Hi hi SuperForest
I just came across another interesting brain-related article on NewScientist.com – this time about how your body affects your thinking:
Now research suggests that our bodies and their relationship with the environment govern even our most abstract thoughts. This includes thinking up random numbers or deciding whether to recount positive or negative experiences.
To probe whether movements can drive thought, Daniel Casasanto of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, turned to the metaphors that we use to speak of our moods. “We can hardly help mapping them onto a vertical, spatial schema, with the good end ‘up’ and the bad end ‘down’,” says Casasanto. “We talk of being high on life, or our mood taking an upswing, or feeling down in the dumps.”
The results also led to a deeper question: does physical movement have the power to change not just the speed at which people talk, but also what they choose to talk – or even think – about? Casasanto’s next experiment found that it does.
As the students were moving the marbles either up or down, they were asked neutral questions, such as “tell me what happened yesterday”. In this task, the subjects were more likely to talk of positive happenings when they were moving marbles upwards, and narrate negative stories when moving marbles downwards.
This raises a host of cool questions…
….can we make ourselves feel more positive by using our bodies in a “positive” way (could I make a ‘desk toy’ that required me to push marbles upward when I’m beginning to feel down? should you do jumping jacks before going into an interview? Is the bottom bunk really the better option after all, since you get ‘up’ to start your positive morning rather than ‘down’ from the top bunk?!;)
…. how much of this relies on language (moods being “up” or “down” ?) – do other languages have other norms?
…. and what of ROBOTS?! does this mean to be truly AI a robot would need to have a body? no brains in jars?
Thoughts, thoughts…
Love
P
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