In the New York Times, Edinburgh philosopher Andy Clark has a nice essay on embodied cognition. If you’re familiar with his book Natural Born Cyborgs, you’ll already know the outlines of his argument; but it includes this update:

Most of us gesture (some of us more wildly than others) when we talk. For many years, it was assumed that this bodily action served at best some expressive purpose, perhaps one of emphasis or illustration. Psychologists and linguists such as Susan Goldin-Meadow and David McNeill have lately questioned this assumption, suspecting that the bodily motions may themselves be playing some kind of active role in our thought process. In experiments where the active use of gesture is inhibited, subjects show decreased performance on various kinds of mental tasks. Now whatever is going on in these cases, the brain is obviously deeply implicated! No one thinks that the physical handwavings are all by themselves the repositories of thoughts or reasoning. But it may be that they are contributing to the thinking and reasoning, perhaps by lessening or otherwise altering the tasks that the brain must perform, and thus helping us to move our own thinking along.

It is noteworthy, for example, that the use of spontaneous gesture increases when we are actively thinking a problem through, rather than simply rehearsing a known solution. There may be more to so-called “handwaving” than meets the eye.

I find this interesting because a lot of my thinking has an embodied, moving component to it. I do a lot of walking and pacing when I think; it got in the way of writing until I redesigned my home office to have a standing desk/writing space. I also spell with my hands: when I’m writing a long word (or telling someone how to spell it), I don’t remember its spelling as a series of letters in my mind’s eye, but as patterns that my fingers recall.

Not long ago, I came across an ancient expression of the idea that “bodily motions… [play] some kind of active role in our thought process:” the Latin phrase solvitur ambulando, or “it is solved by walking.” Taking a walk, it suggests, can help you think through problems. I’ve seen it attributed to Diogenes, Ambrose, Jerome, and others, but I like to think that no matter who said it first, they probably all used the idea. Embodied cognition, in other words, was familiar to ancient philosophers.

Clark’s piece also suggests a second insight. He makes the argument that information technologies are playing a role similar to canes for the blind, or pen and paper for writers: namely, they’ve becoming prosthetics and extensions of our minds, in much the same way that our biological bodies are part of our minds and mental processes. A commenter responded,

Give me your blackberry. Now it is mine. Is it no longer part of your brain/body, but part of mine? Or, keep it but take the batteries out. Has your brain stopped fully functioning? How about I throw it off a cliff? Do you die?

Okay, point taken. Even if I “think” with a word processor, I don’t lose the power of speech when I turn of Ecto or Word. But I think the answer to this challenge is that “embodiment” is not a noun, but a verb: it’s not a property that describes a certain combination of technologies and minds, but rather the active use of the former by the latter– or as Clark would put it, the incorporation of the former into the latter.