4
Mother Nature’s gestural design is ultimately founded in interrelationships between
the body, its actions, and cognition now held as normative in contemporary theories of
cognition. Research from a vast collection of fields, including psychology, cognitive science,
robotics, linguistics and philosophy has increasingly concluded that the body is the basis for
much – by some accounts perhaps all – of the social, emotional and conceptual processing
that humans do – even the most abstract conceptual thinking. These accounts of
“embodied” or “grounded” cognition suggest that, as a person has an experience, the brain
does three things: (a) captures all the information about that experience from the person’s
motor (e.g. movement, proprioception), perceptual (e.g. visual, auditory) and introspective
(e.g. affect, mental state) systems; then (b) integrates that information into a multimodal
representation; and then (c) stores that representation in her memory. 1
Later, when she needs to represent to herself some part of that experience, a person’s
brain reactivates all of those previously stored multimodal representations, simulating the
perceptions, actions and introspections the brain experienced before. As far as Mother
Nature’s design is concerned, most suggestive about this model is that all of that
multimodal information is bundled together into one mass and that a single trigger
activates all the material (sensory, perceptual, motor, emotional) stored in that one
multimodal representation.
1 PM Niedenthal, LW Barsalou, P Winkielman, S Krauth-Gruber, and F Ric,
‘Embodiment in Attitudes, Social Perception and Emotion’ in Personality and Social
Psychology Review Vol. 9, No. 3, (2005 ) pp. 184-211; LW Barsalou, ‘Grounded
Cognition’ in Annual Review of Psychology 2008 Vol. 59, pp. 617-45.