations they converted, renunciation
of the physical and corporeal became a moral doctrine. Old pan-
theons that were deeply embedded in the landscape were replaced
by an abstract, non-localized God and a theology that depicted this
world and our bodily selves as corrupt temporary dwellings where
souls could lose their way en route to heavenly salvation. Although
the Copernican and Newtonian revolutions in science later ruffled
feathers in the church by displacing the Earth from the center of
creation, they did not challenge the more fundamental credo that
our minds and souls were something beyond the Earthly realm. The
upstart science of geology was the first to do that.
The treatise that announced the arrival of geology as a distinct in-
tellectual endeavor was Sir Charles Lyell’s monumental three-volume
work Principles of Geology, first published between 1830 and 1833.
It was a widely distributed and immensely popular work, depicting
in vivid prose the emerging evidence for vanished worlds. Charles
Darwin took the first volume with him when he left on the voyage
of the HMS Beagle in 1831, and the book shaped his thinking about
how small, incremental changes over time could drive biological evo-
lution. Later, Darwin’s ideas would of course unleash the full wrath
of those unwilling to see humans as anything less than divinely fash-
ioned creatures.
But Lyell, trained as a lawyer, was a savvy rhetorician. Even as he
made the case for an incomprehensibly ancient Earth, he took great
care in Principles of Geology to draw a sharp line between the phys-
ical world whose secrets were being revealed and the intellectual
and spiritual domain of humankind. In his analysis of Lyell’s in-
fluence on Victorian culture (in the journal Victorian Poetry, 2004),
Michael Tomko considers Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam – an
16 Marcia Bjornerud

elegiac meditation on mortality in the context of materialist sci-

ence. Tomko notes, “Lyell’s work is often read only as a source of
overwhelming anxiety for Tennyson, as a baldly atheistic list of the-
ories or a dreadful set of facts, rather than as a complex, culturally
aware, religiously astute text” (p. 114). Whether or not Lyell himself
believed it, he intentionally downplayed the potential psychological
threat posed by the new geological worldview by “introducing a
strict, impassable division between the natural and spiritual [which]
provides a secure, interior, spiritual realm but also effectively evis-
cerates the body” (Tomko, p. 115).
Lyell’s tactical maneuver of keeping the human mind at a safe
remove from physical phenomena was temporarily successful –
allowing geology to enjoy two decades of unconditional love –
because the first editions of Principles of Geology did not directly
address biological evolution nor, especially, human origins. But
Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), Descent of Man (1871), and his
lesser known but prescient The Expression of the Emotions in Man
[sic] and Animals (1872) began to perforate Lyell’s “impassable di-
vision” by revealing how our bodies, minds, and behaviors can be
traced to animal ancestry. Today, modern advances in archeology,
genetics, neuroscience, psychology, and medicine make it increas-
ingly difficult to argue for any clear line between our physical and
mental selves. It is appearing more and more likely that we too are
mere matter.
But perhaps a neo-Lyellian geological perspective can help us
to embrace at last our embodied nature. As Lyell recognized, the
salient lesson of the geologic record is the power of time to alter,
erode, innovate, transmute, and recreate. If we feel diminished by
the idea of having arisen from mere matter, maybe it is because we
have underestimated matter.
Perhaps we don’t understand that 4.6 billion years ago, mere mat-
ter from stellar explosions coalesced to form a new star with fuel to
last 10 billion years, illuminating a swarm of nascent planets. Or
that the mere matter in one of those planets separated into a rocky
mantle and an iron core, which in turn began to convect. Or that
this roiling core, mere metal, soon began to generate a powerful
magnetic field that has ever after shielded the planet from cosmic
rays; meanwhile, the churning mantle refined itself through melting
and remelting, yielding magmas of basalt and then granite, laying
the foundations for mere continents. And that volcanoes conveying
this molten rock to the surface also exhaled mere water and carbon
dioxide that formed a mere ocean and atmosphere.
 At Home in Deep Time 17

And maybe we have not appreciated that soon after that, some
mere matter began to reproduce and continuously modify itself as
it spread out across the mere planet. And that when the Earth was
still in its childhood, some of those self-replicating organisms de-
veloped the sophisticated habit of photosynthesis. Using volcano
breath and the light of the sun, they infused the atmosphere with
free oxygen and have been feeding all the rest of us mere Earth-
lings for the subsequent 3.8 billion years. If we feel debased by the
idea we evolved from microbes, then we misjudge the astonishing
technological prowess and versatility of prokaryotes – and deny the
fact that the teeming microbiome of bacterial cells in our bodies
outnumbers our own animal cells. The lone ego is an illusion; each
of us is plural, multitudes.
The rock record makes obvious how our bodies are part of a
continuum from raw Earth to endlessly ramifying Life, an unbro-
ken chain of living organisms that stretches back to the early days
of the planet. How marvelous to know that our bones – minerals
made of calcium and phosphorous, derived from rocks – can be
mapped one-to-one onto those of almost every other vertebrate
from amphibians to zebras. How amazing to realize that our blood
is a distant memory of seawater. How good to feel in our marrow
that we are fully native to this old, verdant, resilient Earth. Any
alienation we feel is self-inflicted; any existential torment we may
suffer over our origins amounts to ignorance and disrespect for
our forebears.
Geology is a strange blend of the pragmatic and philosophical. It
is responsible for more than its share of environmental sins, but it
also offers breathtaking vistas of vast timespans. While other sci-
ences, particularly astrophysics, offer glimpses of the cosmic, their
focus is on objects too abstract and far away for us to grasp in any
literal way. Modern physics – the science of the physical world – is
largely non-physical, immaterial, theoretical.
The practice of geology is, in contrast, very physical, concerned
with tangible objects – rocks, fossils, mountains, ice – and involves
direct bodily engagement with the landscape. While laboratory sci-
ences strive to keep the bodies of investigators separate from the
objects of study, with white coats and enclosed experiments, geol-
ogists must enter into the terrain to fathom it. In fieldwork, geolo-
gists develop a visceral sense of scale by traversing topography on
foot; pace length and eye height are still used as measuring tools in
creating rough maps. And one’s evolving understanding of the geo-
logical backstory of a particular area is inevitably entangled with
18 Marcia Bjornerud

personal experience of that place – the weather, one’s companions,

where the group paused for lunch.
Although not everyone can or should become a geologist, geo-
logic habits of mind – a sense of temporal proportion, an instinct
for our place in Earth’s story – may serve all Earthlings as an an-
tidote to the dangerous illusion of disembodiment. Environmen-
tal misconduct and existential malaise both stem from a distorted
sense of who we are as a species in the context of the natural world.
Modern anomie arises out of disconnection from history and nat-
ural history, and it is intensified by the loss of physical engagement
with the world owing to our increasingly virtual interactions with
people and things.
The remedy is to reclaim our pre-Platonic kinship with the Earth
and all its denizens, animate and inanimate. Learning the narra-
tives of natural history and getting to know the protagonists by
name can provide a feeling of meaningful embodiment and em-
beddedness in the cosmos. This is the essential premise of Aldo
Leopold’s “Land Ethic” (in his 1949 Sand County Almanac) which

enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, wa-

ters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land… it changes the
role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to
plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-
members, and also respect for the community as such.
(p. 204)

As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes (in Orion Magazine, 2017), a first

step toward achieving such a shift in perception is to adopt a con-
scious “grammar of animacy”: “Kin are ripening in the fields; kin
are nesting under the eaves; kin are flying south for the winter, come
back soon. Our words can be an antidote to human exceptionalism,
to unthinking exploitation, an antidote to loneliness.”
Thinking like a geologist – or a botanist or ecologist – can si-
multaneously ground us and elevate us. Paradoxically, these Earth-
bound, very physical sciences yield transcendent insights. Matter,
both living and non-living, has accomplished many astonishing
things over the past four billion years. Our own material minds
have now learned to read the archives of those eons. Why would we
even consider disavowing such a long and distinguished heritage of
embodiment?
 At Home in Deep Time 19

For Sources and Further Reading

Bjornerud, M. (2006). Reading the rocks: The autobiography of the earth.
New York: Basic Books.
Bjornerud, M. (2018). Timefulness: How thinking like a geologist can help
save the world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kimmerer, R. W. (2015). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scien-
tific knowledge and the teaching of plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed
Editions.
Von Humboldt, A. (2014). Views of nature (M. Person, S. Jackson, & L. D.
Walls, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (Original work
published in 1807).
3 The Secrets of Life
The Vital Roles of RNA
Networks and Viruses
Luis P. Villarreal and Guenther Witzany

Viruses and related infectious genetic parasites are the most abundant
biological agents on this planet. They invade all cellular organisms,
are key agents in the generation of adaptive and innate immune sys-
tems, and drive nearly all regulatory processes within living cells.

The lives of humans and other large animals might seem distantly
connected to bits of subcellular agents such as viruses and simi-
lar genetic parasites. Their fates, however, are intimately entwined.
A typical human body contains more microbes than human cells,
and incorporation of retroviruses and related genetic parasites into
DNA accounts for at least half of the human genome. Understand-
ing human life requires understanding life – and, specifically, com-
munication and cooperation – on the tiniest of scales.
The modern philosophy of communication makes clear that
natural languages or codes emerge through population-based in-
teractions. Any natural language or code is the result of social
interaction in which biotic populations can communicate, to co-
ordinate and organize common goals. No natural language speaks
itself, and no natural code codes itself. Therefore, there must be
competent agents to generate language signs or codes (including
the genetic code), combine signs to sequences based on grammar
rules, designate something by content-coherent rules (semantics),
and use signs in communicative interactions in real-life circum-
stances in a context-dependent way (pragmatics).
The study of ribonucleic acid (RNA) and viruses (virology) has il-
luminated how and why a genetic code emerged, evolved, and plays
essential roles in all living agents on this planet. Examining the ge-
netic code together with current RNA biology and virology reveals
that RNA and viruses cooperate. In addition, scholarly coopera-
tion between virology and philosophy of communication creates
a new perspective to better understand life, its complexity, and its
 The Secrets of Life 21

evolution. Cooperation – not selfishness – provides the key to un-

derstanding the secret of life. In this essay, we describe some of the
most important themes of this cooperation.

Falsified Key Assumptions of the 20th Century

Several key assumptions of the last century serve as a basis for a
picture of life, a picture which underlies most research projects and
convictions on emergence of disease, and therefore underlies in-
vestments in the development of new drugs. Those assumptions no
longer hold up against scientific knowledge:

• The one gene-one protein hypothesis has been falsified through

epigenetics, which demonstrates that varieties of different pro-
teins can be translated out of identical genetic information.
• The idea that noncoding deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is junk
has been falsified by demonstrating that noncoding regions as-
semble noncoding RNAs that play essential roles in transcrip-
tion, translation, and an abundance of gene regulations.
• The central dogma of molecular biology (DNA RNA  Protein)
has been falsified by demonstrating that RNAs that regulate gene
expression may be coded into DNA or, together with proteins,
change genetic identities.
• The idea that evolution results entirely from random genetic
variations and biological selection has been falsified. Genetic
variations have been assumed to be caused mainly by repli-
cation errors. Today’s genomic analysis reveals that besides
error-based mutations that may cause disease, most beneficial
genetic variations are the result of persistent viruses and their de-
fective relatives such as transposons and retrotransposons.

A New Picture of Life

Exposing the deep flaws in those key assumptions has set the stage
for a new picture of life, a view grounded in radically new under-
standings of the roles DNA, RNA, and viruses.

DNA Serves Only as Habitat (the “House”),

RNAs Act as Inhabitants
For decades, DNA has been the central focus of efforts to under-
stand the determinants of evolution and development of all organ-
isms (except RNA viruses). DNA sequencing promised knowledge
22 Luis P. Villarreal and Guenther Witzany

about which genes are responsible for features, capabilities, and

disease in all life forms, including humans. Genetic manipulation
as well as genetic engineering in breeding and gene therapy mainly
looked at DNA as a toolbox of molecular bricks. This focus persists
today. But DNA is only a relatively stable storage medium. DNA is
inhabited by RNA parasites with a variety of group-behavioral mo-
tifs and goals. Given the more active and dynamic role for RNA in
living organisms, we should consider RNAs as the living agents and
DNA as their habitat. From this perspective, RNAs can be seen as
open space invaders.

Evolution of Genetic Novelty by RNA Groups

How do RNA parasites exceed their physio-chemical boundaries
to transform life? Even at this subcellular level, a key principle op-
erates: Group membership is crucial for living networks to emerge.
Beyond DNA and RNA base pairs (e.g., the bases guanine and cy-
tosine forming a G–C base pair), RNA has multi-base sequences at
the end of the molecule (stem loops). Single RNA stem loops interact
with other molecules in a physico-chemical way without features
that are biotic (i.e. characteristic of life forms). But any interaction
involving one RNA molecule can involve many other, different
RNA molecules. These interactions are building blocks of life.
When the density of RNA stem loops reaches a critical mass, bi-
ological selection emerges. Crucially, within biological selection of
RNA stem loops, a core of historic behavioral motifs is ever present.
These motifs include parasitism, splicing (ligation), splitting (cleav-
age), and group building. The motifs reflect and shape genetic and
group identities, a process of dynamic self-directed learning. Initial
learning requires learning self-identity.
How does self-identity emerge in RNA group building? Single
RNA stem loops join groups, and group membership is the pre-
requisite for self/non-self-differentiation. To survive, RNA stem
loop replicators must assemble in groups that dynamically gener-
ate group identity. RNA stem loops are ligated to other stem loops
that fit into the group identity and cleave those that do not fit.
Self-ligation of RNA stem loops forms a module-pool that partic-
ipates in many cooperative interactions, leading to ribozymes and
the capacity for RNA cleavage. Interestingly, the genetic identity of
RNA stem loops groups may change quickly in response to envi-
ronmental necessities, and formerly rejected stem loops may later
fit well into the group (or vice versa).
 The Secrets of Life 23

The ongoing, dynamic nature of group identity and selection also

is expressed in how infectious RNA stem loops operate via RNA
groups. These extended groups are called quasi-species consortia.
Quasi-species consortia produce and depend on diversity; diversity
is not an “error” but rather a fundamental property of the groups.
RNA stem loop variations play a crucial role in building quasi-species
consortia: Especially the binding-prone single-stranded loops and
bulges interact and build new groups with distinct identities. An
RNA group with a specific identity may cooperate with other RNA
groups in building networks. Importantly, RNA groups retain mem-
ory of past events via minorities, so their survival does not depend
on selection of a “Fittest Type” but rather on an ongoing process of
selection for heterogeneity.
The evolution of early RNA-based life, then, was communal: Co-
operation is key, and RNA group behavior generated the origin of
the genetic code, a real natural language.

Viruses Are Masters in the Editing of Genetic Codes

Viruses and related infectious genetic parasites are the most abun-
dant biological agents on this planet. They vastly outnumber cellu-
lar life forms, invade all cellular organisms, and serve as key agents
in the generation of adaptive and innate immune systems. The in-
vasion strategy that results in persistence within host genomes (ge-
nomic parasitism) provides novel evolutionary genetic identities that
were not present prior to the invasion. The remnants of persistent
viral infection events include transposable elements (transposons
and retrotransposons) in the host genome which all share a repeti-
tive sequence syntax. Even highly fragmented parasitic genetic el-
ements can create new RNA networks that are directly involved
in gene regulation found in all organisms. When viruses cooperate
with hosts, they are the only living entities that share all variants of
genetic sequence syntax from RNA to DNA, from single-stranded
to double-stranded, and from repetitive to nonrepetitive sequences.
One cooperative motif that is successful for invading DNA hab-
itats is the addiction module. It is the main behavioral motif that
interconnects communication of RNA groups, viruses, and cell-
based organisms and accounts for the persistence of viral elements.
Competing genetic parasites, together with a host immune system,
build counterbalancing modules and genetic counterregulation (e.g.,
toxin/antitoxin, restriction/modification, insertion/deletion, etc.).
In such a counterbalanced module, viruses do not harm the host.
24 Luis P. Villarreal and Guenther Witzany

Host organisms depend on such counterbalancing agents and are in

that sense “addicted” to them: If the counterbalance is disturbed,
then one part of the addiction module (e.g., a toxin) may become
dominant and harm the host. Most disease results from addiction
modules being out of counterbalanced control.
Thus, like stem-loop RNA consortia, viruses are a force for
ancient, recent, and contemporary life. They are natural genome
editors with core competences including innovation, integration,
regulation, and setting the stage for further selection (exaptation).
Wherever viruses exist and interact with hosts (the virosphere), per-
sistent viral life strategies are beneficial for their hosts. The strate-
gies result from special group behavioral motifs ever present in the
virosphere such as cooperation (in addiction modules, to reach per-
sistent balance) and collective actions of dispersed defective viruses
in infection and integration processes.

RNA Networks, Viruses, and Cells Constitute Life

Cellular life means metabolizing entities with membranes that ensure
genetic identity and rejection of parasites via immune systems. Cellular
life characterizes organisms from bacteria, amoeba, and fungi to an-
imals and plants. Before cellular life emerged, RNA networks repli-
cated. Although cellular life is a result of RNA consortia interactions,
genetic parasites such as viruses shaped cellular life through constant
infection, innovation, immune function, and selection via reproduc-
tion. Capsid-encoding viruses and cellular life may have originated
in a complementary way, but viruses undoubtedly had their roots in
the depth of the RNA world and represent many genes and sequences
never found in the cellular world, which indicates a pre-cellular origin.

A Social Science Perspective on RNA Networks,

Viruses, and Cells
The new concept of quasi-species consortia primarily focuses on
RNA interactions together with viruses that represent groups with
identity, which means they differ from groups that do not share
that identity. This social science perspective looks at RNA societies
which share a self/nonself-identification competence. Group behav-
ior of RNA networks including viruses (i.e., their infection compe-
tence) has several motifs to integrate foreign stem loop groups that
fit into present group identity or to expand group identity for novel
context-relevant functions.
 The Secrets of Life 25

The main objective remains group identity, which is constituted

not by uniform members, clones, or similar low-level variations but
mainly of very different members such as former competing agents
and rejected minorities. The quasi-species consortia are character-
ized by different agents that compete, are rejected, or remain as
defectives. Such consortia also present a selection profile: A con-
sortium regulates gene expression, creates epigenetic marks, and
generates new, evolutionarily relevant nucleotide sequences, all of
which is subject to selection. Each member serves a counterbalanc-
ing function and can react to specific circumstances in ways that
other members cannot; therefore, a consortium integrates com-
peting RNA stem loop groups in context-relevant ways. The two
subunits which form a ribosome (RNA with associated proteins),
for instance, have a group identity very different from the identities
of other large RNA stem loop groups; each has its own evolution-
ary history and original function, and each may integrate or reject
other foreign RNA stem loops. A group identity arises with this
integration/rejection (self/nonself) behavioral motif. They are inte-
grated via addiction module function into a DNA-stored essential
tool, for all cellular life.
The social science perspective on RNA biology and virology has
more explanatory power than previous theories because it can inte-
grate diverse motifs of RNA stem loop groups into a consortial bi-
otic behavior that formerly was described only in a physio-chemical
realm of individual Fittest Types. Further, what has been explained
in the past by replication errors – namely variations – is now an
essential feature of RNA stem loop group behavior to generate un-
foreseeable, newly created forms, functions, and structures of RNA
groups. To call this productivity “error” now looks like an outdated
error of the last century.

Conclusion
Virology and philosophy of communication together present a new
perspective to look at life as a whole and on life in all its details based
on the most recent empirical and philosophical knowledge. If we
look at key features of life as we know it on our planet, including im-
mune systems, replication, transcription, translation, and repair in
all its steps and substeps, we can justify the conclusion that all these
features and properties are the result of evolutionary innovations
caused, generated, and introduced by viruses, RNA consortia, and
other genetic parasites. These infectious agents are the innovators of
26 Luis P. Villarreal and Guenther Witzany

RNA stem loop group interactions of all life. They insert and delete,
adapt, modify, and, most importantly, counterbalance competing
genetic identities. They cooperate, edit genetic codes, and are at the
basis of the secrets of life – including human life.

For Sources and Further Reading

Villarreal, L. P. (2015). Can virolution help us understand recent human
evolution? In V. Kolb (Ed.), Astrobiology: An evolutionary approach
(pp. 441–472). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
Villarreal, L. P., & Witzany, G. (2010). Viruses are essential agents within
the roots and stem of the tree of life. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 262,
698–710.
Villarreal, L. P., & Witzany, G. (2019). That is life: Communicating RNA
networks from viruses and cells in continuous interaction. Annals of the
New York Academy of Sciences, 1447, 5–20.
Webpages: [Link]
[Link]
4 A Brief History of Death
Sheldon Solomon

North and south; hot and cold; life and death. All common exam-
ples of polar opposites. You cannot be heading north and south
at the same time. Your coffee cannot be hot and cold at the same
time. And surely you cannot be alive and dead at the same time. Or
can you? The distinction between life and death is not as simple or
obvious as it appears to be.

Biologists generally maintain that death likely originated with the

advent of life and is necessary to maintaining life (see, for example,
Volk & Sagan, 2009). But what is death? When is one dead? Is death
irreversible? Theologians, philosophers, biologists, and physicians
have pondered these questions since antiquity and, for the most
part, there is little dispute regarding responses to these queries for
all forms of life except humans. Death is the irreversible cessation
of an organism’s vital functions. Logically, then, life and death are
mutually exclusive – one is either alive or dead. Moreover, death
marks the permanent end of life. Death is terminal, literally and
figuratively – no round trips or do-overs.
For humans, however, these questions have always been both
more pressing and more complicated, in that an unintended conse-
quence of our vast intelligence is the realization that death is inev-
itable and can occur at any time for reasons that cannot always be
anticipated or controlled. “As a naked fact,” philosopher Susanne
Langer observed, “that realization is unacceptable...Nothing, per-
haps, is more comprehensible than that people…would rather reject
than accept the idea of death as an inevitable close of their brief
earthly careers.” Consequently, throughout history humans have
been ardently devoted to understanding, forestalling, reversing,
and transcending death.
28 Sheldon Solomon

One approach to death transcendence is via religious belief sys-

tems in which death is viewed as a transition to a more pleasant
and enduring afterlife. Chinese nobles, following the proverb “treat
death as life,” buried their servants, artisans, concubines, and sol-
diers alive with them when they died. Egyptian royalty and nobil-
ity were entombed in magnificent pyramids, stocked with clothing,
furniture, toiletries, food and drink, and life-size wooden boats for
transport to the netherworld. In the Islamic tradition, the afterlife
is located in the heavenly Gardens of Delight, where miraculous
trees are made of silver or gold, and the dead are resurrected in
perpetually young bodies, untarnished by pubic hair or mucous.
Virtually, all religions also embrace the concept of souls, although
their specific nature varies considerably across time and space.
Some souls are physical entities, ranging from full-sized shadows
to miniature replicas of the body; other souls are immaterial. Souls
render the prospect of immortality feasible by enabling humans to
perceive themselves as potentially detachable from their corporeal
containers.
Humans have also diligently attempted to forestall death by
not dying. Throughout history, people searched for sacred places
where they would reputedly live forever: The Isles of the Blest for
the Greeks; The Land of Living Men, featuring a race of giants
who never aged or died for the Teutons. Magical fruits, seeds, and
waters could also preclude dying: for the Celts of Western Europe,
eating enchanted foods or using a magic vessel found at the Land
of Youth; an eternal spring that eliminated sickness, age, or death
on the Japanese island of Horaisan; the Hindu Pool of Youth; the
Hebrew River of Immortality. In China, Tao alchemists spent cen-
turies trying to produce “drugs of no death.” (See Cave, 2012, and
Solomon et al., 2015, for more on literal immortality.)
Despite these earnest and persistent efforts to overcome death, it
was quite evident that every human being who had ever been alive
ultimately apparently perished at some point. This observation led
to equally tenacious exertions to determine precisely when death
occurs, in part to ensure that individuals were not declared to be
deceased prematurely. When is one dead? As Dick Teresi described
in his 2012 book, The Undead, how death is determined has changed
over time. His chronology, in brief, is as follows: Historically, the
determination depended on the organ or body part deemed neces-
sary for the body to remain operational. For the ancient Egyptians
and Greeks, the heart was the primary organ of life, so death was
when one’s heart stopped beating. For the Hebrews and Christians,
 A Brief History of Death 29

one was dead when respiration ceased: no breath = no life; the He-
brews further stipulated that the only unequivocal indication of
death was bodily purification.
To ensure that people were not too hastily abandoned, interred,
or cremated, ancient Greeks cut off a finger from a putative corpse;
Plato recommended waiting for three days before burial. The
Romans put bodies in a warm bath or rubbed them with hot wa-
ter; they also practiced conclamation: summoning the person by
name three times. In Europe in the Middle Ages, vigils for dead
neighbors served to certify that the superficially deceased were gen-
uinely dead. Despite such precautions, by the mid-1700s, compila-
tions of accounts of premature burials made it quite clear that it
was quite unclear at times how to determine who was unequivo-
cally dead. Medical technologies, including artificial respiration,
smelling salts, and electric shocks, were increasingly deployed to
make such decisions, leading Ben Franklin to observe in 1773, “It
appears that the doctrines of life and death in general are yet but
little understood.”
The progressive reliance on medical technologies to determine
the time of death was accompanied by a shift from cardiovascular
and respiratory criteria to brain death as the basis for such deci-
sions. Scientists and physicians emphasized the distinction between
basic organic (e.g., cardiac and pulmonary) bodily functions com-
mon to most life forms, and sophisticated brain-based processes
that engender sensation and volition. With the advent of ventila-
tors, fatally brain-damaged people could continue breathing while
their hearts kept beating. Are they dead? What about people in a
persistent vegetative state, who, for months or even years, show no
signs of higher brain function and seem completely unresponsive
to psychological and physical stimuli? Are they dead? By the 20th
century, and to this day, irreversible coma, or brain death, marks
the end of life, rather than the cessation of bodily functions per se.
People are technically dead, then, when they are no longer “them-
selves,” even if all of their other vital organs are fully or partially
functional.
This conception of human death is potentially problematic, how-
ever. First, the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School
to Examine the Definition of Brain Death, which concluded in
1968 that anyone who had a “permanently nonfunctioning brain”
was technically dead, was contemporaneous with burgeoning im-
provements in organ transplant technology. Perhaps, some argued,
well-intentioned efforts by transplant surgeons to forestall the
30 Sheldon Solomon

death of those in need of organs were, literally, at the expense of

seriously ill potential donors, who were nevertheless not-quite-dead
when they were declared deceased in order to harvest their organs
to maintain the organs’ viability for transplant purposes. Maybe
this would be morally inconsequential for brain-dead patients in a
truly irreversible coma. There are, however, documented instances
of people declared brain dead being resuscitated, even while they
are being prepared to have their organs harvested for transplant.
Moreover, other seemingly brain-dead patients are actually
quite alive and alert, despite being severely incapacitated and un-
able to express themselves directly. For example, Kate Bainbridge
was in a vegetative state for almost two years after a 1997 bout
of encephalitis when a neuropsychologist conducted a PET scan
to assess her intellectual capacity – a procedure that was under-
taken primarily to give her family hope. Quite unexpectedly, the
scan revealed normal levels of intellectual functioning, obscured
by Kate being paralyzed and unable to communicate at the time.
After regaining limited movement, and communicating by point-
ing to letters on a board, Kate expressed concern that she might
have been mistaken for a brain-dead organ donor had she not had
the PET scan, saying “they should never let people die without
assessing them properly.”
Near death experiences (NDEs) during a coma or cardiac arrest
pose a slightly different challenge to the notion of brain death as the
primary criterion for determining when one is technically dead. The
most frequently reported core elements of NDEs, which are quite
consistent across cultures and independent of religious beliefs, are:
awareness of being dead during the experience, pleasant feelings,
out-of-body experiences, perceptions of a warm and bright light,
encounters with deceased people or other beings, and the sight of
a heavenly or hellish landscape. Some physicians and psychologists
explain the core elements of NDEs as dream-like hallucinations.
What, however, is the neuroanatomical locus of such experiences
if the person having the NDE is technically brain dead at the time?
Additionally, there are documented cases of veridical experiences
during NDEs – that is, brain-dead patients reporting out-of-body
experiences including accurate descriptions of, for instance, hospi-
tal emergency rooms and conversations by doctors and nurses at
the time the patient was technically dead. Such experiences imply
that a functional brain (as clinically assessed) is not necessary for
non-hallucinatory states of awareness, which seemingly calls into
question the claim that brain-dead people are truly dead.
 A Brief History of Death 31

Although scientific progress generally tends to clarify our un-

derstanding of complex phenomena, improvements in medical
technology since antiquity have made unequivocal determination
of human death murkier. The time between when legal dictates or
social customs deem one dead and when physicians and neurosci-
entists deem one dead has lengthened. In humankind’s early days,
the temporal gap between being apparently dead and being sum-
marily disposed or ceremonially interred was fairly immediate. The
gap grew a bit over time as it became evident that people could be
declared dead but then subsequently recover hours, or even days
later, perhaps from freezing or drowning. Now the gap is months
or even years, given documented instances of brain-dead patients’
spontaneous recoveries and seemingly brain-dead patients who are
actually mentally alert and totally sensate.
This temporal gap will likely increase in the future as medical
technology becomes more sophisticated, and humans persist in our
species-defining quest to forestall and ultimately overcome death.
Although most people have abandoned expeditions seeking sacred
places with magical waters and fruits to extend life indefinitely, hu-
mans have by no means forsaken other approaches to remaining
undead for as long as possible. As described in the Immortality In-
stitute’s 2004 volume, The Scientific Conquest of Death, modern “im-
mortalists” strive to delineate the biological underpinnings of aging
so as to discover the optimal combination of vitamins and nutritional
supplements to extend our natural life span. People now have their
bodies frozen after they “die,” in anticipation of future technological
developments enabling them to be resuscitated. Most cryogenically
preserved humans are decapitated first; only the head and brain is
frozen, in accord with advice on the Alcor Life Extension Foun-
dation website that “it makes no sense to preserve…a large mass
of aged, diseased tissue that may very well be completely replaced
during revival anyway.” If a presently frozen head is reanimated in a
few 1,000 years, was the person ever totally dead millennia ago?
Meanwhile, human body parts are now routinely replaced with
more durable alternatives: knees, hips, shoulders, iron rod ver-
tebrae, and even plastic hearts. Innovations in the works include
computer-assisted intelligence and nanobots – tiny robots to
monitor and regulate digestive processes and serve as miniature
trash compactors to replace bowel functions. Some futurists favor
“non-invasive static uploading” to store all of the information in
a human brain on a computer cloud as a back-up in case of mem-
ory loss, including one’s sense of self, during bodily maintenance
32 Sheldon Solomon

or repair. Others question the wisdom of returning one’s knowl-

edge and identity to a physical body. Why not abandon a respiring
carbon-based embodiment entirely and “relocate” to a sturdier and
long-lived silicon-based corporeal foundation? In what sense will
silicon-based entities be alive? What will constitute dying under
such conditions?
“Life,” as the saying goes, “goes on.” Death too, although what
we mean by living and dying may change in interesting and unfore-
seen ways in the future…

For Sources and Further Reading

Cave, S. (2012). Immortality: The quest to live forever and how it drives civi-
lization. New York: Crown Publishers.
Immortality Institute (Ed.). (2004). The scientific conquest of death: Essays
on infinite lifespans. Wausau, WI: Libros en Red.
Langer, S. K. (1982). Mind: An essay on human feeling (Vol. III). Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins Press.
Smith, A. (1863/1892). Dreamthorp, a book of essays written in the country.
London, UK: Oxford University Press.
Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The worm at the core:
On the role of death in life. New York: Random House.
Teresi, D. (2012). The undead: Organ harvesting, the ice water test, beating-heart
cadavers—How medicine is blurring the line between life and death. New
York: Pantheon Books.
Volk, T., & Sagan, D. (2009). Death and sex. Chelsea, VT: Chelsea Green
Publishing.
Part II
Engaging

How does a body shape its dynamic engagement with the world in
which it is immersed? In what ways are bodies physical manifes-
tations of those dynamic engagements? What is the relation of an
active body to agency, learning, and noetic experience? The essays
in this section take up these questions, each utilizing a unique per-
spective on environmentally embedded deployments and transfor-
mations of the body, from gene expression to reading pleasure.
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
[Link] ndfra [Link]
5 Attentive Bodies
Epigenetic Processes and
Concepts of Human Being
Samantha Frost

The patterned logic of epigenetic processes suggests that they are

a non-neurological means by which bodies pay attention to the
world. This possibility disrupts some of the central categories
that thinkers in the West have used for conceptualizing embodied
subjectivity.

Epigenetics research shows that bodies are responsive genetically

to experiences of their environments, which is to say that the ways
our bodies grow and function are deeply and durably susceptible
to the places we live and to our modes of living. While epigenetic
processes unfold as biochemical changes in molecules and cells, re-
search shows that the factors that provoke them are not only the
biochemistry of nutrition and toxins but also and sometimes more
profoundly the effects of living with racial and sexual discrimina-
tion and economic deprivation. Consequently, when epigenetic pro-
cesses change how our bodies use genes, they infuse the very matter
of biological life with the effects of social and political life, shaping
not just how bodies work but how they develop, grow, and persist
over time. Understandably, epigenetic processes transform medi-
cal and scientific accounts of biology and health. But in showing
how the material dimensions of biological bodies are socially and
politically formed – and thus in showing that there is no moment
in which a biological body could be said to be pure or unformed
by social and political life – epigenetic processes also demand the-
oretical work on some of the fundamental concepts in the history
of Western thought. They demand that we consider what epigenetic
processes mean for our understanding of what human beings are
and of how humans live in their worlds.
Maurizio Meloni (2019, this volume) observes that the notion
that biologies are “impressionable” has historical precedent in the
36 Samantha Frost

Hippocratic and humoral traditions of medicine. Here, different

facets of the natural, climatic, nutritional, and built environment
were considered to affect the development of health and personal-
ity. What is distinctive in the re-emergence of impressionable biol-
ogies today is that in epigenetic processes, the body is not passively
subject to its environment but instead is actively engaged in its own
responsive transformations. Georges Canguilhem (2008[1965]) ob-
serves that in recent history, bodily phenotypes – or historically
specific living bodies – have been considered as changeable in the
course of engaging with the vagaries of the lived environment:
famine, climate, disease, or conflict might affect the health and
function of phenotypic bodies. In contrast, the genotype – bodies
considered as repositories of genetic code – was thought to be pro-
tected from all these, preserving the instructions for the construc-
tion of a new, unalloyed body each generation. But as Lappé and
Landecker (2015) explain, epigenetics research suggests that expe-
riences of unequal social relations, nutrition, toxins, poverty, and
other forms of stress affect the shape and structure of chromatin,
which is the conglomeration of proteins and macromolecules that
bind DNA together and makes genes accessible or inaccessible to
transcription. Epigenetic processes transform chromatin so pro-
foundly that the genome can no longer be conceived as a time-
less sourcebook for the making of each generation. As Lappé and
Landecker remark, “time and history have come into the genome
itself” (p. 117).
It is clear that the forms of marking, memory, and biological ad-
justment that are seen in epigenetic processes require a conceptual
reworking of the relationship between genomes, bodies, and envi-
ronments. Here, I argue that if we trace the logic of the unfolding
of epigenetic transformations, they seem to evince both anticipation
and intentionality. The anticipatory and intentional characteristics
of epigenetic processes suggest, in turn, that we might conceive of
epigenetic processes as a form of paying attention.
Zaneta Thayer and Christopher Kuzawa (2011) argue that epi-
genetic processes mark living bodies’ experiences, forming a kind
of memory. For example, nutritional stress in neonatal and early
postnatal life can provoke epigenetic transformations that affect
metabolic health later in life as well as in subsequent generations.
Likewise, psychosocial stress in the form of workplace and social
inequality or extreme duress (as in the experience of Holocaust sur-
vivors) provoke epigenetic transformations that affect stress physi-
ology and health for several generations. Christopher Kuzawa and
 Attentive Bodies 37

Elizabeth Sweet (2009, cited in Thayer & Kuzawa, 2011) similarly

observe that the stresses generated by chronic daily experiences of
racism provoke epigenetic processes that change biological systems
so that those that deal with stress are highly sensitive and those
that enhance immunity are depressed. They argue that this com-
bination of transformations helps explain the heightened vulner-
ability to cardiovascular disease observed in African American
communities.
Now, although epigenetic processes can be helpfully conceived
as a kind of memory of experience, if we follow the patterned logic
of those processes, they can also be seen as a kind of anticipation.
Epigenetic processes shape the ways genes are used to build and re-
build bodies on a daily basis. When they prompt bodies to rebuild
to be more sensitively responsive to the stresses of experiencing rac-
ism (for instance), the transformations in gene use they promote are
not an effect of recovery from the past experience (as in the case of a
scar, for instance). Instead, in making stress response systems more
highly sensitive, epigenetic processes are preparing the body to be
ready for further experience of racism. In preparing the body to be
ready, epigenetic processes functionally anticipate a recurrence of
the experiences that prompted them.
This figuration of epigenetic processes as not just a form of mem-
ory (a record of the past) but also anticipatory (concerned with
the future) brings to the foreground another feature, which is their
intentionality. The concept of intentionality in philosophy is used
to denote that a claim, a thought, or a perception is “about” an
object. For example, one might describe my action of swatting a
fly as intentional because my arm moves vis-à-vis the fly buzzing
irritatingly by my head. In other words, the action is “about” the fly.
In the case of epigenetic processes, we could say that they exhibit
a mediated form of intentionality, but intentionality nonetheless.
When epigenetic processes enable a body to prepare to experience
something again, they exhibit the functional presumption (the an-
ticipation) that the experience will happen again. This functional
presumption concerns the conditions of the world that generate the
experience; it is a presumption that previously experienced con-
ditions in the world will repeat or recur. So, epigenetic processes
are intentional in that they are about the world of experience. This
“aboutness” is a mediated form of intentionality in that epigenetic
processes are prompted not directly by experience but instead by
the body’s response to its experience – its response to its response to
the world. But nonetheless, it is a form of intentionality.
38 Samantha Frost

This combination of anticipation and intentionality is important

because it suggests that living bodies are not passively receiving in-
puts about the material and social conditions of existence. Accord-
ing to the logic of epigenetic processes laid out here, in anticipating
a future experience in a specific futural form of the world, bodies
are paying attention to the world at a molecular and cellular level.
Indeed, this is the main claim of this essay: Epigenetic processes
are a means by which bodies pay attention to the world. And sig-
nificantly, even though epigenetic processes may be shaped by per-
ception, self-reflection, and imagination – as claimed by Bradley
Turnwald and colleagues (2019) – the form of paying attention that
they appear to embody is not managed by the neurological system.
That is to say, epigenetic processes appear to be a non-neurological
form of attention. It is difficult to give imaginative or conceptual
form to a kind of attention that is not managed by the neurological
system: How to think it? Indeed, what is theoretically fascinating is
that this form of attention suggests that the matter of the body is
generating meaning, is making meaning of the world in ways that
have generally been reserved for complex neurological systems and
creatures capable of linguistic representation.
In sum, as molecular scale attentive responses to experiences
of the social and material world, epigenetic processes represent
a complete disruption of the long-standing distinction between
the raw, material, animal processes of the body oriented only
towards survival and the purportedly more elevated processes
bound up with taste and aesthetics, habit, movement, accultur-
ation, thought, and language. In disrupting this distinction be-
tween matter and meaning – a distinction at the very foundation
of Western thought – epigenetic processes also throw into disar-
ray a host of other categorical distinctions that have organized
thinking about people and politics in the Western political tra-
dition. Cause and effect, active and passive, subject and object,
subjective and objective: All of these distinctions rest on the dis-
tinction between matter and meaning, and they scaffold the ways
that people in the West think about what makes humans human
and what makes political life distinct from natural life. If we can
trace out the successive conceptual disruptions that are provoked
by our increasing knowledge of epigenetic processes, we may de-
velop concepts that defamiliarize our understanding of demo-
cratic political cultures and that point to unexpected possibilities
for political transformation.
 Attentive Bodies 39

For Sources and Further Reading

Canguilhem, G. (2008[1965]). Knowledge of life (S. Geroulanos & D.
Ginsburg, Trans.). New York: Fordham University Press (Original work
published in 1965).
Fox, M., Thayer, Z. M., & Wadhwa, P. (2017). Acculturation and health:
The moderating role of sociocultural context. American Anthropologist,
119(3), 405–421.
Frost, S. (2016). Biocultural creatures: Towards a new theory of the human.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Lappé, M., & Landecker, H. (2015). How the genome got a lifespan. New
Genetics and Society, 34(2), 152–176.
Meloni, M. (2019). Impressionable biologies: From the archeology of plas-
ticity to the sociology of epigenetics. New York: Routledge.
Thayer, Z. M., & Kuzawa, C. W. (2011). Biological memories of past envi-
ronments: Epigenetic pathways to health disparities. Epigenetics, 6(7),
798–803.
Turnwald, B., Parker Goyer, J., Boles, D. Z., Silder, A., Delp, S. L., &
Crum, A. J. (2019). Learning one’s genetic risk changes physiology inde-
pendent of actual genetic risk. Nature Human Behavior, 3, 48–56.
6 Uncovering the Living Body
Bodies and Agents in the
Cognitive Sciences
Fred Keijzer

As long as the concept “embodiment” remains tied to the widely

applicable notion of “agent,” it will remain insufficiently con-
strained and kept away from the empirical foundation that living
bodies provide for the cognitive sciences.

Usually, we keep our bodies covered. Physically, we wrap them in

textiles, and conceptually we hide them under layers of interpreta-
tion and meaning. In contrast to the physical ones, the conceptual
wrappings are not so easily removed or changed. They consist of
enduring encrustations that shape our perceptions and thoughts
about our bodies – and ourselves – in more permanent ways. The
case that I will address here concerns the concept of “agent” and the
way it influences our view of the body within the cognitive sciences.
Starting about 30 years ago – as signaled by Varela, Thompson,
and Rosch’s 1991 book The Embodied Mind, and Rodney Brooks’
seminal work on robotics – the cognitive sciences have taken on the
notion of embodiment as a central concept: To explain human be-
havior and cognition, we should not only look at neural processes
but also to the body and its interactions with the environment.
Given such a general commitment to embodiment, it is important
to specify what this commitment entails. The notion of embodied
agents is central here.

Embodied Agents
Within the cognitive sciences, embodiment is tied to agents, which
in turn are characterized as entities having knowledge and goals
in relation to a situation or world in which they can act. The gen-
eral structure of agent-based explanations incorporates four cen-
tral ideas. First, such explanations differentiate between a world
 Uncovering the Living Body 41

and an agent that interacts with this world. Second, we have some
description of this world, providing us with an ontology. Third, we
can reuse this ontology to describe the agent itself in terms of inten-
tional or goal-oriented states that incorporate these descriptions,
such as in propositional attitudes. Fourth, we assume the agent
applies some degree of rational choice with respect to these inten-
tional states and by doing the same, we can predict the actions of
the agent. The resulting explanations take familiar forms, such as
“When the woman sees the red light, she will stop her car” and “He
said he would make lasagna so he must have gone to the supermar-
ket.” This basic explanatory structure applies to both simple agents
with a basic goal structure as well as complex ones with mental
states like beliefs and desires.
In such an account, being an agent is central, while embodiment
is an additional constraint. Embodiment is tied to an agent rather
than being a substantial entity in its own right. Bodies are import-
ant because they instantiate an agent, not the other way round.
After all, the standard phrase is “embodied agents,” not “agentive
bodies.” Agents can be conceived and constituted in many different
ways, and embodiment can refer to a human body, a simple robot,
or even to the interface of a software agent in a simulated envi-
ronment. There are no evident material criteria involved except for
functional requirements that make the entity an agent.
Without clear material criteria, establishing whether some en-
tity is an agent remains a matter of interpretation and ascription.
Daniel Dennett’s famous notion of an intentional stance provides
a very influential example of how agent-based explanations work.
However, using such an intentional stance and ascribing agency to
an entity does not merely come naturally to us. It is actually diffi-
cult to avoid and therefore can be thought of as an intentional urge
rather than an optional theoretical position that we might or might
not apply.
Simple movements often suffice to ascribe agency. Humans get
upset when they see a robotic device being kicked, and overall
humans have a “tendency to innately, automatically, and sponta-
neously view a broad variety of different targets as holding goals
and mental states” (pp. 117–118) as Mar and Macrae phrased it in
their 2007 paper Triggering the Intentional Stance. One can give
evolutionary reasons for the ease with which we discern agents,
as agents – predators, group members – which tend to be highly
significant and should not remain undetected. Susan Carey, in her
2009 book The Origin of Concepts, names agency as one of the
42 Fred Keijzer

“core cognitions” that constitute innate input analyzers that also

“ground the deepest ontological commitments and the most gen-
eral explanatory principles in terms of which we understand our
world” (p. 22). Finally, child psychologists Gergely and Csibra, who
study the evolutionary and ontogenetic origins of how we interpret
others’ actions in terms of intentional mental states, report that in-
fants of only 12 months (a) can already interpret others’ actions as
goal-directed; (b) can evaluate which one of the alternative actions
available within the constraints of the situation is the most efficient
means to the goal; and (c) expect the agent to perform by the most
efficient means available. Taking this all in, ascribing agency is fun-
damental to our way of looking at the world itself.
Given our tendency to ascribe agency so easily and widely, em-
bodied agents can take many different forms. Embodiment itself
need not be specific as long as it provides a material contraption
that enables the agent to function. From this perspective, we can –
or even should – resist tying human agency too closely to the liv-
ing human body as this could lead to a form of biochauvinism that
excludes the possibility of non-biological agents, such as robots.
While our bodies enable us to act as agents, these bodies themselves
are only relevant for understanding mind and cognition as far as
they subserve this agency. Under this interpretation, the many de-
tails of our bodies – such as the presence of livers and muscles – are
not considered important for the cognitive sciences. Even the rel-
evance of the biological characteristics of the brain can be ques-
tioned, as exemplified by science fiction scenarios where minds can
be uploaded to a computer leaving the brain behind. Thus, accept-
ing the importance of embodiment, but interpreting this in terms
of embodied agency, keeps out the living human body itself as a
starting point for the cognitive sciences.
Ascribing agency and intentionality is a basic feature of human
minds and comes with a cluster of ideas concerning the limited rel-
evance of our living bodies. However, given our susceptibility to the
intentional urge and the intuitive force of the conceptualizations
that stem from it, we must consider the possibility that the very sa-
lience of agentive interpretations keeps the potentially much wider
cognitive relevance of living bodies in the background.

Living Bodies
One reason to be wary about the impact of our intentional urge
comes from the rapidly expanding study of cognitively relevant
 Uncovering the Living Body 43

phenomena in a very broad range of living systems. This expanded

scope starts with bacteria, but also involves plants, fungi, and both
invertebrate and vertebrate animals. Excluding a few exceptions
such as humans, these organisms do not have minds nor do they
constitute smart agents in any obvious way. Using our intentional
urge, this easily disqualifies these cases as interesting targets for
the cognitive sciences. However, when studied in more detail, all
organisms exhibit behavioral and growth-related decision-making
and fit cognitive criteria such as perception, action, memory, and
valuing (see Lyon, 2015, for bacteria and Baluška & Levin, 2016, for
the general case). Whether we should use the word “cognition” for
this broad set of widely dispersed phenomena is a matter of debate,
but it is evident that these atypical cases are highly relevant for the
cognitive sciences as an explanatory target. In this context, the con-
cept of “agent” becomes less important as a guideline for judging
cognitive relevance. Being a living system provides a more certain
criterion when these atypical cases are taken into account.
The need to look at living systems more widely provides further
reasons for taking our own living bodies seriously as an important
target for the cognitive sciences, and even as an empirical condition
for agency in the first place. Basic life forms consist of single cells,
and are wonders of natural nanotechnology, which enables unicel-
lulars to construct themselves, metabolize, multiply, adapt, change
shape, and do all the things that enable them to thrive. Importantly,
unicellulars are small. They are usually not visible to the naked eye
and live in microscopic worlds. As our own ancestors started out as
such unicellulars, it follows that our current perceptual access to a
macroscopic world is not a basic situation but the result of major
evolutionary changes that took place when our ancestors became
multicellular animals.
Becoming multicellular was a major change where (eventually)
billions of separate cells came to sense and act as a macroscopic
individual. These cells need to be coordinated in many ways, such
as for body organization, physiology, and behavior. The evolution
of nervous systems must have played a major role in the transition
towards multicellular organizations capable of sensing and acting
as a collective and, in this way, for the first time becoming capable
of accessing our own familiar macroscopic world – the world of
extended surfaces and things in it as James Gibson nicely described
it in his 1979 book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
How this transition took place and how it bears on our understand-
ing of nervous systems are key questions for the cognitive sciences,
44 Fred Keijzer

as they turn on explaining how animals turned into the agents that
we are so familiar with.
One intriguing idea is that nervous systems originally were mostly
involved in controlling the body itself, enabling it to move in a co-
ordinated way. The resulting motile body could then have acted as
a multicellular unit capable of sensing in a way that was dispersed
across many cells and so enabling perceptual access of the macro-
scopic world (see Keijzer, 2015, for more details and references). If
this is on the right track, it ties the ontology of the perceptual and
behavioral world to the makeup of a living body. How we should
interpret this option remains future work, but we will need to reas-
sess many assumptions that seem clear and fundamental from our
own human perspective, which is itself tied to such a multicellular
organization.
Our living animal bodies incorporate many characteristics that
may be crucial for understanding our minds and cognition. The
concept of “agent” provides a skewed perspective on our own living
bodies that backgrounds much that is relevant. Using the concept
of (embodied) agents as a starting point for the cognitive sciences
ignores not only a wide array of fundamental questions about the
origins and nature of such agents, but also keeps these questions
invisible by downplaying the crucial role of the living body.

Lived Bodies
One final issue must be addressed. Within phenomenology and en-
activism (two related philosophical approaches that both focus on
conscious experience), the concept of a living body is often used as a
contrast to the lived body (see, for example, Evan Thompson’s 2007
book, Mind in Life). The lived body refers here to our first-person
experience of our own bodies and aims to describe it from this
perspective. Advocates for this perspective argue that study of
the living body is limited to a third-person scientific perspective
on the body that is associated with a reductive view that neglects
experience.
There are various reasons for being unhappy with this restricted
view of the living body that sees it as disconnected from first-person
experience, which only surfaces in the “lived body.” Foremost,
highlighting the experiential lived body brings us back to high-level
agentive conceptualizations of the body that fit in with an agentive
interpretation. Such a view easily remains oblivious to the under-
lying complexity and organization of our own bodies that can only
 Uncovering the Living Body 45

be accessed by systematic, empirical, and socially shared scientific

work. Another reason concerns the critique that scientific work on
the living body involves a reductive view that is antithetical to con-
scious experience. Although such a reductive tendency has indeed
been present in a lot of scientific work, by now the need to explain
consciousness as we all experience it firsthand has become part
of the scientific enterprise (see Ginsburg & Jablonka, 2019, for an
overview). When the cognitive sciences start to pay attention to the
living body in earnest, this inquiry must also involve the question of
how a first-person perspective and the experience associated with it
comes into being in the natural world. We do not need a dualism
between living and lived bodies.

For Sources and Further Reading

Baluška, F., & Levin, M. (2016). On having no head: Cognition throughout
biological systems. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 902.
Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2013). Teleological understanding of actions. In
M. R. Banaji & S. A. Gelman (Eds.), Navigating the social world: What
infants, children, and other species can teach us (pp. 38–43). New York:
Oxford University Press.
Ginsburg, S., & Jablonka, E. (2019). The evolution of the sensitive soul:
Learning and the origins of consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Keijzer, F. A. (2015). Moving and sensing without input and output: Early
nervous systems and the origins of the animal sensorimotor organiza-
tion. Biology & Philosophy, 30(3), 311–331.
Lyon, P. (2015). The cognitive cell: Bacterial behavior reconsidered. Fron-
tiers in Microbiology, 6, 264.
7 Approaching Learning
Hands First
How Gesture Influences Thought
Susan Goldin-Meadow

The gestures that speakers spontaneously produce as they talk are

acts of the body and, as such, have the potential to influence learn-
ing in the same way that bodily action does. But gesture differs
from action in a number of important respects and, as a result,
helps learners remember newly learned information and extend
that information to new contexts better than action does.

When people talk, they move their hands. These hand movements,
commonly called gestures, can convey substantive information that
is related, but not always identical, to the information conveyed in
that talk. Take, for example, a child telling a room full of adults that
she ran upstairs. She says, I runned up, while at the same time mov-
ing her hand in an upward spiral. We know from her hands, and
only from her hands, that she ran up a spiral staircase. Gesture thus
has the potential to offer listeners – parents, teachers, clinicians,
researchers – insight into a speaker’s unspoken thoughts.
In fact, when a speaker’s gesture about a task conveys different
information from that speaker’s speech, it signals that the speaker is
open to instruction on that task. For example, a child who says she
solved the mathematical equivalence problem, 2+5+3=__+3, by add-
ing up the numbers to the left of the equals sign (“I added 2 plus 5
plus 3”) while, at the same time, gesturing to all of the numbers in the
problem (point at the 2, the 5, the 3 on the left, and the 3 on the right),
is more likely to profit from a math lesson on the problem than a child
whose gestures match her speech (point at the 2, the 5, and the 3 on
the left). The gestures that a learner produces can thus reveal that the
learner is in a transitional state and, in this sense, ready to learn.
But gesture can do more than reveal a speaker’s thoughts – it can
change those thoughts and, as a result, contribute to learning. More
specifically, the gestures that learners see can help them learn, as
 Approaching Learning Hands First 47

can the gestures that learners produce. For example, children are
more likely to learn how to solve a mathematical equivalence prob-
lem if their teachers gesture during the lesson than if they don’t
gesture. Children are also more likely to learn how to solve the
problems if they are taught gestures that they themselves produce
during the math lesson than if they are not taught gestures and are
taught only words to say during the lesson.
Why does gesture have an impact on learning? One possibility
is that gesture is part of a multi-modal production involving both
hand (gesture) and mouth (speech). If this hypothesis is correct,
then signers who use the same modality (the manual modality) to
both sign and gesture should not show these learning effects. But
they do – signers whose gestures convey different information from
their signs prior to instruction in mathematical equivalence are
more likely to learn how to solve the math problems than signers
whose gestures convey the same information as their signs. And
signers whose math teachers gesture along with their signs bene-
fit from that instruction, just as speakers do when their teachers
gesture along with their speech. It is not the juxtaposition of hand
and mouth that gives gesture its power – it’s more likely to be the
gesture’s ability to provide an analog representational format that
co-occurs, and is coordinated, with the discrete representational
format found in language, be it speech or sign.
Another possibility is that gestures are movements of the hand
and, as such, actions of the body – in other words, gesture may affect
learning because it is itself an action. Actions have indeed been found
to affect cognition. For example, people are more likely to recall an
action if they have done the action than if they have read a verbal
description of the action. And learners are more likely to master a
task if they produce an action relevant to the task than if they see
others produce the action. Not surprisingly, when a task is learned by
doing an action, motor areas in the brain are activated. What is more
surprising is that these same motor areas are activated later when the
task is done without action. This same process happens when a task
is learned through gesture: Motor areas are activated after the task
has been learned when it is performed without gesture. Acting while
learning a task – be it acting on an object or gesturing in the air – thus
has long-term effects on how the task is processed, even when the
actions are no longer involved in doing the task.
But gesture differs from action in a number of important respects.
First, gestures refer to the world and thus do not directly influence
it. For example, producing a hammer gesture does not actually
48 Susan Goldin-Meadow

flatten the object – only physically hammering the object has this
effect. Second, although gestures, particularly iconic gestures (i.e.,
gestures that look like what they represent), resemble actions, ges-
tures vary in how closely they mirror the actions they represent.
For example, a hammer gesture produced with a C-shaped hand
simulating how the hammer would be held if it were moved up and
down resembles the actual act of hammering more closely than a
hammer gesture produced with a pointing hand. Gesture can there-
fore selectively highlight components of action that are relevant to
a particular situation. This selectivity could allow gesture to play a
different role in learning than action does.
As it turns out, gesture and action do play different roles, not
in learning per se, but in retaining the knowledge gained and in
extending that knowledge to new contexts. For example, when chil-
dren are taught a novel word (e.g., leeming) along with either an ac-
tion (e.g., squeezing the bulb of an object) or a gesture representing
that action (e.g., squeezing performed near but not on the object),
they are equally good at learning the new word. However, children
who learned through gesture are more likely to generalize the new
word to appropriate contexts (i.e., to other objects that have the
potential to be leemed) than children who learned through action –
and this difference widens over time.
As another example, consider a child who is either taught to
solve mathematical equivalence problems by gesturing the group-
ing strategy (e.g., for the problem, 2+5+3=__+3, pointing with a
V-hand at the 2 and the 5, the two numbers that should be grouped
and summed, and then pointing at the blank), or by acting out the
grouping strategy on plastic numbers that have been placed on the
problem (e.g., picking up the 2 and the 5, and holding the two num-
bers together in the blank). Children are equally good at learning
how to solve the mathematical equivalence problem whether they
are taught through gesture or through action. But children who
learned through gesture are more likely to generalize the knowl-
edge they gained to new problem formats (e.g., 2+5+3=2+__, or
2+5+3=__+4) than children who learned through action. Both ges-
ture and action help learners learn, but gesture helps them extend
and retain that learning, two essential components of education.
These facts about gesture have implications for practice, in par-
ticular, for how gesture can be recruited in everyday teaching sit-
uations by parents and teachers. A good teaching tool is one that
can be implemented broadly. If a tool is difficult to use, it is un-
likely to be adopted. If the tool is costly, it may not be accessible
 Approaching Learning Hands First 49

to underprivileged communities. Gesture is an ideal teaching tool

because it is ubiquitous, naturally produced, and universally ac-
cessible in both homes and schools. Moreover, gesture is not only
used naturally, but its use can be increased in children, parents, and
teachers with little effort. Adults can be told to use gestures when
talking to children and will thus model gestures for them. They can
also be told to ask children to produce gestures of their own. These
practices have the potential to be particularly beneficial for children
from lower socio-economic homes who tend to produce fewer spon-
taneous gestures than children from higher socio-economic homes.
In addition, because children who have impairments in language
often use gesture to compensate for their disabilities, harnessing
gesture may be beneficial not only for typically developing children
but also for children with special needs.
There are, however, at least two caveats to consider. First, gesture
is a powerful tool that can be used to promote learning, but it can
also be used to mislead. For example, a math teacher inadvertently
pointed at all four numbers, without pausing at the equals sign, in
the problem 2+5+3=__+3. In response, her pupil added up the num-
bers and gave 13 as his (incorrect) answer – he was misled by his
teacher’s gestures. As another example from eyewitness testimony,
interviewers are told to ask open-ended questions (e.g., “What else
was he wearing?”), rather than targeted questions (e.g., “What color
was the hat he was wearing?”), to avoid influencing their witnesses.
But an open-ended question produced along with a suggestive ges-
ture (e.g., a donning-hat movement) results in as many incorrect
responses (in this case, that he was wearing a hat even though he
wasn’t) as a targeted question produced without gesture. Gesture is
a powerful tool that needs to be used thoughtfully.
Second, gesture may not always be the optimal tool. Although
gesture often leads to more flexible learning than actions on ob-
jects, there may be times when action experience is more effective
than gesture. For example, a child who has made very little prog-
ress in mastering a task may profit more from action than from
gesture simply because acting on an object can provide a concrete,
physical representation of a concept. Manipulatives are often used
in math classrooms for this purpose. However, the danger in using
action manipulatives exclusively is that learners may not be able to
generalize what they have learned to new contexts. Offering learn-
ers gesture after they have used manipulatives to make progress on
a task may, for some tasks and for some learners, be just the right
teaching strategy to promote deep and lasting learning.
50 Susan Goldin-Meadow

The facts about gesture described here also have theoretical

implications for notions of embodiment. Gesture’s impact on the
learning process cannot stem exclusively from the fact that it in-
volves the body – actions on objects are embodied, too, and they do
not encourage learners to generalize in the way that gesture does.
The body may be important for gesture to have an impact on learn-
ing not because it is embodied per se, but because it offers an analog
format within which to represent ideas that are different from those
supported by speech. Gesture thus promotes a second representa-
tional format that has the potential to lead to learning.
To summarize, gesture offers a unique window onto a speaker’s
thoughts, and provides a vehicle not only for changing those
thoughts but also for promoting deep and lasting learning. Im-
portantly, gesture can improve learning with little effort or cost.
Simply telling children to gesture, or modeling gesture for them,
puts gesture into the hands of the learners. And increasing child
gesture improves learning by giving parents and teachers insight
into a child’s cutting-edge (albeit implicit) thoughts, and by help-
ing the child consolidate those thoughts and make them more ex-
plicit. Along the same lines, simply telling parents and teachers to
gesture, or modeling gesture for them, puts gesture into the hands
of the teachers. And increasing teacher gesture not only increases
child gesture, but also encourages teachers to express imagistic
ideas that may be easier to grasp in the manual modality than in
the oral modality. Gesture is a ubiquitous and easily accessible tool
that should be harnessed for teaching and learning.

For Sources and Further Reading

Cartmill, E. A., Beilock, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2012). A word in
the hand: Action, gesture, and mental representation in humans and
non-human primates. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,
Series B, 367, 129–143.
Goldin-Meadow, S. (2014). How gesture works to change our minds.
Trends in Neuroscience and Education (TiNE), 3, 4–6.
Goldin-Meadow, S. (2015). From action to abstraction: Gesture as a mech-
anism of change. Developmental Review, 38, 167–184.
Goldin-Meadow, S., & Alibali, M. W. (2013). Gesture’s role in speaking,
learning, and creating language. Annual Review of Psychology, 64,
257–283.
Novack, M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2017). Gesture as representational ac-
tion: A paper about function. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 24(3),
652–665.
8 Digitization, Reading, and
the Body
Handling Texts on Paper
and Screens
Anne Mangen

The ongoing transition from paper/print to screens reveals the ex-

tent to which reading is multisensory and embodied, involving in
particular our fingers and hands in manually engaging with a text.

Our modes of reading are changing. Whether we are reading to pass

time on our way to work, are studying for an exam in the library, or
are browsing through today’s news or enjoying a novel at home – in
many of these cases, reading entails engaging with a digital screen
device rather than with materials printed on the substrate of paper.
Laptops, tablets, and smart phones are doing the job of “old” read-
ing technologies such as print books and newspapers, while also
being multipurpose devices with which we entertain ourselves with
movies, chat with friends and family, pay our bills, and coordinate
our children’s school activities.
Digitization is massively and rapidly affecting our reading be-
havior, and it is futile to try to give a simple, general answer to the
question of whether we read “better” or “worse” as an effect of this
transition. Such questions require fine-tuning in terms of what type
of text/material we have in mind (narrative texts or news entries?
Long or short texts? Simple or complex?), the purpose of reading
(study? Leisure? Information updates?), the type of device (desk-
top computer? Smart phone?), the physical location (at the office?
On the train or at a cabin)? Indeed, Anežka Kuzmičová and her
colleagues (see Kuzmičová et al., 2018) have shown that physical
location and social context – whether a reader is, for instance, alone
or in the company of others – may affect aspects of reading, such as
supporting the sense of immersion or the conjuring of mental imag-
ery. Other factors probably matter, too. Amidst all these changes,
one dimension emerges as being more fundamental than hitherto
acknowledged: the role of the body, and of embodiment, in reading.
52 Anne Mangen

Whether for study, pleasure, or information, we typically read by

holding the text in our hands. Reading has always been embodied,
inviting and requiring certain postures and dexterous movements
to access and process the texts. The ongoing replacement of print
books with digital devices brings the haptics of reading to the fore,
inviting us to reconsider the role of embodiment for cognitive as
well as emotional aspects. Often called “active touch,” haptics is
an umbrella term for the combination of senses of touch via the
skin, and movement of our joints and limbs – most typically, our
fingers and hands. Applied to reading, haptics refers to the ways in
which we use our fingers and hands to hold the text and the device
on which the text is displayed, the ways we turn the pages back and
forth, use our index finger to guide and sharpen our visual gaze,
and use our fingers as place holders. For a long time, thanks to the
dominance of the print book, the embodied aspects of reading have
not been granted much attention. However, with much of our read-
ing now performed with a screen device rather than with paper, the
embodiment – in particular, the haptics – of reading takes on fresh
urgency.
Take a closer look at your fingers next time you pick up your
smart phone to check the news, and compare with your fingers
as they handle the pages of a print magazine. Or, take a moment
during your reading of a novel on the Kindle or iPad, to reflect
on the feel when holding the device and swiping the screen to turn
the pages. Then compare this with page-turning in a print book.
The materiality of the substrate – screen displays and paper pages –
provides different tactile feedback to your fingers and hands, hence
engaging your body and brain differently. Whether, how and to
what extent such differences have an effect on how we read, are
intriguing questions that reading researchers are only beginning to
understand, and findings from empirical research on screen read-
ing indicate that there is indeed more to reading than meets the
eye. More specifically, the physicality of the substrate of paper may
contribute to certain cognitive and emotional aspects of reading in
ways that we have yet to fully acknowledge and comprehend.
A wealth of research has compared paper and screen reading,
from reading fairytales in print and on tablets with toddlers and
preschoolers, to studies measuring recall and comprehension
among high school students reading print text books and their dig-
ital equivalents, to adults reading novels in book format and on
tablets and e-readers. The diversity of methodologies, designs, and
texts used, precludes a simple answer to the question of “P(rint)
 Digitization, Reading, and the Body 53

vs E(lectronic).” However, recent meta-analyses (see Delgado et al.,

2018, as an example) have shown that, for the reading of informa-
tional texts, there is a screen inferiority when it comes to reading
comprehension. In other words, people tend to comprehend a text
better when they read it on paper compared to reading it on a
screen. Moreover, the difference in reading comprehension in favor
of paper has in fact increased rather than decreased over the past
couple of decades. Such findings cast serious doubts on persistent
claims about digital natives being better at reading on screens than
on paper.
The reasons provided for the screen inferiority are related to
what is called “The Shallowing Hypothesis” (see Wolf, 2018). Given
that our most common modes of engaging with texts occur on-
line, we acquire a habit of quickly perusing an enormous amount
of text and information, rarely stopping to engage with any of it
more deeply and conscientiously. These screen-based habits then
“bleed over,” to use Wolf’s term, to our mode of reading on paper –
resulting in the feeling that our concentration starts to drift after a
couple of pages, and that we have to make an effort to stay focused.
As Nicholas Carr observed in The Atlantic in 2008, “The deep read-
ing that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”
Why do many of us find it so difficult to engage in deep reading
and, concomitantly, deep thinking, on screen? Plausible explana-
tions can be found in the embodied dimensions of reading and in
the differences in sensorimotor contingencies between screens and
paper as substrates for text presentation. Sensorimotor contin-
gencies refer to the sets of structured laws prescribing the sensory
changes brought about by one’s movement and/or manipulation of
objects: How we perceive the look, smell, sound and feel of objects
in our surroundings depends on how we move around in the world,
and manipulate and move objects around in, most often, our hands.
These laws are specific to the various sense modalities, meaning
that the sensorimotor contingencies for vision are different from
those for hearing, which are yet again different from those of the
sense of touch, smell, etc. Moving an object around in our hands
will provide abundant information about its properties – texture,
size, shape, weight, etc., only some of which are available when we
merely look at the object. However, when seeing an apple on the
kitchen counter, our numerous prior, embodied experiences with
simultaneously seeing and touching an apple will shape our pre-
dictions about what it will feel like if/when we pick it up and move
it around in our hand. Vision and touch are intimately entwined
54 Anne Mangen

in our ongoing perception and experience of our surroundings –

vision, and therefore also reading, is “textured.” This texture is
provided by the substrate on which the text is displayed – whether
sheets of paper bound together in a book, a piece of cardboard, or
an LCD touch screen.
Importantly, the sensorimotor contingencies of the book differ
from those of a screen: A text may look identical when printed on a
page and displayed on a tablet screen, but the two texts differ with
respect to the kinesthetic feedback they provide. When we read a
print book, we can see as well as feel the page-by-page progress
through the text. The physicality of paper allows a sense of volume
to the substrate, which embodies – literally speaking – the text and
reflects its length. Hence, just by a look at the spine, you can imme-
diately see – and feel – whether a book on the shelf is an 800-page
long novel, or a 20-page short story. In contrast, when you read
on a screen, there is no such correspondence between the physi-
cality of the substrate (screen) and the length and extension of the
text embedded therein. We can see, by means of progress bars or
other visual indicators (e.g., page numbers), where in the text we
are. However, differently from with a book, this exclusively visual
feedback is not supported by the associated sensorimotor cues.
This intangibility of the digital text may have implications for
cognitive and emotional aspects of reading. For instance, several
studies find that people – younger as well as older – still prefer paper
over screens, especially when reading longer texts (e.g. Mizrachi
et al., 2018). The reasons given for the preference for paper often
have to do with tangibility and the tactile quality: People report
that the feel of paper helps them focus and concentrate, and that
something is missing when they read on a screen. This phenomenon,
which Gerlach and Buxmann (2011) called “haptic dissonance,” is
found even with younger readers – the so-called “digital natives”
for whom screen reading is the new normal.
Moreover, recent research indicates that the missing sensorimotor –
kinesthetic – feedback of screens may in fact negatively affect certain
cognitive aspects of reading. In a 2019 experiment, my colleagues and
I compared the reading of a long (28-page) plot-based story read on
a Kindle and on paper in a print pocket book. Matching the surface
dimensions of the paper pages to the Kindle display so that the texts
looked identical, page-by-page, we assessed participants’ performance
on a range of measures targeting factual recall and comprehension.
Participants performed equally well on most of the tasks; however, on
 Digitization, Reading, and the Body 55

measures related to their ability to correctly reconstruct the temporal-

ity and order of events, those who had read the text in a print pocket
book outperformed the Kindle group.
We should of course be cautious when interpreting findings from
one single experiment, so replications are needed before we can
conclude on this issue. However, it seems justified to claim that
the tangibility and kinaesthetic feedback of paper seems to play
a role in cognitive – and perhaps even emotional – processes, in
part explaining the observed screen inferiority for certain aspects
of reading.
“Smell and sight are relevant senses when it comes to reading.
But touch may well be the most important,” writes Naomi Baron
(2015, p. 142). Hence, future research on reading would do well to
broaden the lens, accommodating the vital contributions of our
hands, fingers, and embodied minds in the reading process.

For Sources and Further Reading

Baron, N. (2015). Words onscreen: The fate of reading in a digital world.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Delgado, P., Vargas, C., Ackerman, R., and Salmerón, L. (2018). Don’t
throw away your printed books: A meta-analysis on the effects of read-
ing media on comprehension. Educational Research Review, 25, 23–38.
Gerlach, J., & Buxmann, P. (2011). Investigating the acceptance of elec-
tronic books: The impact of haptic dissonance on innovation adoption.
European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) Proceedings, 141.
Kuzmičová, A., Dias, P., Čepič, A. V., Albrechtslund A. B., Casado, A.,
Topić, M. K., … Teixeira‐Botelho, I. (2018). Reading and company: Em-
bodiment and social space in silent reading practices. Literacy, 52(2),
70–77.
Mangen, A., Olivier, G., & Velay, J. L. (2019). Comparing comprehension
of a long text read in print book and on Kindle: Where in the text and
when in the story? Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 38.
Mizrachi, D., Salaz, A. M., Kurbanoglu, S., Boustany, J., & ARFIS Re-
search Group (2018). Academic reading format preferences and be-
haviors among university students worldwide: A comparative survey
analysis. PloS one, 13(5), e0197444.
Wolf, M. (2018). Reader, come home: The reading brain in a digital world.
New York: Harper.
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
[Link] ndfra [Link]
Part III
Coordinating

What call-and-response relationships attune the body to the world

around it and orchestrate its inner workings? Through what sorts
of clocks, recursive loops, and other controls are physiology and ac-
tion coordinated with environmental rhythms, emotion, and think-
ing? The essays in this section take up these questions, describing
how bodies oscillate in tribute to rhythms of the distant past and
adjust in real time to circumstances and goals.
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
[Link] ndfra [Link]
9 Embodied Time
A Shared, Ancient Heritage
Barbara Helm

On our deeply rhythmic planet, life has evolved the ability to em-
body the change between day and night, the seasons, tides, and
phases of the moon. Human societies strive to overcome this rhyth-
micity by generating ever-ready “24/7” conditions, but problems
linked to clock disruption remind us that we are better off accept-
ing, and staying tuned with, our rhythmically changing bodies.

The fundamental condition of our planet is deep rhythmicity (see

Figure 9.1): Earth’s annual orbit around sun marks the seasons; ro-
tation around Earth’s axis causes the alternation between day and
night; moon’s monthly orbit around Earth is perceived as periodic
waxing and waning; and lunar gravitational forces generate the
tides on the rotating Earth. These rhythms, and resulting physical
changes – for example, in light, temperature, and ocean currents –
shape the cycles of living organisms. Striking rhythmic processes
are the annual die-back and regeneration of green vegetation, the
migrations of billions of animals, and the well-timed dawn chorus
of birds and evening emergence of bats.
Such easily observable biotic mass phenomena result from indi-
vidual biological rhythms of a myriad of organisms. They are the
most obvious tip of an iceberg of countless rhythms in body func-
tion, from expression of genes and cell regeneration, through fluc-
tuations of body temperature and hormones, to cycles in abilities,
such as physical strength and the ability to concentrate. Biological
rhythms are maintained by organisms ranging from unicells (such
as dinoflagellates, zooplankton, beer yeast) to flowers, bees, birds,
and mammals.
Importantly, these rhythms are endogenous (i.e., self-generated).
Each individual organism carries inside itself a biological clock
that continues to tick, even if the individual is isolated from all
60 Barbara Helm

Figure 9.1 Rhythms of humans and other organisms are caused by plan-
etary movements of Earth (circular image) and moon relative
to sun. In anticipation of annual, daily, lunar, and tidal cycles,
organisms from all biological kingdoms have evolved internal
time-keeping. Examples include timely hibernation, pregnancy,
and eclosion of butterflies. That these rhythms of organisms
are entwined is illustrated for host and parasite interactions.
Host and parasite are both subject to environmental rhythms.
Hosts may ramp up immune defense at anticipated time of par-
asite attack, whereas a parasite may attempt to circumvent or
manipulate the host’s rhythmic immune defense. Figure is re-
printed in grayscale from a color version created by Micaela
Martinez-Bakker that appeared in Martinez-Bakker & Helm
(2015), Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

environmental information. This phenomenon was first described

in the 18th century for plants that, despite being stored away from
light, continued to show daily movements of their leaves. Since then,
studies of countless organisms have confirmed that their cycles – for
example, in activity and rest or in hibernation and reproduction –
continued under entirely constant conditions. Humans are no
exception, as firmly established by the rhythmicity of scores of
volunteers who have allowed themselves to be studied for days or
weeks in caves or custom-built isolation facilities without access
to the external environment. It also is true that biological rhythms
have evolved to interact with the environment of organisms. Under
natural conditions, the rhythms do entrain to reliable signals in the
 Embodied Time: A Shared, Ancient Heritage 61

environment, most commonly to the rhythmic changes in light con-

ditions arising from planetary movement. But the cycles carry on
even in the absence of environmental signals, a still-vital legacy of
rhythms in the distant past.
The best-known biological rhythms are circadian (i.e., endogenous
rhythms that repeat at an approximately daily time scale). Research
has tracked the mechanism of these rhythms in many species to a set
of genes that interact in a feedback loop, to effectively switch each
other on and off through the proteins they encode. In this way, a sim-
ple cell – for example, in human skin or in the brain – can generate its
own rhythm. Its apparently simple loop is backed up and fine-tuned
by a whole suite of additional genes, more feedback loops, modifi-
ers and epigenetic changes. Moreover, the many cells of individual
organisms – billions in the case of the human brain alone – need to
be coordinated in their rhythmicity. Elaborate mechanisms enable
communication and synchronization of the many clocks in the body
to yield an overall representation of “time.”
The sophistication and ubiquity of biological clocks suggest that
over evolutionary time, organisms have greatly benefitted from
embodying time. Planetary rhythms have been entirely reliable
throughout most of the evolution of life, and certainly throughout
human history. Consequently, organisms had ample time to tune
their bodies to the rhythmic changes in their environments. A num-
ber of advantages are associated with embodied time. First, body
functions are activated for the time when they are needed. For ex-
ample, body temperature is high at times of physical activity, and
immune capacities such as wound healing are high when injury or
infections are most likely. Complementarily, body functions can be
down-regulated at other times to allow for regeneration and rest,
so that different processes are active at different times. Secondly,
embodied time allows coordination of such different processes in
the body so that, for example, competing activities do not co-occur.
Thirdly, embodied time allows for the correct interpretation of the
natural environment. For example, bees and birds are able to nav-
igate by the position of the sun, accounting for its apparent move-
ment across the sky. Finally, embodied time allows organisms to
anticipate relevant changes in the environment long before they oc-
cur. For example, pregnancy and egg-laying occur well in advance
of the favorable environmental conditions in which newly born
young can thrive.
Humans currently have an ambiguous relationship with biolog-
ical rhythms. On the one hand, rhythmicity has long been keenly
62 Barbara Helm

observed. Ancient knowledge, put in stone as a Mayan pyramid or

Stonehenge circle, reflected minute awareness of planetary cycles.
Many cultures also observed nature’s cycles, such as birds’ daily
morning chorus or annual migrations, with similar acuity. Knowl-
edge of the planet’s rhythms had imminent relevance for agricul-
ture, hunting, or travel by land and sea, and that knowledge came
to be canonized in a wide range of calendars and clocks. Many cul-
tures had also recognized rhythmic changes in the human body,
such as in temperament and in reproductive rhythms associated
with lunar and annual calendars. On the other hand, an alternative
conceptualization of time as linear and disembodied came to be
important for humans. This view increasingly dominated physics
to history, religion, and performing arts. This trend resulted in a
baffling paucity of language, with the word “time” being used to re-
fer to radically different concepts. Moreover, as modern fascination
with “progress” grew, the linear view of time came to overshadow,
if not discredit, the view of time as rhythmic, shared, and embod-
ied. A richer understanding of time is warranted. Although linear
progress of time can have bodily traces – for example, as tempo in
performance or in processes of development and aging – it is the
rhythmic nature of time whose embodiment is shared from humans
to unicells.
With increasing human power over the immediate rhythmic
environment – light and darkness, heat and cold – rhythmic bodily
time fell into disfavor. Many modern cultures came to consider
human lives as a-seasonal, derided lunar rhythms as mythology,
and strove to overcome daily rhythms. We are currently well on our
way towards a “24/7” life-style (i.e., continuous activity around the
clock throughout the week), where around the year humans expose
themselves to the daylength and temperature of eternal summer.
The proportion of workers doing night shifts continues to increase,
reaching approximately 15% in several industrialized countries.
Worryingly, human changes affect rhythmic environments of all
organisms on a global scale. The darkness of night, which has been
key for entrainment of biological clocks, is lost at a frightening rate.
Meanwhile, global warming modifies the seasons and along with it,
disconnects the finely timed network of organisms’ interactions, for
example in food webs, pollination, and host-parasite systems.
Ironically, efforts of abandoning rhythmicity in human soci-
eties coincided with increasingly acute and painful awareness of
the shared, ancient heritage of embodied time. The persistence
of our circadian rhythm is experienced through jet-lag – that is, a
 Embodied Time: A Shared, Ancient Heritage 63

mismatch between body-time and environmental time after flying

across time zones. Clearly, resetting the watch does not suffice to
shift ourselves to new locations. Instead, well-timed light exposure,
strict sleep regimens, pharmaceutical solutions, or simply patience
is required to overcome the restless nights and fatigued days of a
mismatched clock. Other forms of clock disruption that are less im-
mediate than jet-lag pose still greater risks to humans. Shift-work
has been identified as a major cause of a broad range of human pa-
thologies and is associated with heightened risk of errors and acci-
dents. Additionally, mental health issues are often associated with
disturbed clocks, and sleep disorders and sleep deprivation affect
many societies at epidemiological scales.
Such observations have prompted the insight that we humans,
once again, act as a naively arrogant species in any attempt to
deny our embodiment of planetary rhythms. Human rhythmicity
is now well-documented on daily, lunar, and annual time-scales.
Although these findings might slow some ambitions, there is so
much to be gained from humble acceptance of embodied time.
For example, we now know that individual differences between
so-called “owls and larks” (i.e., evening and morning chrono-
types) have a firm physiological basis. Chronotype also changes
dramatically with age, in particular during puberty. No longer
can evening types be stereotyped as lazy, nor morning types as
boring, once the reality of biological rhythms is acknowledged.
Chrono-medicine opens new possibilities through, for example,
flu vaccinations or medications that are more efficient if applied
at a generally appropriate or even a personalized body-time.
On the other end of the spectrum, reference to embodied time
also defines our relationship with other organisms, towards a
cross-disciplinary advancement of One Health for humans, other
animals, and the global environment.

For Sources and Further Reading

Foster, R. G., & Kreitzman, L. (2005). Rhythms of life: The biological
clocks that control the daily lives of every living thing. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Foster, R. G., & Kreitzman, L. (2009). Seasons of life: The biological
rhythms that enable living things to thrive and survive. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Martinez-Bakker, M., & Helm, B. (2015). The influence of biological
rhythms on host-parasite interactions. Trends in Ecology & Evolution,
30(6), 314–326.
64 Barbara Helm

Martinez, M. E. (2018). The calendar of epidemics: Seasonal cycles of in-

fectious diseases. PLOS Pathogens, 14(11), e1007327.
Roenneberg, T., & Merrow, M. (2016). The circadian clock and human
health. Current Biology, 26(10), R432–R443.
Schwartz, W., Helm, B., & Gerkema, M. (Eds.). (2017). Wild clocks:
Integrating chronobiology and ecology to understand timekeeping in
free-living animals. London: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society B: Biological Sciences.
Wehr, T. A. (2001). Photoperiodism in humans and other primates: Evi-
dence and implications. Journal of Biological Rhythms, 16(4), 348–364.
10 Rhythm and the Body
Gregory A. Bryant

Rhythm involves the production and perception of regularly timed

events. It is inextricably tied to body movement and an embodied
sense of interpersonal coordination in social and musical contexts
that triggers reward centers in our brains, suggesting evolutionary
function.

Rhythm is ubiquitous. Many phenomena in nature have rhythmic

qualities, occurring on highly variable timescales, and for many
different reasons. Natural systems in living organisms are no excep-
tion. Our hearts beat in periodic intervals, our breathing functions
in regular cycles, and basic body motions such as walking require
a complicated rhythmic coordination between interacting motor
systems. For living beings, rhythm is embodied, meaning that it
emanates from bodily experience, and manifests itself in both body
movement patterns and our perceptual sensitivities. Many of us
cannot help but move along to a rhythmic sound, especially when
it is in the context of music. Recognizing the role of the body in
rhythmic phenomena constitutes a crucial turn in our understand-
ing of the importance of rhythm in human experience, as well as the
evolution of many human behaviors.
The word “rhythm” is derived from the Greek rhiem, meaning
“to flow.” The notion of flow is a central conceptual basis for re-
cent work in the psychology of rhythm and music, and studies of
how musicians “get in the groove.” But the idea of flowing rhythmi-
cally extends well beyond music: We get in the flow with others in
conversation, or with ourselves in our work, and with our lives in
the broadest sense. The underlying conceptual metaphor of flowing
is rooted in our physical experiences of moving through the world
and understanding that movement as a kind of journey. This meta-
phorical understanding is revealed in how people talk about many
66 Gregory A. Bryant

aspects of life in these terms, including quite importantly, how it

feels to get in the groove, or flow with others. Flowing is intrinsi-
cally rewarding, and various kinds of embodied descriptions are
indicative of the deep interactions between sensorimotor systems,
perceptually guided action, and cognitive structure.
Most generally, rhythm refers to specific kinds of timing phe-
nomena that can be described in terms of relationships between
events. Rhythmic events can be isochronic (equally timed intervals)
or heterochronic (variably timed intervals), sometimes with quite
complex, hierarchical structures. Although laypeople and scholars
alike often use the term rhythmic coordination in somewhat loose
ways, the idea of entrainment is actually quite specific (see Phillips-
Silver et al., 2010, for a review). Entrainment is the coupling
of independent oscillators made possible by an energy transfer be-
tween them. An oscillator is any system that produces periodic out-
put, such as a pendulum or metronome. Imagine two metronomes
rocking back and forth separately, at two different beats per minute
(BPM). They will not spontaneously assume the same period, of
course, unless they are positioned in a way where their movement
can have mutual physical effects on one another. For instance, if
they are on a wood board, which is set on a sturdy surface, there
will be no way for the motion of the swinging pendulum arms to
move the board, and thus affect the other metronome(s). But if
they are placed on a board with wheels, allowing it to move along
with the motion of the metronomes, the movement of the pendu-
lum arms will shift the board back and forth. This motion creates
a means of energy transfer between the two metronomes, result-
ing in a feedback process that causes the two oscillators to become
coupled, with the coupling dependent on the strength of the ener-
getic connection. The independent oscillator settings (in BPM) can
disrupt the entrainment, resulting in a continuously shifting phase
relationship (itself potentially comprising a higher-order rhythmic
structure). A web search of metronome synchronization will result
in many visual examples.
Now imagine two bodies as the oscillators, and the link between
perception and action as the means of energy transfer. What we
hear (and see) can directly affect how we move our bodies; that
is, auditory perception is attuned to isochronous sounds, and
our bodies naturally engage with those sounds. From an embod-
iment perspective, we can understand rhythmic production and
perception as situated activity that guides recurrent sensorimotor
connectivity. Bodies generate rhythms through specialized motor
 Rhythm and the Body 67

programs, often with the help of culturally evolved technology, and

drive perceptually guided action. Even passive listening to musi-
cal rhythms will activate motor areas of the brain. In many ways,
rhythm processing in any animal provides a quintessential example
of the relevance of embodied processes for understanding percep-
tion and action.
The link between rhythmic production and perception mediated
through embodied processes can function in many social contexts.
Social entrainment is present in a variety of species (e.g., synchro-
nous chorusing in crickets and frogs), often in the service of terri-
torial and mating behavior; however, many animals can be trained
to entrain, with varying success. Researchers have studied parrots,
sea lions, bonobos, and others showing how these animals can
move contingently to a rhythmic stimulus. But none of these par-
ticular species have been observed to spontaneously engage in so-
cial entrainment with one another in nature. One proposed source
of entrainment abilities is vocal learning. Being able to produce
target vocal sounds generated by others requires specialized per-
ception of useful acoustic features that interfaces with vocal motor
machinery – a perception–action link. Put simply, vocal learning
often requires that we connect, with precise timing, what we hear
to how we move. Evidence from nonhuman animal research shows
that spontaneous contingent movement to rhythmic sounds is typi-
cally performed by vocal learners, such as parrots. But with exten-
sive training, non-vocal learners do it as well, though the underlying
mechanisms are unknown. In one case, a California sea lion (not a
vocal learner) has been shown to have learned quite well how to bob
his head to the beat of human music. But closely related seal species
are vocal learners, suggesting that latent abilities shared across gen-
era or families could be at play. Evolutionary processes conserve
structure, and thus, mechanisms can potentially be triggered by
certain input despite their absence in the behavioral repertoire of
the animal. The vocal learning hypothesis does a fairly good job of
explaining why rhythm entrainment exists in many animals who do
not show spontaneous social entrainment, but more work is needed
(see Ravignani et al., 2014, for a review).
Rhythm in humans has been described as a suite of co-operating be-
havioral subskills, including continuous and burst body muscle move-
ment (sometimes called smooth and ballistic), the action-perception
link just described, and error correction mechanisms. Specific types
of errors require tailored behavioral solutions. For example, adjusting
your rhythmic behavior timing to synchronize with a beat that is the
68 Gregory A. Bryant

same tempo as your movement (e.g., stop momentarily and start on

time) is a different problem from adjusting the interval between rhyth-
mic events (i.e., change the BPM). Evidence suggests these kinds of
corrections involve distinct cortical processes. The underlying control
and implementation of error correction mechanisms interface in still
unknown ways with subjective feelings of being in the groove. This
sensorimotor coordination is facilitated by many factors, including the
auditory structure of the rhythm, whether the target beat is generated
by a live agent or a machine, and how easily one can imagine and pro-
duce entrained movement.
Consider the qualities of music and the contexts in which people
are compelled to dance. We have to feel the beat and find a way to
move our bodies contingently. For instance, people tend to move
their upper body, especially their head, to salient low frequency fea-
tures in rhythms (e.g., a kick drum), while moving their torso and
hands to more high-frequency components. But simple isochrony
often does not induce a groove; small variations in timing qualities,
such as syncopation, where accents are shifted in unexpected ways,
add complexity to rhythms that help capture embodied reactions
to beats.
Rhythmic movement in humans is highly social, and it need not
involve musical rhythm at all. We entrain our speech patterns and
synchronize our body movements during conversation. Moreover,
groups of interacting people can move together over long timescales
that can contribute to an overall sense of flowing with a social part-
ner. These kinds of coordinated phenomena seem to be related to
nonverbal vocal behaviors. For example, laughing together can pre-
dict how coordinated people are in conversation, and the degree
of coordination can be related to various measures of feelings of
closeness and cooperation. Researchers examining interpersonal
coordination in communication use sophisticated techniques in-
corporating dynamical systems analyses revealing synchrony on
multiple timescales, all likely related to an overall subjective sense
of being in the groove, or flowing. These perceptions are not linked
to our deliberate movements; trying to consciously synch with an-
other in conversation can have negative effects on the actual coor-
dination. People are not typically able to describe verbally what
is going on, but they can “feel” it. It is embodied, automatic, and
likely an index of how well we might get along outside of the imme-
diate communicative context.
The beat is felt subjectively in the body, and becoming entrained
to an isochronous rhythm, especially with other individuals, is a
 Rhythm and the Body 69

pleasurable goal state that is associated with activity in reward cen-

ters of the brain. Moreover, how we encode rhythm is affected by
our bodily experience. In one study, researchers bounced babies
to an ambiguous auditory rhythm with bouncing accents on either
a double or triple beat. They then played the recordings back to
the infants days later and found that the babies preferred to listen
to auditory analogs of versions that matched what they had been
bounced to. The way the babies experienced the beat with their
bodies had an impact on how they encoded the sound. Adults even
seek out rhythm in noise that is not recognizable as music. In a
study of how music preferences shape particular musical features,
sound sequences were presented to listeners in pairs, and listen-
ers had to choose which one they preferred. After many repeated
exposures across listeners, preferred sounds were replicated with
slight modification (emulating mutation), and dis-preferred sounds
were removed (i.e., selected against). Over thousands of generations
in this extremely simple evolutionary simulation, rhythmic beats
emerged spontaneously. We deeply crave rhythm in the sounds we
hear.
Research investigating the experience of musicians getting in the
groove reveals that these experiences are multimodal and complex
(see Levitin et al., 2018, for a review). One of the best signs for mu-
sicians that they are in the groove is when the coordinated play-
ing becomes automatic and effortless, and there is a kind of locked
performance. Musicians seek out these kinds of experiences, and
many report a sustained groove as the height of musical pleasure as
a performer. During playing, minor adjustments (i.e., error correc-
tions) are typically needed as the collective performance unfolds in
time. The groove emerges dynamically as these errors are resolved,
and constant feedback between musicians is often helpful. These
adjustments of course often happen mostly unconsciously, but can
also involve verbal instruction, nonverbal signals, and musical indi-
cators of success and failure. The direct connection to interpersonal
interaction in conversation is fairly straightforward, as conversa-
tion is likely the primordial behavior from which culturally evolved
musical interaction is derived.
If our ability to entrain is deeply rooted in our sensorimotor ex-
perience, and is intricately tied to basic communicative behavior,
it is rather easy to understand why cultural processes have been
attracted to it. We are highly motivated to engage in musical ac-
tivity, whether as players, listeners, or dancers. The intense and
universal motivation to participate in musical activity suggests
70 Gregory A. Bryant

social function. Music and other cultural practices that incor-

porate rhythm are successful because of our embodied predilec-
tions. But what social functions could this serve? One possibility
is that rhythm provides a means by which groups of people can
communicate their social coalitions. Isochronous beat structures
allow groups to integrate complex musical and dancing activity in
ways that reveal sophisticated and well-rehearsed coordination.
The ethnographic record of traditional societies around the world
shows clearly that musical performances are very common during
initial encounters between distinct groups. These acts, in conjunc-
tion with other cultural behaviors, can help groups signal the qual-
ity of their relationships, including honest signaling of time spent
investing in the performances and the strength of their coalition.
Evolution could have favored rhythmic abilities in modern humans
beyond those needed for vocal learning, resulting in one of a hand-
ful of musical behavioral adaptations that coevolved with cultural
traditions.
Ongoing research is looking at many different aspects of this
widespread phenomenon, including comparative work attempting
to disentangle the evolutionary roots of entrainment and psycholog-
ical research exploring the complexities of rhythmic coproduction
and perception. The topic of rhythm is one that lies at the complex
interface of biological and cultural evolution, and much remains to
be discovered. We are just now getting in the groove.

For Sources and Further Reading

Levitin, D. J., Grahn, J. A., & London, J. (2018). The psychology of music:
Rhythm and movement. Annual Review of Psychology, 69, 51–75.
Phillips-Silver, J., Aktipis, C. A., & Bryant, G. A. (2010). The ecology of
entrainment: Foundations of coordinated rhythmic movement. Music
Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 28(1), 3–14.
Ravignani, A., Bowling, D. L., & Fitch, W. (2014). Chorusing, synchrony,
and the evolutionary functions of rhythm. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1118.
Project website: where rhythm emerges in an evolutionary simulation:
[Link]
11 The Embodiment of Emotion
Giovanna Colombetti

Emotions are cognitive in that they involve some level of under-

standing of what is going on in the world or in one’s own body. The
cognitive nature of the emotions, however, does not imply that they
are merely “brainy.” Brain and body are deeply interrelated, and
emotions should therefore be regarded as thoroughly embodied.

We live in the age of the brain. As Fernando Vidal and Francisco

Ortega argue in their 2017 book Being Brains: Making the Cere-
bral Subject, we identify our subjectivity with brain processes. We
think that we are fundamentally our brains. A related aspect of this
ideology is that we think that the brain is the powerhouse of the
mind. Before you read any further, you may try this: enter “mind”
or “cognition” into Google Images. Done? What did you find? Most
probably pictures of heads and brains – some even projecting light
around them, as if the mind were an emanation of energy from the
brain. The idea that the mind is in the head, or is caused by the
brain, or literally is the brain is deeply entrenched in our culture. It
is apparent also in the conversational gesture of pointing to one’s
forehead to refer to the activity of thinking. And as a lecturer, I
have noted that my students often (and increasingly) use “brain-
talk” to describe how they feel or think, often saying things like:
“my brain is not very quick today,” or “I don’t understand, my
brain is hurting!”
At the same time, we are also intimately familiar with mental
states that clearly appear to involve the body (for expository pur-
poses, “body” here refers specifically to organs and processes lo-
cated in the biological organism outside the brain). These mental
states are our emotions: fear, anger, joy, sadness, jealousy, disgust,
embarrassment, and so on. When we are in an emotional state, we
often display characteristic facial expressions and other behaviors
72 Giovanna Colombetti

(we cry when sad, blush when embarrassed, tense up when angry,
etc.). We also feel our body changing. For instance, we experience
our heart beating fast when we are agitated or angry, for example,
before speaking in public or if someone aggressively accuses us. It
is difficult to imagine having an emotion without the body undergo-
ing any change or without feeling any bodily sensation. Famously,
the philosopher William James thought this was actually impossi-
ble. In a much-debated article published in 1884, he claimed that a
purely disembodied emotion is a nonentity – it cannot exist. If you
take the body away from an emotion, all you are left with is a feel-
ingless state of “cold cognition.”
Contemporary philosophers and psychologists recognize that
the body is often involved in emotion. However, they emphasize
that emotions are primarily cognitive mental states: Emotions in-
clude cognition – that is, knowledge or understanding (from the
Latin cognoscere: to know, to come to know, to judge). In particu-
lar, contemporary theorists emphasize that emotions involve cog-
nitive judgments and evaluations (also called “appraisals”). Being
scared or agitated before speaking in public, for example, is said to
involve the appraisal that one might say silly things, or be ill-judged
by others; being sad and worried when not finding one’s cat involves
the judgment that the cat is valuable to one, that she might be hurt,
and so on.
It is certainly important to stress that emotions are cognitive. In
the history of emotion theory, however, this claim has often led to
dismissing and side-lining the body. Psychological and philosophi-
cal accounts popular in the 60s and 70s illustrate this phenomenon
well. In those years the body was often regarded as neither suffi-
cient nor necessary for emotion. In other words, emotions were
conceived of as entirely cognitive or “brainy” (as cognition was, and
still is, generally regarded as taking place entirely in the brain). The
fact that one’s heart accelerates before speaking in public was seen
as a mere contingent concomitant of fear; that is, such reactions are
something that happens, sometimes or even often, but that does not
have to happen for fear to occur – one would still be scared as long
as one judged that speaking in public is scary.
The situation is different today, as most emotion theorists and af-
fective scientists conceive of emotions as both cognitive and bodily.
They regard cognitive appraisals as well as various bodily changes
(in facial and vocal expression, posture, behavior, autonomic ner-
vous system activity) as central aspects, or “components,” of emo-
tion. This view does not imply that every emotional episode must
 The Embodiment of Emotion 73

come with changes in all of these components. The claim is, rather,
that changes in these components are typical of the clearest cases
of emotion.
Is it accurate to say, then, that affective scientists today regard
emotions as embodied mental states rather than as merely brainy
ones? Well, yes and no. Yes, because, as just noted, they often re-
gard bodily changes as typical components of emotions, next to
cognitive/brain components. No, however, because the role they
assign to the body in emotion is still secondary and ancillary to the
one of cognition and the brain. In a nutshell: The body has been re-
instated in emotion theory, but it still does not have the same status
of the brain.
This situation can be seen as yet another manifestation of the
“ideology of the cerebral subject” denounced by Ortega and Vidal
and mentioned at the start. Emotions, many affective scientists in-
sist, are cognitive and therefore intelligent. And where does the in-
telligence of the emotions reside? In the brain, of course – for where
else could it reside, if the brain is considered the seat of cognition?
In other words, contemporary affective science recognizes that the
body plays an important role in emotion, yet characterizes this role
not as one of understanding or making sense of the world, but as a
practical one of reacting to stimuli in order to mobilize action. The
intelligent work of evaluating the environment remains a preroga-
tive of brain-located cognition.
There are reasons to question this view. A main reason has to
do with physiology. The more we know about the workings of the
organism, the less the brain appears to be an organ of control, with
the body serving merely to keep it alive. What physiology tells us,
instead, is that the brain and the body are interrelated in complex
ways, at multiple levels and timescales. Given such a deep integra-
tion, it is not clear that we can attribute “pure” cognitive functions
to the brain only, and noncognitive, simply reactive functions to the
body. Relatedly, it is not clear that we can neatly separate the cogni-
tive/brainy components of emotion from the bodily ones.
Take, for example, the case of stress. Many affective scientists
regard the brain as the physical basis of emotions. They claim that
the brain (or rather specific parts of it) evaluates stimuli in the en-
vironment, and subsequently generates or produces corresponding
emotions – such as fear in response to (brain-detected) danger,
sadness in response to (brain-detected) loss, and so on. Relatedly,
they regard stress as a response to brain-detected threat. They also
claim that the brain drives and controls the bodily changes that
74 Giovanna Colombetti

occur as a consequence of the brain evaluating the environment.

Both claims are manifestations of a brainocentric perspective that
privileges the brain over other parts of the organism when explain-
ing how emotions come about and unfold.
When one looks at physiological accounts of stress, however, one
notes that they have long claimed that various endocrine bodily or-
gans and processes influence how the organism responds to chal-
lenging (i.e., stressful) situations. Physiological accounts of stress
do not focus on the brain only, but describe how certain parts of
the brain (the hypothalamus) interact with endocrine glands lo-
cated in the body (the pituitary and the adrenal glands) and with
the hormones released by these glands (e.g., corticotropic releas-
ing hormone, adrenocorticotropic hormone, glucocorticoids). The
standard physiological story is that the brain responds to stress-
ors by releasing hormones that influence endocrine glands in the
body, which in turn release further hormones that have various ef-
fects on both body and brain. In humans, the adrenal glands release
cortisol – a glucocorticoid that can rapidly reach various bodily
organs as well as the brain. Once in the brain, cortisol can influence
its own synthesis by inhibiting the secretory activity of the hypo-
thalamus. This negative feedback loop illustrates nicely that it is
not just the brain that regulates the body, but also the other way
around. This fact alone puts pressure on brainocentrism, because
it shows that an emotion such as stress is not adequately character-
ized solely as a brain process, nor as a brain-body process that is
entirely generated and controlled by the brain.
And this is not the end of the story. Further fascinating recent
evidence shows that plasma concentration of glucocorticoids oscil-
lates hourly and, moreover, independently of the brain (for details
and references, see Colombetti & Zavala, 2019). Importantly for
the notion of embodiment, this oscillation dynamically influences
how the organism responds to the environment. For example, rats
react more aggressively toward a social intruder when their gluco-
corticoid levels are rising, compared to when they are falling. This
evidence challenges brainocentrism further, because it illustrates
that stress is not entirely determined and controlled by the brain
but depends on bodily processes as well, some of which are even
independent from the brain.
Still, this is not yet the end of the story – because, in addition, the
stress system described so far influences, and is in turn influenced
by, various other physiological processes occurring at the level
of the immune and the gastrointestinal system, including the gut
 The Embodiment of Emotion 75

microbiota (the many different bacteria and other microorganisms

that live in the gut). Given this complexity, to say that stress is an
emotion generated and controlled by the brain appears decidedly
misleading.
What about other emotional states, though? One might think
that stress is an exception in its involvement of so many physio-
logical processes. Not so. Evidence is mounting that depression
and anxiety, too, recruit specific changes not just in brain neuro-
chemistry but also in endocrine and immune processes, including
gut microbiota (see Colombetti & Zavala, 2019, for details). And
stress, depression, and anxiety often come together and feed one
another, and importantly also influence a range of other emotional
states, including short-lived ones. More precisely, stress, anxiety,
and depression can be seen as overarching affective conditions that
determine the range of emotional responses one is likely to exhibit
at any given time – very much like climate zones (e.g., temperate
or arid) determine the likelihood of specific local weather patterns
(rain, drought, etc.). We also know from experience that being de-
pressed makes one more prone to feeling dejected, hopeless, or
guilty; the same stimulus, such as a mild critical remark, will affect
a depressed and a nondepressed person differently. Similarly for
stress and anxiety.
The upshot is that it seems neither possible nor advisable to re-
gard stress and other emotional states as based entirely or primarily
in the brain. Many short-lived emotional responses to stimuli argu-
ably depend on more global, longer-lasting emotional conditions
(sometimes also called “moods” and “mood disorders”) whose
physiological bases straddle mutually influencing brain and bodily
processes. And more generally, the brain and body are always inter-
acting and influencing one another – not just during stress, anxiety,
or depression. Given this integration, it does not seem possible to
divide the realm of emotional states into the embodied ones, and
the merely brainy ones.
In sum, to regard emotion as properly embodied entails going
beyond acknowledging that it involves bodily changes. Embodi-
ment as an alternative to brainocentrism should also challenge the
popular assumption that the cognitive or intelligent dimension of
emotion depends entirely on the brain. As physiology tells us that
the body is so intimately coupled or integrated with the brain, the
body then ought not to be seen as a mere reactant. Rather, the body
ought to be seen as an active participant in the process of making
sense of stimuli and situations beyond its borders.
76 Giovanna Colombetti

For Sources and Further Reading

Colombetti, G. (2014). The feeling body: Affective science meets the enactive
mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Colombetti, G., & Zavala, E. (2019). Are emotions based in the brain? A
critique of affective brainocentrism from a physiological perspective.
Biology and Philosophy, 34, 45.
Vidal, F., & Ortega, F. (2017). Being brains: Making the cerebral subject.
New York: Fordham University Press.
12 Body Focus in Expert
Action
Barbara Gail Montero, John Toner
and Aidan Moran

Although adopting an explicit, conscious “body focus” may, at

times, hinder performance and impede improvement, such a fo-
cus may often be advantageous to both practice and performance
in highly skilled bodily activities. Empirical studies suggest that
certain groups of experts frequently employ bodily foci and that
a body focus can help fend off “choking under pressure.” Because
experts push themselves to achieve their personal best and because
bodies and environments are labile, a body focus may be needed
to control action.

Achieving a desired goal that is just out of reach may sometimes

require focusing on the means rather than the end. For example,
if an aspiring thief wants to steal Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry
Night,” from the Museum of Modern Art, the thief needs to find a
disguise, gather tools, arrange for a getaway car, and so forth. But
stealing second base in a baseball game, some claim, is not like this:
A runner on first base who is focusing on the means of stealing
second – specifically, the bodily means – will soon be out. Indeed,
even prior to a nighttime heist, a prospective buyer might caution
the thief against concentrating on finger movements while disabling
the security system. Although focusing on the means may some-
times be needed to achieve an end, it is thought that focusing on the
bodily means is unhelpful.
In sport, many studies suggest that focusing on the body leads
to poorer performance relative to focusing on the consequences of
bodily actions (see Wulf, 2013, for a review). Indeed, those studies
led Wulf (2016) to conclude that “if movements are not planned
in terms of the intended movement effect, but in terms of specific
body movements, the outcome will always be less-than-optimal”
(p. 338, cited in Montero et al., 2018). We do not doubt that there
78 Barbara Gail Montero et al.

are times in an athlete’s, dancer’s, or other professional mover’s ca-

reer when adopting an explicit, conscious “body focus” may hinder
performance and impede improvement. And whether athletes are
always marginally aware of their bodies (a topic beyond the scope
of this essay) deserves attention. However, we shall present some
reasons to think that in highly skilled bodily activities, it is often
advantageous – both to practice and performance – to adopt an
explicit bodily focus.
Let’s begin with an obvious example of where a bodily focus is
necessary for achieving one’s goals: The small subset of skills whose
success conditions are, at least in part, defined in terms of attain-
ing a bodily-centered focus. The dance practice Gaga is illustrative
(see Katan-Schmid, 2016, cited in Montero et al., 2018). As Gaga
is concerned not with how you look but with how you feel, you are
sometimes asked to focus on very specific parts of the body, such as
the webbing between your fingers. Other activities that explicitly re-
quire a body focus are certain types of yoga and meditation where
the point is to focus on one’s breathing. Because an explicit aim
of these activities is to focus on the body, failing to do so, in these
activities, means failing to perform optimally.
That such skills are aided by a bodily focus is uncontroversial.
However, we argue that even beyond this small subset of skills, ath-
letes and others whose skills are body based can sometimes benefit
from focusing on the movements of their bodies.
One important reason why adopting a body focus can, at times,
be beneficial to a wide range of skills is that focusing on one’s body
can promote conscious control. The relevance of conscious control
to improved skill might seem straightforward: Put simply, to fine
tune your actions, you need to control them consciously. However,
the empirical evidence does not invariably support this position.
Wulf and Lewthwaite (2010, cited in Montero et al., 2018), for ex-
ample, argue that in expert skill, a conscious mode of control may
trigger self-evaluative and self-regulatory processing which may
result in “choking” episodes (a sudden deterioration in skilled per-
formance due to anxiety). Although we think that conscious con-
trol may sometimes impede certain skills, we are not convinced
that it is always harmful. In fact, we believe that a body focus can
sometimes be used to prevent choking. We believe that body focus
may be helpful, in part, because even highly practiced skills might
not be fully automated (Carr, 2015). Experts frequently try to push
themselves to achieve their “personal best,” to shave off a couple
seconds in a cross-country race or make the ending of a pirouette
 Body Focus in Expert Action 79

more seamless. And, as noted by Ericsson and colleagues (1993,

cited in Montero, 2018), going beyond what you have done involves
leaving the comfort zone of automaticity.
Furthermore, environments are often labile and every day the
body is slightly different, and slight differences may matter for the
exacting and extremely important skills that an athlete or dancer
may enact. As the tennis player Rafael Nadal put it in his 2011 book
(with Carlin), Rafa, “every day you wake up feeling differently . . .
[and] every shot is different”; thus, even after hitting millions of balls,
“hitting a true, smooth clean shot every time . . . [is not] a piece of
cake” (p. 132). And if a challenge is present, we suggest, you need
conscious attention. You might not need conscious attention to your
bodily movements; however, as we shall go on to argue, in at least
some cases of expert action, a body focus is beneficial.
There is evidence from empirical studies that certain groups of
experts frequently employ bodily foci. When Guss-West and Wulf
(2016) surveyed 53 international professional ballet dancers to iden-
tify what these performers focused on or imagined when preparing
and executing a variety of actions, they found that 72% of responses
related to body movements, and sometimes even quite specific, low-
level bodily movements. For example, when describing the type of
focus they adopted during a grand jete (a large leap), the dancers
reported, among other things, focusing on the “gluteal engagement
of the push off leg for thrust” and “releasing the air from my lungs
to prevent the shoulders from going up; turning the head to the
public,” while balancing in arabesque, where a dancer stands on
pointe on one leg and extends the other leg high into the air behind
her, the dancers’ reports included “feeling my center controlled
over my supporting leg” and “the big toe of my arabesque floating
away and up.” Conceivably, such a focus may have no effect on their
movements. The widespread use of body focus among professional
dancers, however, indicates that it may be beneficial. Using a sim-
ilar approach, Stoate and Wulf (2011, cited in Montero et al., 2018)
found that a number of expert swimmers reported focusing on their
bodies – focusing, for example, on “high elbow,” “pull hands back,”
“hip rotation” – when asked to adopt their “normal” focus of atten-
tion. Yet they also found that this body focus proved optimal for
some swimmers but less than optimal for others.
By focusing on their bodies, athletes and others might focus
directly, via proprioception, on a muscle or joint to fine-tune
control or to monitor an injury (Montero, 2018). But, arguably,
experts may also find it useful to focus on the body indirectly via
80 Barbara Gail Montero et al.

imagery. Bernier et al. (2016, cited in Toner et al., forthcoming)

found that skaters used visual and kinaesthetic images before,
and indeed during, some of their jumps. One skater reported,
“During the approach to the jump, actually, I’m doing the jump
in my head: I have the same sensations in my body, and I feel
like I’m doing it in my upper body and hips;” another revealed
that: “Here, when I place my foot to take off, I have an image
in my head that my neck is really straight… My coach, when
I was young, he told me to picture a hair standing straight up,
perpendicular to the top of my head. So here, I’m visualizing
this image” (p. 261). In these examples, it seems that bodily foci,
mediated through mental imagery, assist performance perhaps
by focusing the mind and heightening control.
Apart from the ability to facilitate conscious control over
one’s movements, adopting a body focus has been seen as bene-
ficial in alleviating anxiety, which is a crucial trigger of choking
episodes (Hill & Hemmings, 2015). One way that anxiety dis-
tracts one from one’s optimal focus is by turning one’s mind to
disturbing thoughts about such things as what others will think,
or the possibility of failure or, indeed, how much the mind is
racing and not focusing on what is important (Wine, 1971, cited
in Montero et al., 2018). And although the best way to cope with
anxiety is very much an open question, some athletes manage it
by focusing on the details of their bodily movements. For exam-
ple, in Hill et al.’s (2010, cited in Hill & Hemmings, 2015) study
on choking under pressure, some golfers claimed that focusing
more on their skills helped prevent a more severe performance
breakdown.
Although some of the warnings against body focus apply not
just to performance but to practice as well (Wulf, 2016), there
seem to be strong reasons to think that both body focus and
a disruption of automaticity can be useful in practice. Accord-
ing to Anders Ericsson’s theory of deliberate practice (Ericsson
et al., 1993), automaticity leads to stagnation: Performing auto-
matically may help maintain a level of performance but will not
allow improvement. Thus, if adopting a body focus can lead to
consciously controlling a movement, such foci in practice can
leave to door open to continued improvement. And when an
athlete or dancer has been applying a body focus during prac-
tice, a bodily focus would be natural and thus one would not
expect it to hinder performance. As Maurer and Munzert (2013)
 Body Focus in Expert Action 81

found in their study of skilled basketball players’ focus during

free throw performance, irrespective of focus direction (internal
or external), “frequently used familiar focus strategies become
integrated into the proceduralized skill components and are no
longer disruptive to skill execution” (p. 737, cited in Montero
et al., 2018). Furthermore, a body focus can also be pleasurable,
and thus would encourage prolonged practice.
Finally, although numerous studies appear to support the view
that focusing on the body leads to suboptimal results, the long-
term effect of focusing on one’s body is untested empirically. And
this is significant because, as Peh et al. (2011, cited in Montero
et al., 2018) suggest, it could be that the most effective training
schedule can disrupt performance in the short-run while it im-
proves it over a longer period of time. It is also quite difficult to
design experiments that adequately investigate how adopting a
body focus affects skill even in the short run. This is so because
it is challenging to design experiments to test body and external
foci that are balanced both in terms of how natural or familiar an
expert finds them and in terms of their relevancy to the task. We
hope that future research into body focus will be able to address
these shortcomings.

In Memoriam
We (B. G. M. and J. T.) note with sorrow the passing of our col-
league, Aidan Moran, who died shortly after this essay was com-
pleted. We are richer for having known and worked with him, and
the scholarly community is richer for his contributions.

For Sources and Further Reading

Carr, T. H. (2015). Strengths and weaknesses of reflection as a guide to
action: Pressure assails performance in multiple ways. Phenomenology
and the Cognitive Sciences, 14, 227–252.
Guss-West, C., & Wulf, G. (2016). Attentional focus in classical ballet: A
survey of professional dancers. Journal of Dance Medicine & Science,
20(1), 23–29.
Hill, D. M., & Hemmings, B. (2015). A phenomenological exploration of
coping responses associated with choking in sport. Qualitative Research
in Sport, Exercise and Health, 7(4), 521–538.
Montero, B. G. (2018). Thought in action: Expertise and the conscious mind.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
82 Barbara Gail Montero et al.

Montero, B. G., Toner, J., & Moran, A. (2018). Questioning the breadth of
the external focus effect. In M. L. Cappuccio (Ed.), Handbook of embod-
ied cognition and sport psychology (pp. 199–221). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Toner, J., Montero, B. G., & Moran, A. (forthcoming). Continuous im-
provement in elite performance. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Wulf, G. (2013). Attentional focus and motor learning: A review of 15 years.
International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 6(1), 77–104.
Part IV
(Re)Locating

In what way do eddies, ebbs, and flows of varied, sensuous bodies

collectively comprise human sociopolitical organization and spa-
tial distribution? How does the cultural and geographical position-
ing of bodies stunt or nurture, constrain or liberate, upset or settle
them? The essays in this section take up these questions, making the
case for incorporation of other-than-discursive processes of human
life into multiplex understandings of subordination and dislocation
and fresh imaginings of just societies.
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
[Link] ndfra [Link]
13 How Bodies Become Viscous
Arun Saldanha

The embodied perspective departs from an individualist and men-

talist way of understanding the social. The basic argument is that
the “body politic” (governments, social movements, corporations)
consists of the largely unconscious sticking together of bodies ac-
cording to their differences.

While sensory perception and bodily location have been extensively

conceptualized, what happens when many bodies come together as
bodies has mostly escaped attention in social theorizing. This essay
discusses four dimensions of human bodies: sensuousness, varia-
tion, locatedness, and viscosity. The embodied perspective departs
from an individualist and mentalist way of understanding the so-
cial. The basic argument is that the “body politic” (governments,
social movements, corporations) consists of the largely unconscious
sticking together of bodies according to their differences. Viscosity
refers to this dynamic emergence, at scales from the street to the
planet, of collectivities of people based on corporeal attributes.

Sensuous Bodies
Embodiment has until recently been neglected by social theorists
more or less in line with the foundational Western philosophical
expunging of emotions and the flesh. Descartes and Newton epito-
mized scientific positivism, striving for ostensibly objective and dis-
interested knowledge at the expense of the immediate relationships
the senses develop with their surroundings. What difference does
it make to call social phenomena embodied? Firstly, an insistence
on sensory perception highlights certain crucial components that
are more often than not obliterated from purview for ideological
reasons. For example, the nation-state is often embodied through
86 Arun Saldanha

physical violence and pain (and their painful recollections). The im-
portance of rape for ethnic cleansing and warfare has until recently
escaped attention. Secondly, the cultural reproduction of geopolit-
ical relations and entities (through parades or border patrol) can
be more concretely studied if what bodies do and feel enters the
discussion. Thirdly, the affective qualities of leaders and rhetoric,
circulating within constituencies, can be meticulously analyzed as
legible corporeal signs (think of Hitler’s body language). Fourthly,
more and more geopolitics itself depends on the biometrical man-
agement of bodies through what Michel Foucault called biopolitics.
What many are arguing in the wake of Foucault is that the intru-
sion of the state into the biological being of people (refugees, con-
victs, citizens) is accompanied by a whole new range of emotions
and embodied skills. If it seeks to understand the concrete nature
of these political changes, social theory has to take into account
their targets and vehicles: bodies of flesh, blood, senses, genes, and
memories.

Different Bodies
Embodiment is fundamentally about difference. Feminist politics
therefore starts with the difference between women and men. All
of Western thought has not only overwhelmingly been conjured
by men, among men, and for men, but these men have also always
talked on behalf of everyone else: women, children, slaves, foreign-
ers, the Indigenous, the old, and the sick. The philosophy of Luce
Irigaray exposes the implicit privileging in European philosophy
of the average male body and its particular morphology. The spe-
cific characteristics of femininity and masculinity have been con-
sistently ignored in the centuries-old conceptualization of “man.”
Irigaray’s ethics and politics follow from what she sees as the irre-
ducibility of sexual difference. Biology is then not destiny, but the
playground for ethical and political experimentation.
The sensual and differential nature of bodies needs to be seen
as a question of many bodies. How to conceive of collective embod-
iment from the street to the continental has not been satisfactorily
explored. We hear of “the body” but seldom about bodies. This de
facto methodological individualism is foreign to the life sciences.
In population biology and biogeography species and subspecies
groups do not have essences but are dynamic outcomes of many
interacting organisms. Evolution itself is understood as the net ef-
fects of many organisms adapting to their changing environments.
 How Bodies Become Viscous 87

So both biologically and culturally, embodiment is already dif-

ferentiated. Every human accumulates tastes, attitudes, habits,
and gestures. A human body develops as it goes to certain places
and engages with things and other bodies. How does voting behav-
ior differentiate populations through collective fear? How many
protesters can move through a street without getting clogged up?
Whose senses will likely to be stirred by populist propaganda? The
challenge is to think of those populations not as mere “minds,” de-
cisions, or sets of data, but as thinking and feeling organisms con-
tinually on the move, mixing with each other in certain physical
settings.

Located Bodies
Bodies differ not just anatomically, neurologically, and medically.
Bodies always exist somewhere. What bodies can do depends on
their location in uneven distributions of resources and media im-
ageries, and deeper, as the Indian Ocean tsunami and New Orleans
flood showed, in seismic and climate processes. What matters is
one’s position in all the constellations that human and physical ge-
ographers map. Feminists have taken up location to describe how
uneven development and socio-spatial boundaries delimit choices,
and more so for women than men, more so for the poor and the black
than for the white and wealthy. Black, immigrant, diasporic, and
third world feminists have emphasized the tremendous importance
of bodily specificity to the politics of location so that the explora-
tion of location multiplied feminism itself. Doreen Massey argued
for decades that space itself is constructed differentially. Globaliza-
tion affects and is affected by different groups in glaringly different
ways, according to what Massey called power-geometries.
It is because bodies vary sexually, racially, and economically that
they get differently located in geographies of power and possibil-
ity. The sensuous, voluminous materiality of phenotypes should be
explored as expressions of global capitalism and colonialism. It is
not simply a question of bodies being “inscribed” by geography,
but geography materially constituting bodies and their capacities.
This is evident in the geographies of food. Anyone’s diet reproduces
class- and race-based tastes and health disparities, and there is a
growing awareness of the effects of consumption on ecosystems
and vulnerable populations both human and nonhuman, especially
of meat. But how bodies relate to social space can also be imagined
in the geographies of education or religion. When trained as an
88 Arun Saldanha

electrician, one literally incorporates and transports certain skills;

when facing Mecca one literally aligns one’s body with millions of
others.
It is equally crucial to understand, conversely, that location does
not follow deterministically from phenotypic particularity. How a
body is intercepted by global flows depends on what bodily features
matter in everyday interaction and in the reproduction of social re-
lations and institutions. Sexual and racial segregation shows that it
is the materiality of bodies itself that makes particular spatialities
endure, though the segregation follows contingently from the inter-
play of urban planning, architecture, surveillance cameras, urinals,
and so on. Bodies are not blank surfaces. Their genitals, hair, and
health need to be molded and charged by power-geometries; they
need to be pushed and pulled to certain places. There is no social
inequality without the affective and monetary investment in the
shifting particularities of bodies.

Viscous Bodies
Whether human or not, many bodies together are very rarely cha-
otic. They are capable of “communicating” movement to each
other, becoming sticky relative to one another, even if they keep
moving and remain a plurality. This process of becoming-sticky is
what I have called viscosity. The concept has an affinity with the
better-known term in science of emergence, the spontaneous ap-
pearance of coherent group motion irreducible to what the many
particles do individually. Viscosity is inevitably about a multiplicity
of elements, and one can appreciate the many-ness of viscosity only
in physical terms. A classic example is the relative unison of flying
birds. The bird bodies stick together as a temporary system, yet re-
main many, flying in order to avoid their neighbors. Viscosity wants
to emphasize this mobile spatiality of togetherness, of coordinated
flowing and relative stability. Unlike gases, viscous liquids do not
move randomly; unlike solids, they are not static.
Viscosity is more than a metaphor. It does not only apply to
fluids or birds. Human flows become viscous in crowds, in large
airports, and in traffic jams. Crowds are easily appreciated as be-
ing sticky because they are about concentration in one place. But
human bodies stick together in more durable ways: packs, crowds,
cities, nation-states, social classes, Facebook groups, and racial
formations. If thinking the viscosity of bodies on scales larger than
the city is difficult, this only proves how unaccustomed we are to
 How Bodies Become Viscous 89

thinking bodies as bodies, as shifting and linked masses subject to

gravity and expulsion. Viscosity is a quintessentially spatial pro-
cess, but it need not depend on either geographical proximity or
actual deceleration. It is about flows and networks, and how they
intersect, before it is about places. Remember that the flock of birds
can be both moving erratically in real space and remaining viscous
in topological terms.
Philip Ball usefully summarizes recent advances in what he hopes
will be a “physics of society.” Strange as it may seem, Ball’s book
is in effect a physicist’s answer to Hobbesian political philosophy.
While rejecting Hobbes’ bleak assumption of human selfishness,
Ball revives the early-modern enthusiasm of approaching human
aggregation physically, like grains of sand or droplets of water. Of
course, it is today’s powerful computation technology that enables
the probing into the mathematical depths of collective behavior. It
is far from certain to what extent computer modeling of complex
behavior hints at physical laws shared by humans and everything
else. What is more certain is that much of contemporary physics,
like biology, is less mechanistic and positivist than social theory
makes of it. On a par with Irigaray, science after complexity theory
can grapple with the creativity of bodies.
If the sticking-together of crowds in public space is relatively easy
to appreciate, a brief elaboration on the viscosity of racial forma-
tions will allow for imagining what the concept can do for theo-
rizing society. Population geography demonstrates that migration
(e.g., during the European colonial era) follows spatial patterns. In-
digenous populations remain in a certain region for many centuries,
though more often than not were displaced by colonialism. Other
populations emigrate in large numbers, go on holiday, or main-
tain networks of diasporic kinship. Within countries, within cit-
ies, these populations furthermore coalesce in certain landscapes,
neighborhoods, churches, or camps. This whole host of degrees of
movement and stasis is what the concept of viscosity tries to desig-
nate. However, the concept demands in addition that we imagine
the phenotypic, sensory, and cultural specificity of these masses of
bodies: their skin color, diet, health, reproduction rate, religious
affects. And there are bodies even more difficult to map: business
travelers, for example, who are usually white, male, heterosexual,
and able-bodied. Through their high mobility, businessmen keep
corporate capitalism and patriarchal power-geometries in place. In
the framework of viscosity, the formation of racial difference be-
comes a literal term, an extremely complex configuration of bodies
90 Arun Saldanha

moving on a range of scales with a range of speeds, with shapes that

can only be approximated in maps.
The political upshot of thinking social collectivities and the
body politic as sensuous, differential, located, and viscous is that
exchanges are possible between the so-called “social” and the “nat-
ural” sciences with an eye on bringing clarification to how inequal-
ities come about and sustain themselves. The intellectual resources
for such a project are, as this essay shows, multiple and sometimes
at odds with one another. The theme of embodiment cannot but
raise scholars from their disciplinary slumber.

For Sources and Further Reading

Ball, P. (2004). Critical mass: How one thing leads to another. London: Ar-
row Books.
Massey, D. (1994). Space, place, and gender. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Saldanha, A. (2007). Psychedelic white: Goa trance and the viscosity of race.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Saldanha, A. (2008). The political geography of many bodies. In K. R.
Cox, M. Low, & J. Robinson (Eds.), The Sage handbook of political geog-
raphy (pp. 323–334). London: Sage. Note: The current essay is a strongly
abridged and modified version of this chapter.
Slocum, R. & Saldanha, A. (Eds.). (2013). Geographies of race and food:
Fields, bodies, markets. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Young, I. M. (1990). Throwing like a girl and other essays in feminist philos-
ophy and social theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
14 Embodiment, Plasticity,
Biosociality, and Epigenetics
The Politics of a Vulnerable
Body for Toxic Times
Maurizio Meloni

The complex links between social structures and biological bod-

ies are increasingly recognized. The field of epigenetics offers
scientific evidence about the “biological embedding” of social ex-
perience – how environmental factors can be inscribed on the bi-
ological body. However, the social implications of epigenetics for
race, class, and gender inequalities have to be addressed carefully.

While ideas of embodiment are far from new and go back in the
West to the Hippocratic treatise on Airs, Waters, and Places in the
5th/4th century BCE, modern biomedical views, and genetics in par-
ticular, have traditionally sidelined this ecological line of thought.
Biomedical thought in the 20th century has mostly foregrounded
internal factors, such as genes, as the root of health trajectories.
Significantly, this line of thought has tended to clearly separate bio-
logical from social factors, postulating the latter intervene at some
secondary time to alter or interact with the capacity of the first. The
last three decades have witnessed a significant questioning of this
approach. As reviewed in Impressionable Biologies (Meloni, 2019), a
wealth of evidence has emerged on the complex pathways that link
social experience to biology, health and disease risk, opening up
questions on the separation of biological and social factors.
At the level of the individual body, data from neuroimmunolog-
ical research and neuroscience have highlighted the dependence of
neuroendocrine and immune functions on social and psychological
processes. The emphasis has been on how socio-economic status
and social structures – such as the qualities of neighborhoods and
communities, or social isolation – may have a profound impact on
brain development and functioning and patterns of morbidity and
mortality (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008). Moving from the individual
body to what Stuckler and Basu (2013) call the “body economic,”
92 Maurizio Meloni

an increasing number of studies now focus on the way in which

austerity policies and inequalities are literally killing factors. As
Krieger argued in Epidemiology and People’s Health (2011), these re-
cent works can be better appreciated within the context of a longer
tradition of social epidemiology research on how inequality, dis-
crimination, and racism literally harm health, producing different
population patterns of disease distribution.

Epigenetics and Embodiment: Deepening the Agenda

A framework rooted in biological embedding – to use Clyde Hertzman’s
term – posits that the biological body bears the inscriptions of its lived
experience and its social and material contexts, and these contexts are
constituted by the socially modulated biographies of the body, past
and present (toxic exposures, dietary factors, financial and educational
capital, social networks). Epigenetics has raised hope and expectations
that it could provide this debate on how environmental factors get
under the skin and are inscribed on the biological body with crucial,
and so far missing, molecular evidence. Epigenetics describes changes
to the chemical structure of DNA triggered by environmental cues.
These changes alter gene and phenotypic expression of an organism
without change to DNA base-pair sequences.
Coined by British embryologist and polymath C. H. Waddington
(1905–1975) in the 1940s, epigenetics was originally meant as a ne-
ologism from epigenesis (not “on the top of” or “above genes” as in
today’s folk etymology) to define in a broader nonmolecular sense
an interdisciplinary study of all the “causal interactions between
genes and their products which bring the phenotype into being”
(Waddington, 1942, cited in Meloni, 2019). Since the early 2000s,
epigenetics has turned into a burgeoning subbranch of molecu-
lar biology where the developmental complexity that links genes
and environments to phenotypes is investigated at the molecular
level. DNA methylation is the most recognized and studied of these
molecular mechanisms of epigenetic mutation. The term refers to
the addition of a methyl group to a DNA base, resulting in inhi-
bition of gene transcription. It is often dependent on nutritional
or wider extra-cellular factors, giving a wider dynamism to genetic
functioning.
Michael Meaney’s experiments on the transmission of poor
maternal care in rats well illustrate this dynamism of the genome
via methylation changes, where wider social signals regulate the
organism physiology. Certain behavioral exposures (low licking/
 Embodiment, Plasticity, and Epigenetics 93

grooming by the mother rat, or dam) shape changes in methyla-

tion patterns in offspring that alter genetic expression and hence
long-term neurochemical responses in the brain. This modifies the
physiology of the pups, who, as adults, will reproduce the inducing
behavior and consequently modify their environmental niche, thus
shaping the biological life also of a next generation. Importantly,
cross-fostering pups to high licking/grooming dams reversed the
methylation pattern (Weaver et al., 2004, cited in Meloni, 2016).
Although epigenetics is often described as the fifth letter of the
linear genetic code, it is better understood as an environmentally
driven change to chromatin, the macromolecule into which DNA
fibers are folded, comprising chromosomes (see Meloni, 2019, for
more detail). In a nutshell and at the cost of simplification, DNA
is structurally constrained by chromatin architecture and this ar-
chitecture can be remodeled partly in response to environmental
inputs. Chromatin strands can be transcriptionally “open,” and
thus potentially expressed, or “closed,” and thus silenced by wider
cellular and extra-cellular signals. The flexible rearrangement of
chromatin structure enables the dynamic interplay between gene
functions and the environment, and more broadly organism and
milieu over the lifespan. As a regulator of the chromatin system,
epigenetics constitutes a significant opportunity to reconceptualize
embodiment in a way that includes genetics factors. However, the
so-called post-genomic genome is no longer seen in the driving seat
of biological processes. Rather, it has to be understood as embed-
ded into a context-dependent regulative framework, described as
highly sensitive and responsive to environmental influences, plastic
to social effects and cues. It has become a biosocial genome, to use
Müller and colleagues’ (2017) term. This line of investigation highly
complicates the neat distinction between biological and social fac-
tors, calling increasingly for a “biology of social causes” and a “so-
ciology of biological effects.” It is at this level that the debates on
biosocial models of health and disease or biological plasticity have
attracted increasing interest and may become an important plat-
form for cross-disciplinary collaborations across the social/natural
science divide.

Epigenetics in Toxic Times: A Politics

of Vulnerable Bodies
The reassuring fiction of a DNA segregated from experiential
factors, which translates into reassuring disciplinary boundaries
94 Maurizio Meloni

between nature-oriented and culture-oriented disciplines, may be

a luxury we cannot afford anymore given the ubiquitous toxicity
of life in the Anthropocene. Epigenetic changes are likely to be
studied as an archive or a biomarker of toxic exposures that, espe-
cially in crucial key windows of development (in utero, early life,
adolescence, pregnancy), may materialize as a morbid alteration to
present and future health trajectories. A small but growing body
of literature has also highlighted the potential multigenerational
effects of poisoned exposures, either to stress, famine, or social ex-
ploitation and violence.
The policy implications of these emerging findings, however,
present a number of ethical and social dilemmas that need to be
addressed carefully. Care is particularly important because there is
a long (albeit often forgotten) history of eugenic and racist policies
based on the belief that heredity is not fixed at birth but influenced
by the environment and hence bad environments result in damaged
people (Meloni, 2016). For instance, if the effects of a future parent’s
diet on offspring’s wellbeing are validated by epigenetic findings,
how does this change notions of responsibility and risk, normality
and pathology? If the genome can be damaged by smoking or opti-
mized through exercise, will we not – as White and Wastell (2016)
suggest – monitor individual lifestyles more carefully than ever?
In this way, aren’t lifestyle and behavioral structures increasingly
burdened with biomedical implications and hence normative de-
mands? What about recent popular and scientific claims that peo-
ple are “poisoned” or “marked for life” by bad environments? Will
this lead to claims about social justice and reparation or an identi-
fication of vulnerable groups as “at greater risk” and hence open to
new types of regulation, policy and medical surveillance?
The recent epigenetic and developmentalist argument that racial
differences in health are not the product of a set of inherited genes
but the biological embedding of common exposures to racialized
structures and social gradients of stress (Kuzawa & Sweet, 2009,
cited in Meloni, 2016) may legitimize the notion that there is, after
all, a biological meaning to race. Moreover, if people embody their
toxic environments in this linear way, and if some of these effects
may travel across a certain number of generations, what are poli-
cymakers supposed to do with this notion? Offer compensation or
reparation for what has occurred in the past and still haunt the biol-
ogy of contemporary generations? Or instead, as it occurred in past
eugenics arguments, use this notion to claim that certain groups are
too damaged (not by faulty genes but by toxic histories) to deserve
 Embodiment, Plasticity, and Epigenetics 95

a substantial financial or educational investment for their future?

And what about the gender inequality of epigenetic effects, given
that women embody their surrounding environments in a more di-
rect way, especially during pregnancy? Might they not be increas-
ingly encouraged by developmental models to plan the health of
their offspring well before conception – and to be expected to do
so by others – which is a burden not equally borne by men? Finally,
what sort of embodiment is epigenetics promoting? One where peo-
ple are just seen as the passive receivers, not this time of DNA sig-
nals but of environmental exposures? How can ideas of agency and
vitality be rescued in this model?
These dilemmas do not mean that research in epigenetics will
necessarily be hijacked into racialist or sexist political agendas.
However, they should sound a warning that views of embodiment
and ecologies of the body are not necessarily simplistically aligned
with politically progressive views.

For Sources and Further Reading

Cacioppo, J., & Patrick, B. (2008). Loneliness: Human nature and the need
for social connection. New York: Norton & Company.
Krieger, N. (2011). Epidemiology and people’s health: Theory and context.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Meloni, M. (2016). Political biology: Science and social values in human he-
redity from eugenics to epigenetics. London: Palgrave.
Meloni, M. (2019). Impressionable biologies: From the archaeology of plas-
ticity to the sociology of epigenetics. New York: Routledge.
Müller, R., Hanson, C., Hanson, M., Penkler, M., Samaras, G., Chiappe-
rino, L., … Villa, P. (2017). The biosocial genome? EMBO Reports, 18,
1677–1682.
Stuckler, D., & Basu, S. (2013) The body economic: Why austerity kills.
London: Allen Lane.
White, S. J., & Wastell, D. G. (2016). Epigenetics prematurely born(e): So-
cial work and the malleable gene. British Journal of Social Work, 47(8),
2256–2272.
15 Violating the Inviolable
Evolved Reproductive Prerogatives
of Individual Women
Patricia Adair Gowaty

Abortion bans defy the inviolability of women’s reproductive

decision-making, which was ultimately organized by the evolu-
tionary rules of within-sex selection and sexual conflict during the
hundreds of millions of years of mammalian evolution.

The current intensification of efforts in the US to curtail women’s

reproductive rights is not just a horrific political moment, but also
a profound evolutionary selection pressure with implications for all
of humanity. Here, I describe why the modern efforts to criminalize
women who seek medical abortion not only violate the autonomy of
individual women but importantly increase the likelihood of delete-
rious evolutionary results for women, men, and children. In doing
so, I connect key concepts of evolution with the insights of ancient
and modern feminisms having to do with the political orders of
societies, an effort I promoted in the 1990s when writing about the
relationships between evolutionary ideas and feminism: I said then
and observe now that “Women’s oppression is the first, most wide-
spread, and deepest oppression…sexist oppression is fundamental
to – is ‘the root’ of – all other systems of oppression” (1992, p. 219).
Today I argue that contemporary efforts criminalizing abortion vi-
olate the inviolable and will reduce the lifespan and reproductive
success of all – men as well as women. Women’s autonomy is an
imperative evolved over millions of years of evolutionary sorting.
This means that the criminalization of women doing anything to
their own bodies is itself a crime against nature. Stopping gestation
is a woman’s prerogative, not just because gestation is a function of
her body including her autonomous decisions about her health, but
because of the forces of evolution.
Humans are embodied mammals whose evolutionary divergence
from reptiles and birds began hundreds of millions of years ago.
 Violating the Inviolable 97

The defining adaptations of modern mammals are that females give

birth to live young after a period of internal gestation, which is then
followed by provisioning to otherwise helpless offspring of moth-
ers’ breast milk from mammary glands that evolved from sweat
glands. All mammal mothers including human mothers physiolog-
ically control (consciously or unconsciously) the viability of their
progeny during pregnancy and before birth, and after parturition
human mothers, as in all other mammal species, also routinely con-
trol the lives of their dependent progeny for varying amounts of
time after birth. Evolutionary selection pressures determined the
embodiment of autonomous female mammals. Thus, to understand
the evolution of women’s autonomy as well as the ongoing selec-
tion pressures faced by women in misogynistic human societies, it
is useful to be acquainted with the assumptions (the rules) of sexual
selection and sexual conflict.
Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin (1858) described evo-
lution by natural selection, emphasizing what have become known
as the assumptions of selection. Natural selection is something
that happens because of the phenotypic variants among individu-
als in a population that are favored or disfavored by environmen-
tal or social selection pressures thus “sorting” among individuals
so that over time, the traits of “favored” individuals persist and
spread (evolve), while the traits of those “disfavored” individuals
sometimes disappear entirely – go extinct! Evolutionary fitness is
measured as variation among individuals in their lifespan and the
lifespan of their children.
Natural selection acting on within-population, within-sex varia-
tion in females organized the evolved reproductive traits of female
mammals. In human females, evolved reproductive traits include:
physiological adaptations associated with age at first menstruation;
the subsequent timing and duration of menses; the management
of sperm after copulation; timing of implantation of zygotes; the
endogenous mechanisms of fetal loss including spontaneous abor-
tion; and the control of developmental milestones during months-
long gestation of embryos and fetuses. Selection and adaptation
via social-cultural transmission of knowledge further legitimated
women in traditional societies to self-administer plant-based con-
traceptives and abortifacients (Riddle, 1992). Once born, maternal
prerogatives include the control of the fate of altricial offspring still
dependent on mother’s breast milk as well as other milestones of
“evolutionary fitness.” Just as in other mammals, when variation
in women’s traits – morphological, physiological, behavioral, and
98 Patricia Adair Gowaty

cultural – occur, the opportunity for selection relative to those

traits exists. Traits within-populations, within-a-sex that became
“fixed” (more or less identical among individuals) indicate that in
the past, these traits were “adaptive” – that is, associated with lon-
ger maternal life spans and healthier offspring.
Modern institutionalized patriarchy – a social system orga-
nized primarily for the benefit of male alliances bent on control of
women’s sexuality and reproduction – confronts the fundamental
rights of every woman to control her own body. Patriarchies can
and do produce violent selection pressures that decrease the health,
welfare, and lifespan not only of women and their children, but
also of men. To understand the origins of women’s evolved auton-
omy one must therefore understand the evolutionary principles of
within-sex selection and sexual conflict.
Within-sex selection is a type of natural selection that occurs
among members of the same sex, in a given population of a spe-
cies. Three assumptions must be met for any selection hypothesis:
The first is about the variation in traits of individuals in the “level
of selection”; here, the level of selection is within a given species
and within a sex. The second posits mechanisms of selection, which
impact individuals of a sex differently because of their traits. The
third tenet is about “fitness” (length of lifespan and reproductive suc-
cess of a given individual) that results from the traits because of the
mechanisms of selection. Said another way: The three assumptions
of within-sex selection are that individuals within a sex, say fe-
males, vary in traits that are affected by environmental and social
constraints and opportunities, such that some females – because of
their traits – live longer or have more or healthier offspring than other
mothers. The “competitive” dynamics of within-sex selection among
females in all mammal species has guaranteed that mammal mothers
who remained in control of their own reproduction were more evolu-
tionarily successful than those mammal mothers without control of
their own reproduction. Within-sex selection is a process that results
in greater or lesser fitness outcomes for some individuals compared
to other individuals of the same sex because of their traits, and in the
current context, our concern is about within-sex variants associated
with any interference with an individual’s reproductive decisions.
Sexual conflict is selection that occurs when the reproductive
interests of individual females and males disagree. In current mi-
sogynistic societies, the focus is on the wins and losses of one sex
compared to the other sex; accordingly, in discussions of “the bat-
tles of the sexes,” it appears that the contestants are a given woman
 Violating the Inviolable 99

and a man, a given female and a given male (e.g., a woman who was
raped and the man who raped her). However, in an evolutionary
context, the selection dynamics are between individuals within a
sex, among males on the one hand who do and do not rape and, on
the other hand, among females who are able to avoid being raped
and those who are unable to avoid being raped. Aggressive and co-
ercive sexual conflict is not just about the outcomes – for example,
of an aggrieved woman or a violently neutered man (the way we
look at rapacious men and angry “castrating women” in the context
of crime and litigation). It is about a male and the other males in the
population of males and, simultaneously, about a female and the
other females in the population of females.
The 19th century evolutionary logic of Darwin and Wallace, then,
still holds: Whenever available variation exists among females,
the opportunity under sexual conflict for the evolution of female
resistance exists. Female resistance might always start with one re-
sistive female, but as the recent #MeToo movement demonstrated,
resistance can catch on and spread, and thus demonstrating that
“sisterhood is powerful.” Similarly, evolutionary logic teaches that
whenever available variation exists among males, the opportunity
under sexual conflict for the evolution of coercive, deadly males
exists. What remains interesting from an evolutionary perspective
is that not all females are resistive and not all males are coercive.
In fact, despite the almost universal control that most mammal fe-
males have of their own reproduction, it is remarkable that a hall-
mark of modern human societies is parental collaborations, which
bring up questions about the origins of monogamy. And, thus, we
might ask what the fitness outcomes were – among females and
among males – in the evolutionary transitions to so-called monoga-
mous marriage. Rape and male coercion of females may have been
a defining selection pressure biasing social organizations in many
(most) modern societies. How did all that happen?
Millions of years of selection among females in mammal popu-
lations has produced the complete, utter (nonautonomous) depen-
dence of young on their mother’s ability and willingness to gestate.
This means that, from a natural selection perspective, abortion is
solely the prerogative of an individual woman. It is her choice and
her choice alone to end a pregnancy. In addition it is the inviolable
prerogative of a woman to resist the social/political forces that restrict
her options; her right is to use her body as she pleases. Autonomy is
embodied in each human individual; autonomy of women is em-
bodied in the hundreds of million years of the evolution of female
100 Patricia Adair Gowaty

mammals. And it appears that among the 10,000 mammal species

in the world, conspecifics appropriating the bodies of females is
rare, perhaps a novelty among mammals. Diminishing female au-
tonomy through religious edict and civil law is a patriarchal im-
perative, and, it is an abomination against nature that likely will
continually reduce the lifespan of women and their offspring.
The evolution of women’s resistance to others’ control is a rela-
tively obscure topic in evolutionary biology. Women’s resistance to
other’s control – whether conscious or not – is a counter-selection
pressure against the patriarchal domination of societies. And, that
puts questions about the evolutionary origins of patriarchy under
a light: What ancient selection pressures favored male control of
female reproduction and women’s resistance?

Speculations Abound
For example, could the differences between females and males in
dispersal patterns have set up patriarchal advantage? In some pri-
mates, including humans, dispersal patterns of daughters and sons
differ with sons tending to be more philopatric than their dispersing
sisters. Philopatric sons live with or near parents throughout life so
that male relatives readily formed coalitions. In contrast dispersing
daughters set off as explorers, perhaps seeking strange males for
“one night stands” or coalescing with other females to form new
groups, aiding discovery of new resources, not to mention long-
term bonding with novel males, which is a breeding tactic enhanc-
ing the health of offspring producing reproductive success benefits
for mothers and fathers. The higher primate tendencies of stay-at-
home sons and adventuresome, wandering daughters might mean
that it was women who began the dispersals of humans around the
globe, away from parental confines. These dispersal patterns meant
that males more likely “owned the land” and were buttressed in
their power by confederacies of male relatives.
Women’s evolved autonomy powers resistance to patriarchy and
male control of women’s reproductive decisions. Patriarchal con-
trol handcuffs the development of societies, guaranteeing brutality
that shortens lifespans for women, children, and men.
In October 2019 US District Court Judge Myron Thomson
blocked Alabama’s near-total abortion ban saying:

Alabama’s abortion ban contravenes clear Supreme Court

Case precedent. It violates the right of an individual to privacy,
 Violating the Inviolable 101

to make choices central to personal dignity and autonomy. It

diminishes the capacity of women to act in society, and to make
reproductive decisions. It defies the United States Constitution.

The Judge’s ruling is consistent with evolutionary principles.

For Sources and Further Reading

Darwin, C., & Wallace, A. R. (1858). On the tendency of species to form
varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural
means of selection. Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of
London. Zoology, 3, 45–62.
Gowaty, P. A. (1992). Evolutionary biology and feminism. Human Nature,
3, 217–249.
Gowaty, P. A. (Ed.). (1997). Feminism and evolutionary biology: Boundar-
ies, intersections, and frontiers. New York: Chapman Hall.
Hrdy, S. B. (2000). Mother Nature: Maternal instincts and how they shape
the human species. New York: Ballantine Books.
Hudson, V. M., Bowen, D. L., & Nielsen P. L. (2019). The first political
order: How sex shapes governance and national security worldwide. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Lerner, G. (1986). The creation of patriarchy. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Riddle, J. M. (1992). Contraception and abortion from the ancient world to
the Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
16 Embodiment and the Lived
Experience of Diaspora
Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

Becoming displaced from an originary time and space is charac-

teristic of being human. This essay argues that the diasporic ex-
perience is at once deeply embodied, universal, and continually
constructed through social relations and discursive practices.
Fundamental black diasporic moods are thematized in a way that
incorporates both pre-discursive and discursive elements.

Diaspora and embodiment are terms that have separately gained

currency in contemporary critical thought. However, the relations
between them are inadequately theorized. This is the task ahead.
Diaspora should not be taken to be an abstraction concerning the
spacing of the subject across time. This movement away from and
to a place can only be understood via a third mediating term: “the
body” or “embodiment.” Place and body support and belong to
each other. Being uprooted and rerouted to another place forces
dispositioning and repositioning. Embodied orientations are dis-
oriented, and bodies of culture have to be reoriented in each new
location. This imperative to rework a cultural patterning in plural-
izing new contexts always involves a relationship between traces of
“old” practices and engagement with the new situation. Theoriza-
tion of black diasporic identity and expressive agency, therefore,
needs to be grounded in affective social practices, experiences, re-
lations of power, and habits of bodily being.

(In)habiting the Body

Moving away from the Cartesian disembodied consciousness of “I
think therefore,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty stresses the active em-
bodied “I can.” Incarnated intentionality refers to the body’s capac-
ities to act in the world prior to conscious or reflective thinking
 Embodiment and Lived Experience of Diaspora 103

according to situational demands. For Merleau-Ponty, my bodily

capacities are acquired through habits formed through repeated
practice. These capacities are limited by physiological constraints,
previous attitudes, and socioeconomic, cultural and historical po-
sition. These condition the way I comport myself and inhabit the
world.
As embodied subjects, our actions are constituted, limited, and
empowered by an interaction between our habitat, history, and bi-
ological inheritances. It is within this “already constituted” space
that we take up our place in the world, interact with others, and ei-
ther feel at home or made not to feel at home. The intentional body
is always constituted spatially and temporally, and whenever the
body takes up the terms of the world, it necessarily transforms the
world in the process. So it is that repeated acts of corporeal practice
enable a culture to continue and to reinvent itself.

E-motion, Origin, and Freedom

Embodied agents are always grounded in their lived experience.
They “inhabit” their body in specific ways: inscribed and circum-
scribed, social and self-generated. The body referred to here is not
merely the physical body conceptualized as a biological object. The
body is neither the subject nor the object of experience. It is prior
to both. It lies between and yet prior to inner and outer worlds.
Through the temporal flow of lived experience, the body as self and
the body as world folds and unfolds.
This expressive, situated body continuously reveals the self anew
in relation to other bodies and to new situations and roles. The body
in motion and the knowledge it bears is shifting and indeterminate.
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment can therefore be
seen as the prelude to a situated theory of emotions: All motion is
the horizon of e-motion. Being located or dislocated in space has
affective force. Conversely, emotional experience requires a back-
ground of some prior sense of orientation (or disorientation) in
the world. Displacement from the locus of significance (the “home
place”) can lead to a shift in mood because bodies no longer feel
connected to the familiar geography which grounded their identity
and gave them meaning.
Emotion is therefore another name for a specific form of being-in-
the-world and “being-to-the-world.” Emotions cannot be reduced
to pure interiority or a function of the individual psyche; our emo-
tions reveal the dynamic of relations between self/other and world.
104 Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

Different emotional responses to situations are the expression of

changing relations to a changed world-situation. Emotions are not
the “objects” of our experience; they are the forms our existence
takes. Diasporicity, then, is not simply an experience of motion or
displacement, but an experience that induces profound emotional
responses: danger and fear, loss and grief, joy and pain.
Conceptualizing embodied diasporic experience within the terms
of the sociality of emotions points to a new way of understanding
mixed emotional responses to displacement. For example, the ten-
sion between the so-called essentialist accounts of the black dias-
pora and the anti-essentialists, and anti-anti-essentialists, can be
resolved by a return to an embodied account of the relationship be-
tween emotion and motion. With the expressive, e-motional body,
we can begin to understand the relationship between conditions
of embodiment and freedom. Understood as a fundamental syn-
thesizing agency, the body becomes a gathering of the past in the
present that enables the emergence of new futures. But this is only
the active side of a two-sided story. The body’s capacity to bring
the world into being is based on its passive relation to a preexist-
ing world. If this sounds paradoxical, the contradiction disappears
when the relation between the body and the world is understood
as a nonoppositional one of mutual interdependency. Embodiment
allows a world that is already there to come into being, again. The
body renews the world through an “eternal return” and takes up the
possibilities offered by the world and repeats and transforms them.
This Merleau-Pontyian horizon of the body’s relation to the world
has far-reaching implications for thinking origin, displacement,
and subjectivity. The world we are located in is imbued with values,
traces, and forms of significance that precede our occupation. The
world, therefore, has its own intentionality that is prior to our sub-
jective intentions or free will. Yet, the world only has significance
when its sedimented values are taken up afresh through practice by
each embodied community or subject. For instance, although the
de jure laws upholding white supremacy in the United States may
have been legally abolished, they de facto preserve inherited access
to economic and cultural privilege and myth-making which White
people as a collective continue to benefit from and unwittingly per-
petuate. Correspondingly, Black existence remains conditioned by
the norms, values, and laws of antebellum society, expressed devas-
tatingly and brutally in structural and existential racism, grinding
poverty, and restricted access to economic and cultural means of
production.
 Embodiment and Lived Experience of Diaspora 105

If freedom is the capacity to act and realize my intentionality, the

collective implicated in the “I” has the choice and power to either
persist with an oppressive practice or contribute to its demolition.
Freedom to perpetuate or reject oppressive practices is, however,
grounded in collective sociohistorical processes, privilege, and
nonprivilege which form the basis of the exercise of choice. It is
as intentional, situated, and inter-corporeal beings that we have a
world and are free to act. Through this “worlding” of embodied
communication, we take up stylistic gestures, features, resistance,
and habits that are specific to our cultural, geographical, eco-
nomical, and historical situation. This communication is renewed
through each encounter and event. Here then, Merleau-Ponty offers
a radically different way of thinking about origin and freedom. Par-
adoxically, origin is always repeating itself and structured through
difference. Thanks to the primordiality accorded to difference, as
embodied subjects we give birth to the world and new possibilities
are generated.

The Ontology of Diaspora

Here, I want to highlight two implications of Merleau-Ponty’s cor-
poreal and sensuous phenomenology for a fresh investigation into
the terms of diasporic experience. First, his work can be used to
show that the experience of diasporicity is deeply embodied and
universal. The body is a place, a repository for a certain view of the
world, for ways of moving and interacting with others. In turn, a
place is a form of the body, a unifying site of historical and cultural
forces. Merleau-Ponty calls the intertwining of body and place the
“flesh of the world.” The implication is that when this flesh of the
world becomes disconnected, the corporeal agent can experience
acutely the pain of being elsewhere, feeling atopic to their new loca-
tion in a way that resists cognition or language.
Painful or pleasurable, if the grounding of diasporic experience
in the emotionally situated body remains unthought, the histori-
cally constituted diasporic subject is problematically conflated
with the globe-trotting, multi-passported world traveler. These en-
trepreneurial and intellectual jet setters are able to celebrate the
commodity fetishism of their global access and success, to enjoy
the intrigue of diasporicity that is available for appropriation and
cultural chic. Historically constituted diasporic communities may
uncritically cling to the allure of the original home. Unlike the
appropriative elites, those whose journey on the road or sea was
106 Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

forced have experienced violent negation of the freedom of the

Merleau-Pontyian corporeal schema. The celebration of the hy-
brid and the “international beige” is rife with conflict and ineffa-
ble agony. These conflicts involve positionings, crises of identity,
alienation, and the feeling of being always out of time and off key.
Diasporic subjects are forced to reconcile themselves to the fact
that their place in the world is what Audre Lorde refers to in her
1984 book, Sister Outsider, as the “house of difference rather than
the security of any particular difference” (p. 226). The displaced
diasporic body can be, and is often, a site of conflict and despair
and not the wonderful consumerized, global mish-mash of differ-
ence and transgressive hybridity that is celebrated in contemporary
theory and popular culture.
The second implication of Merleau-Ponty’s account is that
through thinking the deep significance of the body–place rela-
tion, he offers a radical way of thinking origin. His model refutes
a naïve causality of embodied habitus in which the embodied sub-
ject acquires competence from repetition of bodily acts grounded
in a static culture. The origin for Merleau-Ponty is a momentary
event that is renewed and reconstituted in the embodied moment
of a performative present. Movement away from an original lo-
cus means that the origin will be reconstituted in its new context.
Merleau-Ponty’s insight, then, is that diasporicity is not the result
merely of factual changes in location and culture but rather is the
outcome of transformatory dialogs between the embodied being
and place. What constitutes home or origin opens itself up to be
reworked in the present.
As such, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy creates the possibility of
an active agency that takes up the preconstituted diasporic com-
plex through the work of the present. Accordingly, paradigms of
lament and pain are not a necessary condition of diasporicity. Be-
cause origin is a differential repetition, the negative emotionality
associated with displacement is open to the play of differences. On
these terms, we can talk about the humor, the creativity, and the joy
of diasporicity.

The Limit of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology

Although Merleau-Ponty theory allows us to think about an em-
bodied diaspora that is at the heart of what it means to be human,
there is a serious problem with it. We can only embrace a gener-
alized and metaphysically positioned diaspora if we disregard the
 Embodiment and Lived Experience of Diaspora 107

question of how we are positioned by and take a position in relation

to others. Merleau-Ponty’s theory comes up against its limits when
we ask the question: “Can you be a diasporic subject and not know
it?” The French philosopher would have to answer in the affirma-
tive: It is possible to be unmindful of one’s diasporicity due to the
unconscious dialog about how one’s origins are being reworked.
Yet the question proves complicated when we recognize the power
of categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, and so on in the forma-
tion of identity. The power of being positioned permits us to under-
stand that the construction of subjectivity is not solely the work of
the embodied subject.
By stressing the powerful medium of the incarnated agent,
Merleau-Ponty fails to explicitly acknowledge the other’s work of
objectification in social relations. Any account of subjectivity must
allow for a moment when the self is constructed through the ex-
ternalizing power of the other, a moment in which one can only
experience the self through the gaze of the other. The body is no
longer both subject and object; it becomes objectified or named
for others. Any full account of subjectivity must negotiate between
auto-constructions of subjectivity and those imposed from the out-
side, rather than setting them up as opposed. While how I appear
to others might condition my habits of being in the world, my whole
corporeal trajectory need not be determined by these external lim-
itations or the limitations wrought by my body. Through my power
of choice, agency, and action I can (re)create myself through the
sociality of my emotions and sociohistorical situatedness.
Diasporicity can be conceptualized, then, as an ontological
event, as an achievement, or as an imposition. Some are born di-
asporic, some achieve diasporicity, and some have it thrust upon
them. A crucial limit of Merleau-Ponty’s work is that it can only
account for the first possibility. By refusing to analyze the differ-
ences at work in the social field, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy risks
concealing the power relations that constitute it, setting his work
adrift as an abstract pre-discursive ontology rather than a concrete
social ontology.
Frantz Fanon’s seminal essay, “The Lived Experience of the
Black,” helps us address this shortcoming by providing a discur-
sive and sociohistorical transformativity. On his account, embod-
ied transformativity cannot simply be pre-discursive. Freedom and
“dis-alienation” from the prison of appearance involves a reflective
account of how “the other” positions the diasporic subject and at-
tempts to naturalize this positioning through an over-investment
108 Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

in the visual register. This discursive and visualized contestation is

the framework within which diasporic Black agents negotiate their
search for freedom and different modes of being beyond white su-
premacist logic.

Conclusion
With both Merleau-Ponty and Fanon in mind, we can see how it is
possible to bridge the gap between different existential modes and
moods of diasporicity, namely the preconscious and the discursive.
Cleavage between these two moments is untenable if we acknowl-
edge that through embodiment, both moments are necessary for
comprehending why diasporicity can be a source of both affirma-
tive celebration of where you are and of melancholia and nostalgia
for an originary home. When we begin to understand the evolution
of the black diaspora as an ontological condition, the full force of
transportation, enslavement, colonialism, and indifference to black
humanity comes into sharp relief. On a discursive level, bodies are
encoded into a world and ways of being that organize them. For the
diasporic black body, this organization bears a distanced and de-
ferred relation to an origin. Despite this distance and hiatus, many
diasporic subjects often yearn for an originary past which will an-
chor their identity, providing emotional stability in a world which
disrupts and challenges their existence prior to any form of agency
or expression.

For Sources and Further Reading

Bakare-Yusuf, B. (2008) Rethinking diasporicity: Embodiment, emotion,
and the displaced origin. African and Black Diaspora: An International
Journal, 1, 147–158. The present essay is a condensed, revised version of
this earlier work.
Part V
Healing

To what new pathways to wholeness and wellness does a view of

humans as fully embodied point? What insights on individual and
collective healing arise from reimagining humans in terms of their
energy-emitting and absorbing, mobile, sensate, skin-covered,
socially embedded body? The essays in this section take up these
questions, with attention to cutting edge perspectives on bioenergy,
touch, movement, and technology-assisted embodiment.
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
[Link] ndfra [Link]
17 Vital Energy, Health, and
Medicine
Shin Lin and Gaetan Chevalier

The term “Vital Energy” stems from ancient concepts that cannot
be defined scientifically. However, the human body produces and
responds to a wide spectrum of measurable energies that form the
basis of an increasingly large host of medical devices for diagnosis
and treatment of many different diseases and disorders.

The Concept of “Vital Energy”

In many ancient cultures, the living human body is thought to have
a characteristic energy that is important for good health and pro-
vides natural healing strength for fighting diseases and recovering
from injuries and disorders. This energy has different names in dif-
ferent countries.
Qi is the Chinese term for this type of energy, commonly used in
the context of medicine and martial arts. Ki in Japan and Korea,
and prana in India carry a similar meaning. In Traditional Chinese
medicine, qi is thought to circulate through channels known as me-
ridians. A strong, balanced flow of qi is deemed necessary for good
health and healing, whereas deficiency and blockage of qi flow re-
sults in dysfunction and disease. Inscribed on artifacts thousands
of years old unearthed in China, qi is not definable in modern sci-
entific terms. Instead, qi refers to personal sensations and feelings;
they can be sensed, but there are no specific biological markers
measurable with scientific instrumentation.
“Vital Energy,” “Life Force,” and “Biofield” are current Western
terms with meaning related to qi, ki, and prana. These forms of
energy can be divided into veritable (or tangible) and putative (or
intangible) energy. Veritable energy can be measured with scien-
tific instrumentation, with characteristic frequencies ranging from
low-frequency vibrations (e.g., low pitched sound) to higher fre-
quencies in the electromagnetic spectrum (e.g., electricity, visible
112 Shin Lin and Gaetan Chevalier

light); these are sometimes called bioenergy. Putative energy is de-

fined as energy that is not measurable with modern scientific instru-
ments. It includes electromagnetic energy so low in magnitude that
it cannot be detected with instruments available today and energy
that cannot be defined by current scientific paradigms.

Emission and Reception of Energy by the Human Body

A scientific discussion of vital energy begins with the well-established
fact that the human body produces and emits many measurable
forms of energy. At the most basic level is the emission of thermal
energy as infrared rays (frequencies just below visible light); it is
easily detectable by touch and quantifiable with household ther-
mometers and infrared cameras. The heart, brain, and muscles
produce electrical energy which can be measured by electrocar-
diography (ECG, or EKG), electroencephalography (EEG), and
electromyography (EMG), respectively. The body also emits a low
level of magnetic energy, which is detectable with a superconduct-
ing quantum interference device (SQUID). The medical technology
of magnetoencephalography (MEG) for brain imaging is based on
this type of phenomenon. Less well known is the body’s emission of
light. These emissions, termed biophotons, are very low in magni-
tude but can be measured with highly sensitive devices.
The human body also has many structures that respond to ex-
ternal electromagnetic energy. The most sensitive are the rods in
the eye, which respond to individual photons. As elaborated below,
other cells and tissues also respond to externally applied electrical
energy, which can be shown to affect cells grown in culture.

Changes in Body Energy in Relation to Health and

Healing
Elevated body temperature, fever, accompanies many disorders.
This phenomenon is measured with a simple thermometer or de-
vices that detect heat in the form of infrared rays. The latter are
useful in research and clinical applications (e.g., detection of cir-
culatory abnormalities and inflammation) and in public health set-
tings (e.g., airport screening for travelers with flu-like symptoms).
ECG is routinely used to detect abnormalities in the structure
and function of the heart. Heart rate variability (HRV) is in-
creasingly used to evaluate the balance between the sympathetic
(fight-or-flight response) and parasympathetic (relaxation response)
 Vital Energy, Health, and Medicine 113

branches of the autonomic nervous system. Recording EEG to mea-

sure changes in brain wave patterns is used in clinical and research
settings to study neurological and psychological states.
Research on the relationship between electric fields and wound
healing has revealed how this type of energy can alter cellular struc-
ture and function. The skin of humans and other animals emits a
very low DC electric field under normal conditions, but its intensity
increases dramatically during wound healing. In a pioneering study
by M. Zhao and collaborators at the University of Aberdeen and
other institutions, an externally applied electric field enhanced cell
migration in the closing up of artificially created wounds in cell
cultures. This effect involved enzymes crucial in cellular signaling
pathways, including those that regulate blood vessel development
(angiogenesis) and cell movement towards chemical attractants
(chemotaxis). A follow-up study by our research group and collabo-
rators at Hong Kong City University showed that the electrically in-
duced change in cell movement involves rearrangement of the actin
cytoskeleton, which is vital for cellular movement and contractility
in every type of cell in the body.

Eastern Qi-Related Practices and Therapies

Because a state of strong and balanced qi is traditionally regarded
in Chinese culture as vital to good health and healing, a variety of
Eastern therapies and practices are aimed at promoting this desir-
able state.
Qigong (“exercise for qi” in Chinese) is a diverse family of Chinese
practices that were historically developed to improve the strength
and flow of qi. These practices are characterized by the integrated
regulation of mind, body, and breath. The best-known practice is
tai chi, which originated as a martial arts system at the Chen Fam-
ily Village in Central China about 400 years ago (Chen style tai
chi). To the practitioner, an indication of enhanced qi flow is the
tingling, bloated, and warm feeling in the hands. In our laboratory,
we used laser Doppler flowmetry to confirm that these sensations
correlated with increased blood flow to the hands. Increased blood
flow was accompanied by increased flow of electricity, measured
deep in the tissue at acupuncture points. The correlation of elec-
trical flow with blood flow is interesting in light of the principle of
“blood is the mother of qi” described 2,500 years ago in the book
Huangdi Neijing (Yellow Emperor’s Medical Classic). Whereas in-
creased blood circulation is well understood to promote health and
114 Shin Lin and Gaetan Chevalier

healing through elevated transport of oxygen, nutrients, and waste

products, increased internal electrical flow and electric field may
also enhance healing, as described below.
It is also important to note that randomized controlled clinical
trials have shown definitively that tai chi can improve many clini-
cally relevant measures of health, including reduction of stress and
relief of symptoms of arthritis and fibromyalgia, and enhancement
of proprioception, cardiovascular functions, and immune response.
A recent functional brain imaging study by J. Tao and collabora-
tors from Fujian University of Traditional Chinese Medicine and
other institutions found that tai chi and qigong practitioners have
higher connectivity between the hippocampus and the prefron-
tal cortex, resulting in enhanced memory and executive function.
Studies such as these led Harvard Health (August 2019) to call tai
chi “medication in motion.”
In traditional Chinese medicine, the stated intent of many thera-
pies is to “quicken the blood and move the qi.” Our laboratory has
confirmed that therapies such as acupuncture and dit da jow (topical
herbal medicine used for sprains and bruises) can indeed increase
local blood flow. These therapies also produce other beneficial ef-
fects on physiological functions, such as inducing production of en-
dorphins for pain relief and regulation of cardiac function.
The most common qi-related medical therapy is acupuncture,
which involves the addition of physical energy to the body through
manually twirling a needle after insertion into an acupuncture
point. This needling action distorts underlying connective tissue;
cells attached to this tissue are indirectly deformed, leading to the
secretion of signaling molecules (e.g., ATP, histamine) that could
produce analgesic, anti-inflammatory, and other downstream
effects. For some acupuncture points that overlay major nerves,
the physical force from the needle can also send signals through
the nerves to the brain, resulting in systemic effects throughout the
body. J. C. Longhurst’s group at our University has found that
electroacupuncture, in which electrical pulses are applied through
the needles, lowers blood pressure longer than does manual needle
manipulation.
A common type of consumer device for relieving muscular
pain involves transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS;
see also the next section). In one version, called transcutaneous
­acupoint electrical stimulation (TAES), electrodes are placed on
acupuncture points. M. Leung’s group at Hong Kong Polytechnic
University showed that TAES can lower blood sugar in diabetic
 Vital Energy, Health, and Medicine 115

patients as much as does physical exercise. They also found that

aiming a laser at acupuncture points (laser acupuncture) around
the knee – similar to the low-level laser treatment used by physical
therapists for general pain relief – relieves pain and inflammation
and improves mobility in patients with osteoarthritis.
Finally, there is a group of therapies delivered by so-called “en-
ergy healers” that includes External Qi Therapy from China, Reiki
and Johrei from Japan, Pranic Healing from the Philippines, and
Therapeutic Touch, Healing Touch, and Polarity Therapy from the
US. An underlying belief is that qi or vital energy can be transferred
without touching from the hands of a healer to a patient over a range
of inches to miles (distance healing). Although there are claims that
these therapies derive from ancient practices, they all originated in
the 20th century. The few randomized controlled trials on some of
these therapies failed to demonstrate unequivocally benefits rela-
tive to no-treatment controls. Studies of whether qi or vital energy
from energy healers affects cells grown in culture either showed no
effect or were methodologically deficient. Moreover, there is no sci-
entific explanation of how energy from an “energy healer” could
have enough power to influence a patient’s physiology without
touching, particularly from miles away. Any positive effects of such
therapies likely involve the psycho-physiological mechanisms of the
placebo effect. The body’s responses to a placebo can activate a
person’s capacity to heal from a variety of pathological conditions.

Western Energy Medical Devices and Therapies

Today, a host of Western medical devices and therapies are based on
applying different forms of energy to the human body to enhance
health and healing. The most basic devices are lamps emitting en-
ergy in the visible spectrum, supplementing sunlight exposure to
treat seasonal affective disorder, vitamin D deficiency, and skin
disorders. Infrared lamps and chambers warm the body to improve
blood circulation and optimize conditions for metabolic processes
and other physiological reactions. Newer devices emit far infrared
rays, which early-stage research indicates can relieve pain and in-
flammation without heating the body.
Next are devices emitting electromagnetic fields (EMF). As de-
scribed above, electric fields have many effects on cellular structures
and functions. Common EMF therapies use pulsed electromagnetic
field (PEMF) devices, which usually transmit waveforms via anten-
nae near the target tissue. PEMF treatment of pain and some bone
116 Shin Lin and Gaetan Chevalier

fractures have been cleared by the US Food and Drug Administra-

tion (FDA), and research on treating osteoarthritis shows promise.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) uses a rapidly varying
magnetic field to produce electric fields strong enough to alter neu-
ronal activity. The FDA has cleared TMS for treatment-resistant
depression, and reports indicate that it may treat other conditions
such as bipolar disorders, drug craving, and schizophrenia.
An emerging domain in medicine is electrical stimulation. Several
techniques are practiced clinically and are being investigated for
new applications, in particular for conditions unresponsive to drug
therapies. Vagus nerve stimulation, for example, is FDA-approved
for treatment of depression and epilepsy, and deep brain stimu-
lation has been FDA-cleared for treatment of dystonia, tremor,
obsessive-compulsive disorder, and Parkinson’s disease. These
techniques are further being studied to treat other conditions such
as anxiety and Tourette syndrome. They are cutting-edge examples
of applications of energy-emitting devices for medical diagnostic
and therapy.
The marketing of energy devices has sometimes outpaced gov-
ernment regulatory processes. Because of the legalistic difference
between the terms “FDA-cleared” and “FDA-approved,” consum-
ers should consult healthcare professionals whether a given medical
device has been demonstrated to be efficacious in a randomized
controlled trial, and avoid using those with claims unsupported by
rigorous clinical testing.

Looking Towards the Future

Scientists are making big strides towards understanding the physio-
logical mechanisms underlying acupuncture. A pioneering study by
J. S. Han’s group at Peking University showed that when electrical
pulses of different frequencies are delivered through acupuncture
needles, different endorphins are produced by the body for pain
relief. Recent studies have revealed that acupuncture can also sen-
sitize opiate receptors, thus reducing the drug dosage needed to
achieve the same level of pain relief. This research is vital to im-
proving pain management and overcoming the world-wide opiate
addiction crisis.
Another advance comes from clinical research showing that
acupressure massage (stimulation by finger pressure instead of
needles) is effective for reducing pain, sleep problems, fatigue, and
depression. This type of cost-effective self-help remedy is receiving
 Vital Energy, Health, and Medicine 117

increased attention in the medical and research communities as a

way to counter sky-rocketing cost of healthcare in the US.
The use of Western medical devices that deliver various forms of
measurable energy is projected to become a $40 billion industry in
the next five years. These devices and modernized version of tradi-
tional therapies such as electroacupuncture and laser acupuncture
activate and elevate our body’s natural healing strength. They are
shining examples of the current trend of the convergence and inte-
gration of modern medical science with the ancient concept of qi
and other forms of vital energy for optimal treatment of different
diseases and disorders.

For Sources and Further Reading

Hintz, K. J., Yount, G. L., Kadar, I., Schwartz, G., Hammerschlag, R., &
Lin, S. (2003). Bioenergy definitions and research guidelines. Alternative
Therapies, 9, A13–A30.
Jahnke, R., Larkey, L., Rogers, C., Etnier, J., & Lin, F. (2010). A compre-
hensive review of health benefits of qigong and tai chi. American Journal
of Health Promotion, 24, 1–25.
Muehsam, D., Chevalier, G., Barsotti, T., & Gurfein, B. T. (2015). An
overview of biofield devices. Global Advances in Health and Medicine,
4(suppl), 42–51.
Wang, C., Collet, J. P., & Lau, J. (2004). The effect of tai chi on health out-
comes in patients with chronic conditions: A systematic review. Archives
of Internal Medicine, 164, 493–501.
18 The Power of Touch
Oxytocin, the “Love
Hormone,” Is Released by
Massage Therapy
Tiffany Field

Oxytocin, the “love hormone,” has been increased by massage

therapy. A potential mechanism is stimulation of pressure recep-
tors under the skin that calms the nervous system, including reduc-
ing the stress hormone cortisol and, in turn, increasing oxytocin.
The massage-oxytocin link illustrates the health benefits of direct,
active bodily contact.

What we see and hear on digital devices, across a room, or driving

down a highway, we experience at a distance. Touch, on the other
hand, only happens up close, when our body – our fingertips, lips,
chests, toes – comes into direct contact with the world beyond the
skin. Touch is intimate, and vital. Skin is our largest and earliest
developing sense organ, and research with humans, monkeys, rats,
and other species shows that touching and being touched is vital to
development and wellbeing from early in life (Field, 2014). Touch
deprivation can impair growth and health, and massage therapy
helps premature infants thrive, reduces aggression, and improves
management of challenges to wellbeing such as cancer, eating dis-
orders, autism, and pain.
The focus here is on research concerning the role of oxytocin in
health benefits of massage. Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that is pro-
duced in the hypothalamus and has a significant role in the birth,
lactation, and social behavior of mammals. It was first labeled
the “love hormone” following on research by Sue Carter and her
colleagues that showed that mother prairie voles who were more
affectionate with their offspring had higher oxytocin levels (see
her chapter in Hurlemann & Grinevich, 2018). Their evidence sug-
gested that oxytocin is released in saliva following lactation and
massage. Those data were not surprising given that the mother’s
breasts are being massaged during breastfeeding. And, the infant’s
 The Power of Touch 119

mouth is being massaged during breastfeeding. Their findings were

corroborated in a 2019 review of 64 studies by Kerr and colleagues,
which concluded that massage therapy increased oxytocin levels.
An example of the massage–oxytocin studies is a 2015 study by
Tsuji and colleagues in which mothers gave their children 20-minute
massages for 20 minutes a day over a three-month period. Saliva
samples were taken from the mothers and the children during mas-
sage and during a similar non-massage period. During the massage
therapy period, both the mothers and their children had higher
oxytocin levels compared to their levels during the non-massage
period.
In a 2012 study by Morhenn and colleagues (cited in Kerr et al.,
2019), 15-minute moderate pressure back massages were given to a
group of 65 adults who were compared to a control group. Oxytocin
was again increased. Moreover, adrenocorticotropic hormone, ni-
trous oxide, and beta-endorphin were decreased, which were all posi-
tive effects. Shoulder and neck massage also increased oxytocin levels
in a 2008 study by Bello and colleagues (cited in Tsuji et al., 2015).
Oxytocin release by massage may be finely tuned to real social
stimulation of the skin. In a 2019 study by Li and colleagues on
the relationship between massage therapy and oxytocin, 40 adult
males were given 10-minute massages either by hand or machine
and blood samples were assayed for oxytocin. Oxytocin levels in-
creased after both hand and machine massage, but more signifi-
cantly after the massages by hand. The participants also assigned
more pleasant ratings and reported that they were willing to pay
more for massages by hand than by machine. In addition, brain
scans suggested that the hand massages activated regions of the
brain that are involved in social cognition and reward.
The underlying mechanism for the massage–oxytocin relation-
ship relates to the stimulation of pressure receptors under the skin,
as occurs during massage (see Field, 2014, for a review). Compar-
ing the effects of moderate pressure massage and light pressure
massage, the nervous system is calmed by the moderate pressure
massage and aroused by the light pressure massage. Following
moderate pressure massage, heart rate and blood pressure de-
crease and EEG recordings show greater theta activity suggesting
greater relaxation. For example, in a 2012 study by Rapaport and
colleagues (cited by Kerr et al., 2019), massage therapy was com-
pared to a touch control condition. Compared to light touch, twice
weekly 45-minute Swedish massage sessions significantly decreased
cortisol levels and increased oxytocin levels.
120 Tiffany Field

The stimulation of pressure receptors under the skin during mas-

sage leads to an increase in activity in the vagus nerve, the larg-
est cranial nerve with branches to many parts of the body. Vagal
activity, in turn, decreases stress hormones, most especially corti-
sol. With the decrease in cortisol, there are lawful increases in oxy-
tocin as well as serotonin, the body’s natural antidepressant and
anti-pain neurotransmitter. Further, with the decrease in cortisol,
natural killer cells are saved, leading to enhanced immune function
given that natural killer cells kill bacterial, viral, and cancer cells.
These studies highlight the importance of particular forms of
touch and the release of oxytocin, the “love hormone,” for physical
health. Physical health is inextricably tied to cognitive, emotional,
and social wellbeing, and so it comes as no surprise that oxytocin is
involved not only in the attachment process Sue Carter described in
mother voles and their offspring, but also in human social cognition
and relationships throughout the lifespan. Oxytocin plays a role in
facial recognition, trust, empathy, cooperation, and preference for
social groups with which one identifies, in context-sensitive ways (see
Hurlemann & Grinevich, 2018). The pervasive effects of oxytocin
and its release through touch are rooted in the up-close, body/body
contact that has characterized the lives of humans and many other
animals over the long sweep of evolutionary time. The adaptive value
of touch shaped pressure-sensitive mechanisms in the skin and ner-
vous system and the way they function from early in life, imbuing
real-time body contact through massage with its healing power.

For Sources and Further Reading

Field, T. (2014). Touch. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hurlemann, R., & Grinevich, V. (Eds.). (2018). Behavioral pharmacology of
neuropeptides: Oxytocin. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Kerr, F., Wiechula, R., Feo, R., Schultz, T., & Kitson, A. (2019). Neuro-
physiology of human touch and eye gaze in therapeutic relationships
and healing: A scoping view. JBI Database Systematic Review and Im-
plementation Report, 17, 209–247.
Li, Q., Becker, B., Wernicke, J., Chen, Y., Zhang, Y., Li, R., … Kendrick,
K. M. (2019). Foot massage evokes oxytocin release and activation of
orbitofrontal cortex and superior temporal sulcus. Psychoneuroendocri-
nology, 101, 193–203.
Tsuji, S., Yuhi, T., Furuhara, K., Ohta, S., Shimizu, Y., & Higashida, H.
(2015). Salivary oxytocin concentrations in seven boys with autism spec-
trum disorder received massage from their mothers. Frontiers in Psychi-
atry, 6, 58.
19 Traumatic Embodiment
Traumatic Exposure
and Healing
Paula Thomson

Traumatic embodied cognitions disenfranchise individuals from

an embodied self that can move freely in the world; they inhabit
a self that rapidly resonates with any real or imagined signal of
threat. Healing trauma is always a process of healing embodied
cognitions, agency, and ownership.

The odds of experiencing a major traumatic event during a lifespan

are extremely high, with some estimates as high as 90%. Natural
disasters, intentional and non-intentional accidents, the loss of a
loved one due to a violent event, life-threatening illnesses, victim
of assault (sexual or non-sexual), domestic violence, combat or
warzone exposure, terrorist attacks, forced resettlement, political
imprisonment, and/or exposure to childhood adversities (abuse,
neglect, family dysfunction, violent neighborhoods) all directly
engage an embodied self. The body is biologically programmed to
respond to events that threaten the integrity of the physical and
psychological self. For the majority of people, these events are ini-
tially distressing and then recovery processes emerge; however, for
some individuals (approximately 10%) recovery remains elusive.
They develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and suffer the
devastating effects of trauma for prolonged periods, and for some,
an entire lifetime.
The likelihood of developing PTSD increases when individuals
are exposed to prolonged intentional interpersonal trauma or are
poly-victimized. This dose effect increases stress symptoms such
as anxiety, depression, dissociation, and somatic disorders, as well
as PTSD (approximately 12%–40% rate of PTSD in samples with
cumulative trauma exposure). With optimal support and emotional
resilience some individuals may experience posttraumatic growth,
an experience that expands a sense of purpose and meaning. They
122 Paula Thomson

are able to reduce their stress symptoms as they acquire a sense of

wellbeing and hope.

Traumatic Embodiment
According to Bessel van der Kolk (2014), the body keeps the score.
The body remembers the traumatic event(s) and reveals these memo-
ries through physiologic and behavioral responses, especially when
a traumatic memory is triggered. Even preverbal infants encode
traumatic events as embodied memories; years later these children
continue to reenact early traumatic events in play or behavioral ac-
tions. These reenactments have a driven repetitive quality that is
highly resistant to change. Affective states such as anxiety or anger
may accompany these enactments; however, traumatic enactments
may just present as anomalous incongruent actions devoid of emo-
tions. Often traumatic reenactments involve aggressive or sexual
behaviors. The impulse to harm the self or others is difficult to
inhibit, which makes traumatic reenactments challenging to treat
clinically.
In general, embodied cognition implies a memory system that
encodes information about physical competencies and contextual
perceptual and motor responses to external situations in the phys-
ical world. This knowledge is shaped from biological experiences
directly gleaned from the human body. When the body or the psy-
che is rendered helpless and immobilized by a more powerful force
during a traumatic event, a loss of physical competency is etched
into an embodied cognitive scheme. The perceptual and motor
responses during a traumatic event are distorted and differ from
the normal array of responses evoked during daily activities. All
sensory perceptions are heightened and form “flashes” or “bursts”
of images that are burned into long-term memory. The accompa-
nying emotional states of terror and/or rage are deeply entwined
into these perceptual images; for some traumatized individuals,
emotion is dissociated from the event and they are left in a state of
profound depersonalization (alienation from a sense of self) and
derealization (the world is perceived as dreamlike).
These emotional or dissociative states are also deeply etched
into a cluster of traumatic memories. Physiologic responses evoked
during traumatic events are specific, operating as instinctual fixed
action patterns of fight, flight, or freeze behaviors. Normal homeo-
static states shift into heightened allostatic states that mobilize au-
tonomic and sensory-motor responses necessary for survival. The
 Traumatic Embodiment 123

mind and body are united as a single coherent entity to meet the de-
mands of the traumatic event. When these states persist then phys-
iologic adaptations become maladaptive and influence subsequent
behavioral, cognitive, and emotional appraisals. The individual
is now neurobiologically reorganized to engage in a world that is
filled with constant threat and danger.
Embodied cognition, whether trauma-based or not, operates
pre-reflectively; instinctive or intuitive responses are mobilized with
incredible precision and accuracy. Individual embodied knowledge
enhances understanding about other peoples’ movement and inten-
tions as well as informs perceptual understanding about emotional
states in others. Interactive multimodal sensory-motor, intero-
ceptive, and emotional processes shape the formation of embod-
ied cognition. It is constructed via the specific body we possess,
the physical training we experience, and by the particular context
within which embodied cognition is grounded. These conditions
operate in every setting throughout the lifespan and are modified by
the natural changes and adaptions that result from daily demands
and events. Sadly, in extreme traumatic events, the body is often
severely injured and physical competencies maybe constrained (i.e.,
shackled, bound). In every situation, embodied cognition is not
merely a causal reaction to cognitive appraisals; rather this system
is also integral in forming appraisals. More specifically, traumatic
appraisals are always biased towards threat, and even worse, dis-
ownership of self and loss of agency. These embodied traumatic
memories implicitly influence cognitive appraisals.

Embodied Healing
Traumatic events may directly alter a sense of embodied ownership
or a sense of embodied agency. When individuals no longer feel that
they have agency over their bodily actions, and even worse, a loss of
ownership of their body, a sense of self is disrupted. The traumatic
assault destroys a sense of subjectivity; the body becomes an object
that is disconnected from embodiment. Extreme levels of dissocia-
tion now distort the operation of embodied cognition; numbing, in-
difference, detachment, and passivity are coupled with perceptual
distortions of depersonalization and derealization. Disorientation
from the world and the self intensifies feelings of isolation. The goal
of somatic practices and expressive therapies is to restore a sense
of body ownership, including a sense of agency and the ability to
once again engage embodied cognition that is flexible and resilient.
124 Paula Thomson

Effective treatment reduces a sense of alienation so body habitus

can reemerge.
Activities that promote motor agency and perceptual expansion
help ameliorate traumatic embodiment. Change can be achieved
through a myriad of somatic approaches that aim to heighten em-
bodied awareness along with enactive engagement. In all trauma
treatment, the first phase of treatment is to help establish safety be-
fore any traumatic memories and grief are explored. Safety includes
skills to regulate arousal and to reengage an adaptive embodied
sense of being in the world. During the remembering phase, trau-
matic embodied memories are slowly disentangled from a general
sense of embodied ownership and agency. Individuals can learn to
move and “feel” their bodies in motion, and they can disambiguate
emotional states of terror and/or rage as they move. States of sad-
ness, joy, pleasure and/or relief emerge as the traumatic memories
are dislodged from the body.
Body psychotherapy approaches may include movement-based
contemplative practices (Qigong, Tai Chi, Yoga, Feldenkrais
Method, Alexander Technique), Somatic Experiencing (processing
trapped physiologic arousal responses), sensorimotor approach to
psychotherapy (tracking body signals and building body resourc-
ing), somatic therapies (massage, acupuncture, hypnosis, biofeed-
back, neurofeedback, eye-movement desensitization), dance and
movement therapy, expressive arts therapy (integration of art ther-
apy, drama therapy, narrative therapy, embodied expression), and/
or exposure therapy. These approaches cultivate a reintegration
or enhancement of fundamental embodied cognitive processing
such as interoceptive, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic awareness.
The approach-avoidance motor system becomes more complex
and flexible embodied states emerge as healing from past trauma
progresses.
When employing embodied therapeutic modalities, the third
phase, recovery, is always incorporated throughout treatment.
Reconnection with a resilient sense of self often emerges as body
ownership is restored. Body awareness is heightened, and the body
becomes a reliable source of memory as well as a source of ground-
ing and reassurance. It is no longer a source of dread; it becomes a
home from which embodied cognitions are guideposts while engag-
ing in the world.
Embodied cognition is a complex interplay between self, others,
and the world. Body-based trauma therapies draw information
from embodied cognition with the goal of facilitating real-time
 Traumatic Embodiment 125

social interactions and contexts that are no longer colored by un-

resolved traumatic experiences. Effective treatment influences so-
cial responses that are rooted in past experiences and memories
that are stored and retrieved. Even abstract concepts such as truth,
value, and aesthetics can be restored within a dynamic embodied
cognitive system. These abstract ideas have their roots in the body;
healing from traumatic embodiment provides opportunities to re-
engage in these higher abstract concepts that are the bedrock of our
humanity.

Conclusion
Embodied cognition is a theory that promotes the concept that the
sensory-motor system informs subjective emotional feelings; it is
the bedrock for neural constructs of situational-induced feelings.
As well, interoception (combination of proprioception and viscero-
ception) directly influences a sense of self, self in relationship to the
world, and self that experiences another individual’s interoceptive
state. Complex neural networks shape these embodied experiences
at implicit and explicit levels of awareness. The interplay of these
networks operates as embodied cognition. Embodied cognition
is powerfully evident in heightened states of joy and awe, as well
as the searing effects of traumatic exposure. Traumatic embod-
ied cognitions grip individuals, especially those who struggle with
chronic traumatic stress symptoms. They are disenfranchised from
an embodied self that can move freely in the world; one that can
sense and express an elaborate array of emotional and behavioral
responses. Unresolved trauma distorts individuals; they inhabit
a body that rapidly resonates with any real or imagined signal of
threat. A moral sense of meaning is destroyed as they struggle in a
vacillating state of numbness, avoidance, and hyperarousal. Their
embodied humanity resides in the “dark night of the soul.” Healing
trauma is always a process of healing embodied cognitions and em-
bodied agency and ownership.

For Sources and Further Reading

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Adverse childhood experi-
ences. [Link]
Dubi, M., Powell, P., & Gentry, J. E. (2017). Trauma, PTSD, grief, and loss:
The ten competencies for evidence-based treatment. Eau Claire, WI: PESI
Publishing and Media.
126 Paula Thomson

Mayo Clinic. Resilience: Build skills to endure hardship. [Link]

[Link]/tests-procedures/resilience-training/in-depth/resilience/
art-20046311
Thomson, P., & Jaque, S. V. (2019). Creativity, trauma, and resilience. Lan-
ham, MD: Lexington Books.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body
in the healing of trauma. New York: Viking.
20 Virtual Embodiment and
Embodied Cognition
Effect of Virtual Reality
Perspective Taking Tasks
on Empathy and Prejudice
Fernanda Herrera

Taking the perspective of others through the use of virtual reality

(VR) technology increases empathy and reduces prejudice toward
a myriad of social targets. The positive effects of VR perspective
taking seem to be attributable to virtual embodiment and embod-
ied cognition.

For most of human history, we perceived our surroundings and

functioned based on what our physical bodies were able to sense
and do. Later, with the establishment of written language and sym-
bols, we were able to expand our surroundings and learn regard-
less of whether or not physical bodies were present (e.g., reading
a book or listening to a story about a far-off place). Now, with the
availability of virtual reality (VR) technology, for the first time in
our history we are able to embody different kinds of bodies and
explore new virtual environments with our own physical bodies.
VR technology can trace its origins to the flight simulators of the
1920s and Ivan Sutherland’s head-mounted display (HMD) in the
1960s. However, only recently have technological advances made
VR a commercially accessible technology. Since 2015, a plethora
of new VR devices have reached the consumer market – Oculus
Quest, Google Daydream, VIVE PRO, and the Lenovo Explorer
to name a few. These releases increased interest in VR not only
as an entertainment technology, but as an education and therapy
tool that could also be used to train both emotional responses and
physical behaviors.
Most of these VR systems work by replacing the perceptual input
of the real world with perceptual input from the virtual environment
128 Fernanda Herrera

in real time. This replacement is accomplished by: blocking out vi-

sual, auditory, and haptic feedback from the physical world; the
continuous tracking of the user’s head and body movements; and
the immediate rendering of a virtual body and virtual environment
in response to the user’s movements and behaviors. Thus, some
of the unique affordances of VR systems are their ability to im-
merse users in virtual environments, allow them to embody differ-
ent kinds of avatars, and elicit feelings of presence (i.e., the user’s
subjective feeling of being inside the virtual environment). One of
the main goals of Sutherland’s first VR headset was to be able to
see anything from any angle. Now, content creators are building
VR experiences that allow users to virtually experience the lives
of others from the first-person perspective in an effort to increase
empathy and reduce prejudice.
The process of taking the perspective of others through the use of
VR has been termed Virtual Reality Perspective Taking (VRPT).
Traditional perspective taking tasks ask participants to imagine
what it would be like to be someone else under certain circum-
stances and try to understand what that person is feeling. During
VRPT tasks, on the other hand, participants actively experience
what it is like to be somebody else in an immersive virtual environ-
ment through the use of VR technology. VR’s ability to elicit strong
feelings of presence allows users to viscerally experience what it is
like to be someone else and to more deeply understand perspec-
tives other than their own. A growing area of research has lever-
aged VR’s affordances and demonstrated that virtually embodying
different perspectives in VR can reduce prejudice and bias, increase
understanding and empathy, lead to prosocial behaviors, and in-
crease charitable donations. Furthermore, empirical evidence sug-
gests that VRPT tasks can increase empathy for a myriad of social
targets, including the elderly, people with schizophrenia, the home-
less, individuals diagnosed with autism and children (see Herrera
et al., 2018, for a review).
Despite growing evidence supporting the claim that VRPT tasks
can increase empathy and reduce prejudice for specific social tar-
gets, a key question remains: Why is VR an effective perspective-
taking medium? Though research and debate continue, two current
approaches to explaining the positive results of VRPT tasks are
the virtual embodiment of the social target and embodied cognition.
These two theoretical explanations of the effectiveness of VRPT
tasks are synthesized below.
 Virtual Embodiment and Embodied Cognition 129

Virtual Embodiment
In computer-generated immersive virtual environments, users are
usually represented by avatars. An avatar is a digital representation
of users that are controlled in real-time. Even though the most com-
mon avatars available are human-like, users are able to embody a
plethora of different virtual bodies (e.g., aliens, cows, or even pieces
of coral). Because virtual environments are digitally created and
programmed, when participants choose to embody a human-like
avatar, they are able to embody avatars that may or may not look
like them; avatars may be taller, skinnier, or have a different skin
tone than the user. The type of avatar users embody can impact
self-perception, attitudes, and behavior both inside and outside the
virtual environment. For example, when participants embodied
avatars that were taller during a negotiation task inside a virtual
environment, they were less willing to accept unfair offers than
their counterparts who embodied shorter avatars. Additionally, the
behaviors exhibited inside the virtual environment carried over to
the physical world regardless of participant’s actual height (Yee &
Bailenson, 2007, cited in Seinfeld et al., 2018).
Interestingly, when users embody different types of avatars, they
experience the body ownership illusion. The body ownership illu-
sion refers to the illusory perception a person has in which they
believe an artificial body or body part is their own and is the source
of physical sensations. An example of this type of body ownership
is the rubber hand illusion. The rubber hand illusion consists of
hiding a participant’s hand and visually replacing it with a rubber
hand while simultaneously stroking both the participant’s hidden
hand and the rubber hand at the same time. This process has been
shown to elicit a strong illusion of ownership over the rubber hand
and has been found to extend to virtual bodies inside immersive
virtual environments as well. More research in this area provided
evidence that the body ownership illusion was not only possible for
virtual body parts, but for complete virtual bodies as well.
Eliciting the body ownership illusion inside immersive virtual en-
vironments (IVE) requires several conditions. Users must wear an
HMD (to block out their own physical body) and experience the
virtual environment from the first-person perspective. They also
must perceive their avatar’s body in some way, such as using a vir-
tual mirror or by allowing users to look down and see their avatar’s
body. Finally, the user’s avatar must exhibit visuomotor-synchrony
130 Fernanda Herrera

(i.e., as users move their physical bodies, they can see that their
body controls the body of their avatar in real time). Body own-
ership illusions can reshape social cognition (see Herrera et al.,
2018, for primary sources). They are able to mitigate stereotypes
and reduce implicit racial biases when participants embody ava-
tars that look like outgroup members. For example, in 2016 Oh and
colleagues showed that negative stereotyping of the elderly was re-
duced by participants who embodied elderly avatars in comparison
to participants who embodied a young avatar. Similarly, in 2013,
Peck and colleagues found that when white participants embody
dark-skinned avatars and experience the body ownership illusion,
implicit racial biases are significantly reduced when compared to
participants who embodied light-skinned avatars. In an exten-
sion of this work, researchers found that after embodying a dark-
skinned avatar for about 12 minutes reduces implicit racial bias in
comparison to participants who embodied light-skinned avatars or
purple-skinned avatars.
Recently, the body ownership illusion has been found to help
domestic violence offenders better recognize facial expressions in
women. After embodying the body of a female victim in an IVE
depicting domestic violence, offenders improved their ability to
recognize fearful female faces and reduced their bias to recognize
fearful faces as happy (Seinfeld et al., 2018). These results suggest
that virtual embodiment can be leveraged to not only change par-
ticipant’s perception, attitudes, and behavior, but that it can poten-
tially be used as rehabilitation tool.

Embodied Cognition
Embodied cognition theory postulates that cognition is an inter-
action of the body and mind. In contrast to traditional cognitive
theories which suggest that a person’s knowledge and represen-
tations of the world are based on amodal and abstract content,
embodied cognition theory suggests that cognition is situated. In
other words, cognitive activity takes place within the context of the
surrounding environment. When an event occurs, the underlying
sensory, somatic, and motor states are stored, and when the event
is remembered, the original states are partially simulated. Thus,
the interpretation and memory of a particular event is rooted in
the interaction of both cognitive and bodily states. While virtual
embodiment requires users to embody an avatar and experience the
 Virtual Embodiment and Embodied Cognition 131

body ownership illusion, the embodied cognition explanation dif-

fers markedly in that it does not require users to embody any kind
of avatar, but rather suggests that simply being able to move around
and interact with the virtual environment in naturalistic ways al-
lows users to better understand and empathize with perspectives
other than their own.
Traditional perspective-taking tasks, although effective, rely
mostly on imagination (i.e., cognitive states). In contrast, VRPT
tasks allow users to viscerally experience other people’s circum-
stances as if they were happening to them by allowing users to
physically react to the virtual experience. VRPT tasks thus activate
the same sensory, somatic, and motor states that would be activated
if the experience was happening to the user in real life. Compared
to traditional perspective taking tasks, VRPT tasks allow for the
interaction of both cognitive and whole-body states, which could
lead to a more accurate interpretation of the virtual experience,
and thus, a better understanding of other people’s perspectives and
circumstances.
Moreover, bodily responses during interactions with novel ob-
jects have been found to influence later-reported attitudes and
impressions. Physical movement can improve a participant’s per-
formance while completing cognitive tasks, and the physical ex-
perience of a particular environment can have an effect on both
perceptions and behaviors. VR allows users to move and interact
with their surroundings as if they were actually there through a
combination of physical body movements (e.g., walking, extend-
ing their arms to reach an object, or turning their head around to
examine their surroundings) and button presses. Because of these
affordances, users are able to gather spatial information about the
virtual environment using the same perceptual systems they would
use to gather spatial information about the real world. Thus, the
user’s ability to actively engage with and move around inside an
immersive virtual environment may result in improved cognition
due to the additional information users are able to collect through
physical movement and allow users to more effectively understand
and share the feelings of those they are taking the perspective of,
resulting in increased empathy and prosocial behaviors as well as
reduced prejudice. These results provide evidence supporting the
integration of cognitive and bodily states during perspective taking
tasks and suggest that movement is an integral part of VRPT tasks’
success.
132 Fernanda Herrera

Conclusion
Overall, VRPT has been shown to consistently increase empathy,
reduce prejudice, and promote prosocial behaviors toward differ-
ent social targets. Across the VRPT literature, researchers suggest
that virtual embodiment or embodied cognition may be the mech-
anisms through which VRPT increases empathy and reduces prej-
udice. Despite the lack of consensus on the mechanism that leads
to the positive results of VRPT tasks, the explanations put forth by
researchers highlight the benefits of being able to experience vir-
tual environments with naturalistic body movements, especially in
comparison to mental tasks that rely on imagination alone. More-
over, embodying virtual bodies that look different than our own
can have important psychological and social effects on the way we
perceive ourselves and others. However, more empirical work is
needed to further understand the extent to which virtual embodi-
ment and embodied cognition lead to the positive benefits of VRPT,
and examine the interaction between them in order to be able to
answer what specifically makes VR an effective perspective-taking
medium.

For Sources and Further Reading

Ahn, S. J., Bostick, J., Ogle, E., Nowak, K. L., McGillicuddy, K. T., &
Bailenson, J. N. (2016). Experiencing nature: Embodying animals in im-
mersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and
involvement with nature. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communica-
tion, 21(6), 399–419.
Herrera, F., Bailenson, J., Weisz, E., Ogle, E., & Zaki, J. (2018). Building
long-term empathy: A large-scale comparison of traditional and virtual
reality perspective-taking. PloS One, 13(10), e0204494.
Seinfeld, S., Arroyo-Palacios, J., Iruretagoyena, G., Hortensius, R.,
Zapata, L. E., Borland, D., … Sanchez-Vives, M. V. (2018). Offenders
become the victim in virtual reality: Impact of changing perspective in
domestic violence. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 2692.
Won, A. S., Perone, B., Friend, M., & Bailenson, J. N. (2016). Identifying
anxiety through tracked head movements in a virtual classroom. Cy-
berpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 19(6), 380–387.
Epilogue
What Embodiment Is
Anthony Chemero

This essay highlights some ways in which embodiment has been

misunderstood – leading to misguided critiques of embodied
cognitive science– and corrects those misunderstandings. I will
explain what embodiment, at least as it is understood by embod-
ied cognitive scientists, really is. Going forward, inquiry based on
a sound, shared understanding of embodiment can continue to
transform the scholarly landscape.

I have been arguing for the centrality of embodiment in cognitive

science and the philosophy of mind for a long time now. Although
there are still persistent, long-term critics of embodiment in these
disciplines, its centrality has become more widely accepted over
time. As the affiliations of the authors in this essay collection make
clear, this is true outside cognitive science and philosophy of mind
as well: The authors here are drawn from every corner of the univer-
sity. Despite the increasing acceptance of embodiment in the cog-
nitive sciences, a few new critiques have shown up, mostly driven
by social media, where anyone can opine about anything without
worrying about the annoying details (editors, peer review) that
make old-fashioned academic discourse so difficult. And so slow.
This short essay will be reviewed and edited by people with relevant
PhDs and will appear in print more than a year after the process
began. Given this, it is easy to see the appeal of vomiting one’s opin-
ions out into the ether, instantaneously and with no interference
from experts. Don’t worry, dear reader: The rest of this essay is not
a rant about the corrosive effects of social media, a conversation
better had over a beer. But I will be responding here to some views
of embodied cognition that have gotten attention on social media,
among other venues, despite being based on misunderstandings.
Unfortunately, even though academics ought to know better, social
134 Anthony Chemero

media fights really do shape academic discourse. So dispelling mis-

understandings matters. In this essay, I will point to two objections
to embodied cognition. I will argue that both objections are based
on a misconception of what embodied cognition is.
The first objection is that the replication crisis plaguing psychology
is hitting embodied cognitive science especially hard. A Twitter up-
roar about this topic culminated in a January 2019 article in the online
magazine Quartz by Olivia Goldhill. The article was titled “The repli-
cation crisis is killing psychologists’ theory of how the body influences
the mind,” and was published with the ironic page header “Loss of
Power Pose”:

But, in recent years, psychology’s replication crisis, where rec-

reations of major studies failed to produce the same results as
the originals, has shown that several crucial findings in the
field of embodied cognition fail to hold up. As a result, there
are now cynics within psychology who argue the entire field is
suspect – as well as die-hard embodied-cognition researchers
who insist their theories are sound. The replication crisis has
discredited countless individual findings within psychology
(and the sciences more broadly) but, in this case, an entire dis-
cipline is under attack. (Paragraph 2)

There is some truth to this breathless declaration. Embodied cog-

nition has always been under attack. That is how science works:
Ideas and findings are scrutinized from every angle, and many
scrutinizers are unsympathetic. In this respect, embodied cogni-
tion is no more or less under attack than other disciplines. This is
also not what Goldhill was talking about. She was talking about
Twitter, where a few Tweeters were predicting the demise of embod-
ied cognition because of the replication crisis. These tweets were
in response to five failures to replicate notable experiments. The
original, unreplicated findings were all published in top journals
and discussed in the media. Indeed, one of them – the power pose
in the ironic page header (Carney et al., 2010) – landed its principal
investigator a TED talk. In this research, Carney and colleagues re-
ported that adopting a high-power pose – standing upright, looking
forward, feet at shoulder width – for a short time changed hormone
levels and increased confidence. Other studies that have failed to
replicate include that holding a warm cup makes you judge others’
personalities as being warmer (Williams & Bargh, 2008); washing
your hands makes you feel less guilty about unethical behavior
 What Embodiment Is 135

(Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006); exposure to stereotypes about the el-

derly makes you walk more slowly (Bargh et al., 1996). (For citations
for these and other examples, see Hughes, 2018.) One such finding –
that you understand sentences about metaphorical actions more
quickly (or slowly) when they align (or conflict) with the bodily ac-
tions you must engage in order to show that you understand them
(Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002), termed the action-sentence compatibil-
ity effect – was called “a hallmark finding in Embodied Cognition”
in the publication reporting failures to replicate it (Papesh, 2015).
Similar things have been said about the others. If these are indeed
hallmark findings of embodied cognition and they are failing to
replicate, maybe embodied cognition really is in trouble.
The second misunderstanding has not gotten any press, because
as far as I know, no one has bothered to make a publishable ar-
gument for it. But it comes up frequently when I give talks, and
in anonymous referee comments on papers and grant proposals.
People often object to my empirical research because most of our
experiments are done in virtual environments. The objection is that
the very existence and immersivity of virtual environments shows
that actual environments and actual bodies don’t matter; all that
matters is what is represented in the brain. As research in the cogni-
tive sciences increasingly moves into virtual environments, and as
replicability concerns persist, perhaps embodied cognition – which
insists that real bodies and real environments matter – is in trouble.
But really, embodied cognition is not in trouble. Both objections
depend upon misunderstandings of the nature of embodiment.
There are two considerations that are fundamental to embodied
cognition: phenomenology and perception–action coupling. First,
we can see embodied cognition’s roots in phenomenology, es-
pecially that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. To see the centrality of
Merleau-Ponty, it is sufficient to look at the two more recent, his-
torical inspirations for embodied cognition: Gibsonian ecologi-
cal psychology and enactive cognitive science. Both movements
are profoundly indebted to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological
philosophy. Any reader of the literature in enactive cognitive sci-
ence will see Merleau-Ponty’s name all over it. Varela, Thompson,
and Rosch’s book The Embodied Mind (1991), the Old Testament
of enactive cognitive science, has literally dozens of mentions of
Merleau-Ponty and several detailed passages discussing his ideas.
Merleau-Ponty’s influence on ecological psychology is harder to
see: The Old Testament of ecological psychology, Gibson’s book
The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979) never mentions
136 Anthony Chemero

Merleau-Ponty. But James Gibson clearly was reading him care-

fully in the years leading up to the writing of The Ecological Ap-
proach. For one thing, Gibson taught a seminar on Merleau-Ponty’s
The Phenomenology of Perception (1945/1962) in the early 1970s. For
another, Bill Mace has spent some time digging through the Gibson
archives at Cornell University and, as he reported at the 2014 meet-
ing of the International Society of Ecological Psychology, he found
Gibson’s page-by-page notes on The Phenomenology of Perception.
In several cases those notes stray from Merleau-Ponty’s text and
develop ideas that are key to The Ecological Approach.
The key innovation in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological phi-
losophy is his development of the concept of the lived body, which
is based on a distinction made by Husserl. The lived body is not a
physical object in the world; instead it is a set of bodily skills, hab-
its, and readinesses to act that make the world appear to us in the
way that it does. The lived body opens up the world to us as full of
possibilities for action. We do not consciously entertain these pos-
sibilities, or think about them, or imagine them. Rather, given our
bodily skills, habits, and readiness to act – i.e., our lived bodies – we
are open to the possibilities to act that make up the world that we
experience. If our lived bodies were different, we would experience
the world differently. (And we do! The world is experienced differ-
ently by those with different skills, habits, and readinesses to act.) If
we did not have skills, habits, and readinesses to act, we would not
experience the world at all. These considerations are central in the
development of the enactive and ecological approaches to cognitive
science: For ecological psychologists, the theory of affordances (see
Chemero, 2009) is a theory of the world as we experience it, in terms
of what we can do; for enactive cognitive scientists, “laying down
a path in walking” (Varela et al., 1991, p. 237, cited in Chemero,
2009) is a matter of constituting an experienced world with bodily
actions.
The second fundamental part of embodied cognitive science –
the tight connection between perceiving and acting – is built into
Merleau-Ponty’s views, but it gets a fuller account in the scientific
work concerning embodied cognition. I will recount one example
here: work on vision and postural sway (Balasubramaniam et al.,
2000). When standing, humans are constantly swaying slightly, tra-
versing a few degrees at the ankles, which amounts to a few inches at
typical adult human eye height. This sway is predominantly forward
and backward, and side-to-side to a lesser extent. Balasubrmaniam
and colleagues asked why this was the case. Their hypothesis was
 What Embodiment Is 137

that front-to-back postural sway predominates because it is crucial

for visually guided action, and not because of anatomical features
of the human body (like the direction the feet point). Moving the
eyes (or a camera) forward and backward leads to visual motion
parallax; it can be shown that visual motion parallax is lawfully
related to the distance of objects that you see. Knowing how the
distances of objects change is crucial to maintaining your balance:
If the distances of objects you see is decreasing rapidly, you are
probably about to have an accident, either because you are falling
forward or walking into something. To show that front-to-back
postural sway serves this visual function, Balasubramaniam and
colleagues did a series of simple experiments. First, they had par-
ticipants face forward and aim a laser pointer at a small target. As
expected, postural sway was predominantly front-to-back. Next
they had participants face to the side and point a laser pointer at a
target to the side. In this case, postural sway is predominantly side-
to-side. That is, in both cases, participants sway predominantly
in the direction they are looking, generating motion parallax that
enables them to see the distance of objects around them. These
findings illustrate the second general point of embodied cognitive
science: Perception and action are inseparable from one another.
Perception is for action, and action is for perception.
We can see from these two fundamentals of embodied cognitive
science that the discipline is not in trouble from the replication cri-
sis. Do any of the failures to replicate above have anything to do
with the inseparability of perception and action? They do not. All
of those studies took up how features of body affect the way we
make judgments. Obviously, things that happen to our bodies af-
fect our minds. This is not what is supposed to be interesting about
all of those studies that failed to replicate. What made the studies
of interest to high impact journals and science journalists was that
they seemed to show that what happens to our bodies affects our
minds in improbable ways. The very improbability of these findings
made them unlikely to be replicable. Some (hopefully small) per-
centage of scientific studies uncover regularities that are peculiar to
the set of participants they examined, or are caused by some uncon-
trolled variable, or are just chance. The ones that are newsworthy
because they are so surprising are the ones most likely to be spuri-
ous. But – and this is the real point – none of the findings that have
infamously failed to replicate are central to embodied cognitive
science. Newsworthy, yes; hallmarks of the approach, no. In saying
this, I am echoing Andrew Wilson and Sabrina Golonka when they
138 Anthony Chemero

argue, correctly, in their 2013 Frontiers in Psychology article titled

“Embodied cognition is not what you think it is,” that warm cups
and warm feelings are not just not central to embodied cognitive
science, but are not embodied cognitive science at all.
Embodied cognition studies the necessity of the living, skilled, ready-
to-act body for the very having of experiences; no readiness-to-act
means no experience. Embodied cognition studies the close coupling,
even the inseparability, of perception and action. If findings on pos-
tural sway, visually guided actions, and coordination dynamics fail to
replicate, embodied cognitive science would genuinely be in trouble.
Central findings in these would be unlikely to fail to replicate because
they have already been replicated over and over; moreover, they are
generally not sexy enough to raise the eyebrows of those who attempt
to (fail to) replicate sexy findings.
Finally, realizing that the core of embodied cognition is the tight
coupling of perception and action makes clear that embodied cog-
nitive science and virtual environments are a natural fit for one an-
other. In virtual reality, we can actually manipulate the coupling
between perception and action. By turning up visual gain, we can
make anyone feel capable of dunking a basketball. By decoupling
the relationship between where something looks to be and where
it sounds to be, we can explore the relationship between visual
and auditory localization, each of which requires different bodily
movements (Sanches et al., 2019). In other words, in virtual envi-
ronments, we can make features of embodiment into independent
variables, manipulable by the experimenter. Far from being incon-
sistent with one another, virtual environments will be crucial in
studying the embodied mind.
Embodiment has already transformed many disciplines across
academia. In this essay, I have focused on its place in the cognitive
sciences. But because embodiment is an inherently interdisciplin-
ary, the points I make here are not limited to the cognitive sciences.
Embodiment can continue to impact the arts, humanities, and sci-
ences, and can continue to start conversations that cross boundar-
ies, especially when we are not misled about what embodiment is.

For Sources and Further Reading

Balasubramaniam, R., Riley, M., & Turvey, M. (2000). Specificity of pos-
tural sway to the demands of a precision task. Gait & Posture, 11, 12–24.
Chemero, A. (2009). Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
 What Embodiment Is 139

Hughes, B. (2018). Psychology in crisis. London: Macmillan Publishers

Ltd.
Papesh, M. H. (2015). Just out of reach: On the reliability of the action-
sentence compatibility effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Gen-
eral, 144, e116–e141.
Sanches, G., Riehm, C., & Annand, C. (2019). Bee-ing in the world:
Phenomenology, cognitive science, and interactivity in a novel insect-
tracking task. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Pro-
ceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
(pp. 1008–1013). Montreal: QB Cognitive Science Society.
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
[Link] ndfra [Link]
Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures.

action-sentence compatibility austerity policies 92

effect 135 avatars 129–131
active touch haptics 52
adaptive behavior 3 Balasubrmaniam, R. 136, 137
addiction module 23–24 Ball, P. 89
Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Baron, N. 55
Medical School 29 Basu, S. 91
affective qualities, leaders 86 beats per minute (BPM) 66
agent 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 68, 105, behavioral exposures 92–93
107, 108; ascribing agency behavioral subskills 67
42; in cognitive sciences behavior-based robotics 3, 4
40–45; embodied 40–42, 103; Bello, D. 119
subcellular 20 Bernier, M. 80
Alcor Life Extension Foundation 31 Big Bang 9
anger 71, 72 biochauvinism 42
Anthropocene 94 bioenergy 112
anti-anti-essentialists 104 biofield 111
anticipation 36–38 biogeography species and
anti-essentialists 104 subspecies 86
anxiety 75, 80 biological computers 2
archeology 16 biological embedding 92
artificial intelligence 2 biological life 35
The Atlantic (Carr) 53 biological rhythms 59; circadian
attentive bodies: aboutness 37; 61, 62; cultures 62; endogenous
anticipation 36–38; epigenetic 59–60; feedback loop 61;
process 35–38; genotype 36; individual organisms 61;
immunity enhancement 37; legacy of 61; Mayan pyramid/
impressionable notion 35–36; Stonehenge circle 62; see also
intentionality 36–38; rhythm
nutritional stress 36; political biophotons 112
transformation 38; biopolitics 86
psychosocial stress 36; racial biosocial genome 93
discrimination 35; sexual biosocial models 93
discrimination 35; Western biotic populations 20
political tradition 38 black diaspora 104, 108
142 Index

Black existence 104, 108 cultural reproduction, geopolitical

black identity 102 relations 86
body awareness 124 culture-oriented discipline 94
body-based trauma therapies 124
body economic 91 Darwin, C. 15, 97, 99
body focus: anxiety 80; athletes 79; death 10, 27; Alcor Life Extension
conscious control 78, 80; Foundation 31; ancient
dancers 79; movement effect 77; Egyptians 28; brain-dead patients
practice and performance 78; skill 29–31; carbon-based embodiment
execution 81 32; conclamation 29; forestall
body ownership illusion 129, 130 28, 31; Greeks 28, 29; Hebrews
body politics 85–90 and Christians 28–29; historical
body psychotherapy approach 124 determination 28–29; human
BPM see beats per minute (BPM) body parts replacement 31;
brain-dead patients 29–31 irreversible coma 29, 30;
brainocentrism 74, 75 NDEs 30; souls concept 28;
breathing functions 65 species-defining quest 31; time
Brooks, R. 3, 40 of 29; transcendence 28
Buxmann, P. 54 deep learning 49, 50
deep time: disembodiment
Canguilhem, G. 36 15, 18; Earthlings 14, 18;
carbohydrates 11 embodiment 15; ethereal “forms,”
carbon-based embodiment 32 Plato’s concept 15; fossil fuel
Carey, Susan 41 resources 14; geology practice 17;
Carney, D. R. 134 grammer of animacy 18; Land
Carr, Nicholas 53 Ethic 18; mineral resources 14;
Carter, Sue 118, 120 nature worship 15; neo-Lyellian
cellular life 24, 25 geology 16; physical artifacts 14;
central dogma, molecular biology 21 pre-Platonic kinship 18; rock record
Chinese nobles, afterlife 28 17; self-replicating organisms 17;
chromatin system 93 time-and place-bound science 14;
circadian rhythm 61, 62 Victorian culture 15
cognition 2, 4; mental states 72 Dennett, Daniel 41
cold cognition 72 deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA): fibers
colonialism 87, 89 93; methylation 92; sequencing
comet 10 21–22
computational brain 2 depression 75
computational–representational Descartes 1–2, 85
models 4 Descent of man (Darwin) 16
computer-assisted intelligence 31 diaspora: anti-anti-essentialists 104;
conscious control 78, 80 anti-essentialists 104; Black
content-coherent rules 20 existence 104, 108; black identity
conversational gesture 71 102; communities 105; cultural
cooperation 21, 24 patterning 102; embodied agents
Copernican revolution 15 103; embodied orientations 102;
cosmic events 12 emotion 103–104; essentialist
cost-effective self-help remedy 116 accounts 104; expressive agency
counterbalancing modules 102; incarnated intentionality
23–24, 26 102, 104; international beige 106;
Csibra, G. 42 Merleau-Ponty theory limitations
cultural process 69 106–108; ontology of 105–106;
 Index 143

situational demands 103; rhythmic process 59; volunteers

synthesizing agency 104 scores 60
different bodies 86–87 emission 112
digital natives 54 emitting electromagnetic fields
digitization 51 (EMF) 115
dis-alienation 107 emotions 103–104; anger 71, 72;
disembodiment 15, 18 anxiety 75; brainocentrism 74, 75;
disgust 71 cognitive mental states 72; cold
drugs development 21 cognition 72; components 72–73;
dynamic engagements: attentive conversational gesture 71;
bodies 35–38; embodied agents depression 75; disgust 71;
(see embodied agents); hand embarrassment 71; fear 71;
movements (see gestures); lived intelligence 73; jealousy 71; joy 71;
bodies 44–45; living bodies 40, levels and timescales 73;
42–44; reading 51–55 physiological accounts 74;
dynamic self-directed learning 22 resilience 121; sadness 71;
dynamic system 3 stress 75
empathy 131
Earth cycles 12 enactivism 44
Earthlings 14, 18 entrainment 66
Eastern Qi-related practices and Epidemiology and People’s Health
therapies 113–115 (Krieger) 92
The Ecological Approach to Visual epigenetics 21, 91; and embodiment
Perception (Gibson) 43, 135–136 92–93; process 35–38; toxic times
ecological psychology 135 93–95
Egyptian royalty and nobility, Ericsson, Anders 79, 80
afterlife 28 error-based mutations 21
electrical energy 112 error correction mechanisms 68
electromagnetic energy 11 essentialist accounts 104
embarrassment 71 evolutionary fitness 97
embodied agents: ascribing evolutionary innovations 25
agency 42; biochauvinism 42; exaptation 24
core cognitions 42; External Qi Therapy 115
functional requirements 41;
intentionality 42; intentional Fanon, Frantz 107, 108
stance 41; knowledge and fear 71
goals 40; ontology 41; feminist politics 86
substantial entity 41 forestall death 28, 31
embodied cognition theory 134, Foucault, Michel 86
135; VR technology 128, 130–131
The Embodied Mind 40, 135 Gaga 78
embodied time: biotic mass Gardens of Delight 28
phenomena (see biological gender inequality 95
rhythms); chrono-medicine 63; gene expression 21
Earth’s axis 59; endogenous gene therapy 22
rhythms 59; global warming 62; genetics 16; codes 26;
human history 61; human power counterregulation 23;
62; light exposure 63; mental manipulation 22
health issues 63; One Health for genomic analysis 21
humans 63; owls and larks 63; genomic parasitism 20, 23, 25
planet’s deep rhythmicity 59, 60; geology 14, 17
144 Index

Gergely, G. 42 human body parts replacement 31

Gerlach, J. 54 human exceptionalism 14
gestures: children 48; cutting- human existence 10
edge thoughts 50; deep learning human flows 88
49, 50; education components human superiority 13
48; flexible learning 49; hand “humans” vs. “nature” 13
47; iconic 48; lasting learning
49, 50; learning effects 47; iconic gestures 48
manipulatives 49; manual imagination 38
modality 50; mathematical immersive virtual environments
equivalence problem 47, 48; (IVE) 129
mouth 47; multi-modal Immortality Institute 31
production 47; open-ended immune systems 25
question 49; socio-economic immunity enhancement 37
homes 49; teaching tool 48–49; Impressionable Biologies 91
transitional state 46; verbal incarnated intentionality 102
description 47 indigenous populations 89
Gibson, James 43, 135, 136 individual embodied
global capitalism 87 knowledge 123
global warming 62 individual Fittest Types 25
Gogh, Vincent van 77 infection process 24
Goldhill, Olivia 134 information processing 1
Golonka, Sabrina 137 In Memoriam (Tennyson) 15–16
grammer of animacy 18 insect-level intelligence 3
group-behavioral motifs 22, 24 integration process 24
group identity 22–23, 24, 25 intelligent behavior 2
Guss-West, C. 79 intelligent human capacities 3
intentionality 36–38, 42
hammer gestures 47–48 interactive multimodal
hand gesture 47 sensory-motor 123
haptic dissonance 54 Irigaray, Luce 86
Harvard Health 114 irreversible coma 29, 30
healing 123–125 Islamic tradition, afterlife 28
health disparities 87 The Isles of the Blest 28
heart rate variability isochronic rhythm 66, 68
(HRV) 112 IVE see immersive virtual
Hebrew River of Immortality 28 environments (IVE)
hegemonic human exceptionalism 1
Hertzman, Clyde 92 James, William 72
heterochronic rhythm 66 jealousy 71
Hill, D. M. 80 Johrei 115
Hindu Pool of Youth 28 joy 71
Hippocratic treatise 91
Hobbesian political philosophy 89 Kerr, F. 119
Horaisan 28 Ki 111
host immune system 23 Kimmerer, Robin Wall 18
Huangdi Neijing 113 Kindle display 54
human bodies: different bodies knowledge production 4
86–87; located bodies 87–88; Krieger, N. 92
sensuous bodies 85–86; viscous Kuzawa, C. W. 36–37
bodies 88–90 Kuzmičová, A. 51
 Index 145

Landecker, H. 36 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 102–103,

The Land of Living Men 28 105–108, 135
Langer, S. K. 27 microbiome 11
language signs/codes 20 microfossils 10
Lappé, M. 36 Milky Way Galaxy 9, 12
lasting learning 49, 50 mineral resources 14
learning effects 47 momentary event 106
Leopold, Aldo 18 monogamous marriage 99
Lewthwaite, R. 78 Morhenn, V. B. 119
life: Big Bang 9; cellular life 24, mouth gesture 47
25; content-coherent rules movement-based contemplative
20; cooperation 21; degree of practices 124
continuity 11; DNA sequencing Müller, R. 93
21–22; drugs development 21; Munzert, J. 81
Earth cycles 12; Earth-like musical behavioral
characteristics 9–10; genetic adaptations 70
parasites 20; human body
essence 12; human existence 10; nanobots 31
human superiority 13; “humans” natural healing 111, 117
vs. “nature” 13; individual natural killer cells 120
characteristics 11; language natural life span 31
signs/codes 20; life spans 10, 13; natural selection 97
microfossils 10; Milky Way Galaxy nature-oriented discipline 94
9, 12; not selfishness 21; planetary near death experiences
systems 9; population-based (NDEs) 30
interactions 20; RNA 20 (see also neuroscience 4, 16
ribonucleic acid (RNA)); “self” vs. New Caledonian crows 4
“other” 13; subcellular agents 20; Newtonian revolution 15
Sunlight 11; time and space Nicholson, D. J. 4
history 13; viruses 20, 23–24; noncoding deoxyribonucleic acid
water 11 (DNA) 21
lipids 11 nuclear fusion 11
Li, Q. 119 nucleic acids 11
lived bodies 44–45 nutritional stress 36
living bodies: agent concept 40;
cognitive criteria 43; cognitive Oh, S. Y. 130
sciences 40, 43, 44; dispersed one gene-one protein hypothesis 21
phenomena 43; intentional urge organic compounds 11
42–43; multicellular organizations The Origin of Concepts
43, 44 (Carey) 41
located bodies 87–88 Origin of Species (Darwin) 16
Lorde, Audre 106 Ortega, F. 71, 73
Lyell, Charles 15, 16 oxytocin, “love hormone”:
breastfeeding 118–119; massage
manual modality 50 therapy 118–119; natural killer
Marcus, G. 1–2, 4 cells 120; non-massage period
massage therapy 118–119 119; physical health 120; pressure
Massey, D. 87 receptors 120; pressure-sensitive
Maurer, H. 81 mechanisms 120; social cognition
Meaney, Michael 92 119, 120; touch 118; vagal activity
Meloni, M. 35 120; vagus nerve 120
146 Index

page-by-page progress 54 textured 54; vision and touch

paper vs. screen reading 52 53–54
Peck, T. C. 130 Reiki 115
Peh, S. 81 religious belief system 28, 30
perception–action coupling 3, 135 repair 25
phenomenology 44, 135 replication 24, 25
The Phenomenology of Perception representational model 2, 3
(Merleau-Ponty) 136 representation-heavy abilities 2, 3
Plato 29 reproductive traits 97
political life 35 retrotransposons 21
population-based interactions 20 rhythm: auditory analogs 69;
population biology 86 behavioral subskills 67; BPM 66;
post-genomic genome 93 breathing functions 65; cultural
posttraumatic stress disorder process 69; deep interactions 66;
(PTSD) 121 energy transfer 66; entrainment
power-geometries 87–89 66; erochronic 66; error correction
Pranic Healing 115 mechanisms 68; evolutionary
pre-Platonic kinship 18 process 67; flow notion 65; human
pressure-sensitive mechanisms 120 behaviors 65; interpersonal
Principles of Geology (Lyell) coordination 68; isochronic 66,
15, 16 68; metronomes 66; musical
prosocial behaviors 128, 131 behavioral adaptations 70; music
proteins 11 and context qualities 68; natural
psycho-physiological mechanisms 115 systems 65; passive listening
psychosocial stress 36 67; sensorimotor coordination
pulsed electromagnetic fields 68; social functions 70; speech
(PEMF) 115 patterns 68; tailored behavioral
putative energy 111, 112 solutions 67; verbal instruction
pyramids 28 69; vocal learning 67
ribonucleic acid (RNA) 20;
Qi 111, 113–115 biological selection 22; group
Qigong 113 identity 22–23; heterogeneity
Quartz (Goldhill) 134 selection 23; multi-base sequences
quasi-species consortia 23–25 22; parasites 22; quasi-species
consortia 23; replication 24;
racial discrimination 35 social science perspective 24–25;
racial segregation 88 stem loop variations 23, 25
random genetic variations 21 ribosome 25
Rapaport, M. H. 19 Rosch, E. 40, 135
reading: active touch haptics 52;
digital natives 54; digital screen sadness 71
device 51; digitization 51; haptic The Scientific Conquest of Death 31
dissonance 54; Kindle display 54; screen inferiority 53, 55
mode 53; “old” technologies 51; self-identity 22
page-by-page progress 54; paper self/non-self-differentiation 22
vs. screen reading 52; P(rint) self-reflection 38
vs. E(lectronic) 52–53; screen self-replicating organisms 17
inferiority 53, 55; sensorimotor sensorimotor contingencies 53, 54
contingencies 53, 54; substrate sensory perception 85; see also
materiality 52; tangibility 54, 55; human bodies
 Index 147

sensuous bodies 85–86 transcutaneous electrical nerve

sexual conflict 97, 98 stimulation (TENS) 114
sexual discrimination 35 transformativity 107
sexual segregation 88 translation 25
sexual selection 97 transposons 21
The Shallowing Hypothesis 53 traumatic embodied cognitions:
Sister Outsider (Lorde) 106 behavioral responses 122;
social cognition 119, 120, 130 biological experiences 122;
social entrainment 67 emotional resilience 121; events
social epidemiology research 92 122; healing 123–125; individual
social interactions 20 embodied knowledge 123;
social isolation 91 lifespan 121; normal homeostatic
social life 35 states 122; physiologic responses
social media 133 122; PTSD 121
social theory 86, 89 Triggering the Intentional
socio-economic homes 49 Stance 41
socio-spatial boundaries 87 Tsuji, S. 119
Solar System 10, 12
souls concept 28 The Undead (Teresi) 28
species-defining quest 31 unequivocal determination 31
Stoate, I. 79 Universe 9–13
stress 75 US Food and Drug Administration
Stuckler, D. 91 (FDA) 115, 116
Sunlight 11
Sweet, Elizabeth 37 van der Kolk, B. A. 122
Varela, F. J. 40, 135
tai chi 113–114 verbal description 47
Tao, J. 114 veritable energy 111
teaching tool 48–49 Victorian culture 15
Tennyson, Alfred 15–16 Vidal, F. 71, 73
Teresi, D. 28 virosphere 24
Thayer, Z. M. 36 Virtual Reality Perspective Taking
Thompson, E. 40, 135 (VRPT) 128, 131, 132
Thomson, Myron 100 virtual reality (VR) technology
Tomko, Michael 15–16 138; embodied cognition theory
touch 118 128, 130–131; movements
toxic times: Anthropocene 94; and behaviors 128; perceptual
culture-oriented discipline input 127; physical bodies 127;
94; DNA segregation 93; prosocial behaviors 128; virtual
environmental exposures 95; embodiment 129–130; VRPT 128
gender inequality 95; nature- viruses 20; capsid-encoding 24;
oriented discipline 94; policy genetic codes 23–24; social
implications 94; racialized science perspective 25
structures 94; social gradients 94 viscous bodies 88–90
transcendence death 28 visuomotor-synchrony 129–130
transcranial magnetic stimulation vital energy: bioenergy 112;
(TMS) 115 biophotons 112; Eastern Qi-related
transcription 25 practices and therapies 113–115;
transcutaneous cupoint electrical emission 112; health and healing
stimulation (TAES) 114 112–113; Ki 111; natural healing
148 Index

strength 111; prana 111; putative counter-selection pressure 100;

111, 112; Qi 111, 113–115; evolutionary fitness 97;
reception 112; veritable 111; evolutionary sorting 96;
Western energy medical devices institutionalized patriarchy 98;
and therapies 115–116 lifespan 96, 98, 100; monogamous
vocal learning 67 marriage 99; natural selection 97;
vulnerable bodies 93–95 political orders 96; reproductive
traits 97; selection dynamics 99;
Waddington, C. H. 92 sexual conflict 97, 98; sexual
Wallace, A. R. 97, 99 selection 97; social-cultural
Wastell, D. G. 94 transmission 97; traits within-
White, S. J. 94 populations 98; within-sex
Wilson, Andrew 137 selection 98
Wolf, M. 53 wound healing 113
women’s reproductive Wulf, G. 77, 78, 79
rights: adaptations 97;
autonomy 99–100; Zhao, M. 113