Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. For a long

time people very naturally assumed that there was the mind, the sort of disembodied essence of what

we were as people and where the thinking happened, and then there was the body and the mind

talked to the body. There weren't part of the same thing. There were two separate entities

that could somehow communicate. Famously, of course, the philosopher and scientist René

Descartes really formalized this idea of mind, body, dualism. You can read a little bit about that

in my book The Big Picture where I try to bring to the historical foreground the figure of

Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia who criticized Descartes for what we would now call the interaction

problem. How in the world is this disembodied mind supposed to be talking to our actual body?

Of course, with the progress of science and our understanding of how neurons in the brain work,

we see increasingly the mind is just a reflection of what the brain is doing. These days most

working neuroscientists are not dualists when it comes to the mind and the brain, they study the

brain to think about how the mind is working. In fact, you can go farther than that. If the brain

is where thinking happens, what about the rest of the body? There are nerves in the rest of the body.

In fact, there are cells and organs and so forth that clearly influence what's going on in the

brain. Might it not be more appropriate to think of the whole body as doing cognition in some sense?

That's the thesis of a movement in neuroscience called embodied cognition. The idea that where we

are thinking includes our whole bodies, not just the little brain inside our skull. There's even

something called embedded cognition, which if I understand it correctly goes and says, actually,

it's the whole world where we start doing our thinking. When you're writing on a notepad,

that notepad should be counted as part of your cognitive apparatus just like your brain.

So I'm not so sure about that, but the embodied cognition at least makes a lot of sense. So today's

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