There is more to embodied cognition than that neurocogntion happens within and inseparably from the body. We are bodies. And our bodies are of the world, one might say they are the world, the only world we can comprehend (com- ‘together’ + prehendere ‘grasp’). That is simple enough. But what kind of embodied beings are we with what kind of embodied experience?
How we exist within our bodies… how we hold our physical form… how we position ourselves in relation to the world… how we inhabit our extended selves… All of this and more determines our way of being, what we perceive, think, and do, what we can imagine. It is through our bodies that we manage our lived reality. And it is through our bodies that we are managed by the forces and patterns of society and environment, the affordances of structured existence forming our habitus and worldview. Maybe epigenetically carried across generations and centuries.
We are spiders in webs of our own making but webs we don’t so much see as through which we perceive, as if strands connecting us to the world to such an extent that it is unclear who is the puppet and who the puppetmaster. Social constructivism points toward a greater truth of webbed realism, of what we sense and know in our entanglement. As we are embodied, so we are embedded. Our identities extend into the world, which means the other extends back into us. One part shifts and the rest follows.
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The World Shifts When a Black Widow Squats
by Ed Yong
“The widow’s abilities are part of a concept called “embodied cognition,” which argues that a creature’s ability to sense and think involves its entire body, not just its brain and sense organs. Octopus arms, for example, can grab and manipulate food without ever calling on the central brain. Female crickets can start turning toward the sound of a male using only the ears and neurons in their legs, well before their central nervous system even has a chance to process the noise. In the case of the black widow, the information provided by the sense organs in the legs depends on the position of the entire animal.
“Earlier, I described this as a postural squint. That’s close, but the analogy isn’t quite right, since squinting helps us focus on particular parts of space. Here, the spider is focusing on different parts of information space. It’s as if a human could focus on red colors by squatting, or single out high-pitched sounds by going into downward dog (or downward spider).
“The ability to sense vibrations that move through solid surfaces, as distinct from sounds that travel through air, is “an often overlooked aspect of animal communication,” says Beth Mortimer from the University of Oxford, who studies it in creatures from elephants to spiders. It’s likely, then, that the widow’s ability to control perception through posture “almost certainly [exists in] other spiders and web types, too, and other arthropods, including insects, that detect vibrations along surfaces through their legs.” Scientists just need to tune in.”
Marmalade 