Embodied Theories

Embodied Theories sets out to explore the various ways in which a therapist can be a living expression, or embodiment, of his or her chosen theoretical approach.

This book was carried out with the intention of showing the peculiarities of the scientific paradigm of Embodied Cognition (EC) (Gallese, 2005), by highlighting its application in practice (Sousa, 2010), especially in the world of education. The new perspective proves to be significant, mainly due to the importance of learning about brain development in the Evolutionary Age, understanding children and adolescents' behaviors and preventing possible problems at an early age. Moreover, it proves to be significant for highlighting the particular impact that social environment and cultural climate have on learning, as well as on the brain's ability to generate new neurons into older age, along with its changeability (concept of plasticity understood as modeling of the morphology and the function of neural networks mainly induced by experience). These key aspects have led to a multi-perspective view of the human minds' functioning.

Draws on recent cognitive and neuroscientific research and wide-ranging works from antiquity to the present to explore the embodied dimension of reading literary narrative.

The project of naturalizing human consciousness/experience has made great technical strides (e.g., in mapping areas of brain activity), but has been hampered in many cases by its uncritical reliance on a dualistic “Cartesian” paradigm (though as some of the authors in the collection point out, assumptions drawn from Plato and from Kant also play a role). The present volume proposes a version of naturalism in aesthetics drawn from American pragmatism (above all from Dewey, but also from James and Peirce)—one primed from the start to see human beings not only as embodied, but as inseparable from the environment they interact with—and provides a forum for authors from diverse disciplines to address specific scientific and philosophical issues within the anti-dualistic framework considering aesthetic experience as a process of embodied meaning-making. Cross-disciplinary contributions come from leading researchers including Mark Johnson, Jim Garrison, Daniel D. Hutto, John T. Haworth, Luca F. Ticini, Beatriz Calvo-Merino. The volume covers pragmatist aesthetics, neuroaesthetics, enactive cognitive science, literary studies, psychology of aesthetics, art and design, sociology.

From public health luminary Nancy Krieger comes a revolutionary way of addressing health justice and the embodied truths of lived experience. Since the 1700s, fierce debates in medicine and public health have centered around whether sources of ill health can be attributed to either the individual or the surrounding body politic. But what if instead health researchers measure--and policies address--how people biologically embody their societal and ecological context? Ecosocial Theory, Embodied Truths, and the People's Health represents a daring new foray into analyzing how population patterns of health reveal the intersections of lived experience and biology in historical context. Expanding on Nancy Krieger's original ecosocial theory of disease distribution, this volume lays new theoretical groundwork about embodiment and health justice through concrete and novel examples involving pathways such as workplace discrimination, relationship abuse, Jim Crow, police violence, pesticides, fracking, green space, and climate change. It offers a crucial counterargument to dominant biomedical and public health narratives attributing causality to either innate biology or decontextualized health behaviors and provides a key step forward towards understanding and addressing the structural drivers of health inequities and health justice. Bridging insights from politics, history, sociology, ecology, biology, and public health, Ecosocial Theory, Embodied Truths, and the People's Health presents a bold new framework to transform biomedical and population health thinking, practice, and policies and to advance health equity across a deeply threatened planet.

This text explores the theory of embodied cognition, which suggests that human cognition is "grounded" in the neural pathways linked to bodily sensation.

We interact with our environment through perception and action. Perception is based on sensory components while actions are based on motor components. It is commonly accepted that these sensorimotor components constitute the foundation of knowledge (i.e., percepts and concepts), action and emotion. However, whether or not these components remain part of knowledge, action and emotion is still being debated (see Glenberg, Witt, & Metcalfe, 2013). According to the classical symbolic/abstracted approach of cognition, cognitive processes operate on symbols that are abstracted from these components. Reversely, embodied cognition theory states that knowledge, action and emotion remain grounded in these sensorimotor components (see Wilson, 2002). This embodiment revolution assumes that the interactions between present and absent —but simulated in memory— sensory-motor components determine the emergence of knowledge, action and emotion (Barsalou, 2008). It also implies that perception, memory (in particular conceptual knowledge), action and emotion interact together in a closer way that previously thought (e.g. Riou, Lesourd, Brunel & Versace, 2011; Corveleyn, Lopez-Moliner & Coello, 2012; Vermeulen et al., 2013). Despite the accumulation of empirical evidence showing that perception, memory, action and emotion interact together, less is known about the dynamics of these interactions. It remains to precise the temporal dynamic (when these interactions occur), the neural underlying networks, and the factors that modulate these interactions. The present research topic focuses on the dynamic relationship between present and absent sensorimotor components across perception, memory, action and emotion in a grounded cognition perspective. This research topic aims 1) to demonstrate the validity of the embodied cognition theories 2) to highlight the dynamics of emergence of conceptual knowledge, action and emotion 3) to provide a comprehensive state-of-the-art theoretical explanation and/or models.

An international selection of authors provide a detailed exploration of Gestalt as a somatic and relational practice. Covering many aspects of this relationship, the chapters include discussion of our relationships with nature, the role of Eros, energy in Taoism, affect and methods of practice. Both theoretical and practical application of an embodied relational approach to GT are presented, and many chapters include case studies from the contributors’ own work. The overall view of the book is that our bodies are inextricably embedded and co-creating with the environment, and that we know our body and the world through our embodiment.