Fifty years ago cognitive science was born. It was an attempt to figure out what how the human mind works. The model they started with was the ”informationprocessing ”paradigm. The mind is like a computer. The senses record information , the brain process that information according to logical rules and finally give orders to our motorsystem to execute what the brain has processed. It was said that computers would become as intelligent as us. It’s not only in cognitive psycology this metaphor has influenced how we think of what our mind is. Lay people talk about ”information” that comes in to our head.
But the model got into serious trouble. Computers only manipulate symbols: how do they know the meaning of the symbols ?
In that paradigm the bodily experiences was of no importance at all.During the last decades a new paradigm arised called Embodied cognition. Instead of describing thinking as abstract, logical, unemotionally and rational (there are growing empirical evidence from neuroscience, neuropsychology, antropology, linguistic etc.) that our bodies have absolutely everything to do with our minds – something that philosophers like Dewey and Merleau-Ponty alredy has told us.
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