"How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body," said Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam. "We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what's going on."And the communication, naturally, goes both ways. The body physically and literally interprets concepts that engage the brain:
You say a person is warm and likable, as opposed to cold and standoffish? In one recent study at Yale, researchers divided 41 college students into two groups and casually asked the members of Group A to hold a cup of hot coffee, those in Group B to hold iced coffee. The students were then ushered into a testing room and asked to evaluate the personality of an imaginary individual based on a packet of information. Students who had recently been cradling the warm beverage were far likelier to judge the fictitious character as warm and friendly than were those who had held the iced coffee.And it also works the other way, with the physical body affecting cognition:
To learn how to rotate an object mentally, first try a pantomime. "If you encourage kids to do the rotation movement with their hands, that helps them subsequently do it in their heads," said Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago, "whereas watching others do it isn't enough."More on embodied cognition here and here
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