Flicking through the NYT today, I heard about embodied cognition as a field of scientific study. There’s a lot about it on the web, but the NYT explanation for beginners seems pretty good:

… when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time.

As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore.

That’s fascinating. It tells me a lot about my body, body memory, and the words we use for movement. We understand language, ideas, the world in part through our physical bodies and the movement of our bodies. We yield and open to each other, to concepts, to conversation. It’s not just a question of body language being independent of mind, something that happens when you aren’t looking. It is that movement of the body is an integral part of feeling, speaking and apprehending language and, further, the world itself.

The body’s movement is language. Movement is understanding. Understanding arises in and from movement. The presence and possibility of such bodies is awe-some. Understanding, speaking, being in the world is literally a sustained sequence of movement: a dance. When dancers talk about pedestrian movement, we often mean movement that originates in every day life, that doesn’t necessarily belong to a particulary movement vocabulary. Embodied cognition makes that even more true.

But what about disability? What if your body doesn’t or cannot do what researchers would “expect.” Does that mean that you don’t understand in the same way or cannot process or develop moral cognition? Not being a specialist in the field, I don’t have access to most of the research, but the little available on the web was provocative. Michael Anderson lays out the issues:

… first of all, that no researcher in, or theorist of, embodied cognition has ever suggested that physical handicaps imply cognitive deficits. Nor, if there were differences in the conceptual contents or structures of differently abled individuals, would one expect them to be detectable at the level of the linguistic mastery displayed in conversational interaction (the usual evidence offered by those who object to EC along these lines).** Language and linguistically available concepts are highly abstract phenomena; one would therefore expect the criteria for participation in a linguistic community to be likewise somewhat abstract. Thus, the concept of ‘walking’, in so far as it is logically and semantically related to various concepts of movement, and given that examples of walking exist in, and can be easily seen in the environment, ought to be easily acquirable by an individual who cannot, and who perhaps never could, walk. The concept can be placed in a logical and semantic network which is on the whole grounded, even given that there is no specific experience of walking which directly grounds the concept. Everyone is able to understand things which they have not directly experienced, through imagination, analogy, demonstration, and testimony; the physically disabled are in this regard no different.

** (is to a footnote: “assessments of children with spinal muscular atrophy bear this out”)

I support his conclusion, but not, of course, his language. Walking, it turns out, is less about the planting of one foot in front of the other than the experience and idea of moving through space at a certain time. Granted what you see might be slightly different if you are sitting in a wheelchair from what you would see at, say, a height of 6″ 2′. But then, it would also be different if you were 5″ 4′. And no one would argue that people of “only” average height are unable to develop effective cognitive strategies.

So, yes. It comes down to the act of moving your body. Interesting to find that there is a scientific way of expressing what I thought was only an artist’s take on movement (link here is to an earlier post in bfp’s rethinking walking series). We who move through the world experience the world differently, travel differently, but engage in the same moral and intellectual process of cognition as we go.

I also rather liked the disability rights perspective here as articulated by Jackie Leach Scully (I so liked much of what I could get from the google books clip that I have ordered the book. It seems to put together other thinkers that I am familiar with in oh-so productive ways. hooray!). The excerpts are full of paragraphs like this:

Suppose it really is the case that preflective moral cognition is mediated through sensorimotor pathways mediated by the body interacting with the environment, and that this happens differently when anomalous interactions are involved. It would still be true that adaptions of the environment are a distinctly formative of moral cognition as morphologies, movements or perceptions themselves. It certainly cannot lead to the essentialist conclusion that there is a “disability brain” or “disability mind” that is unlike, or should be treated as unlike, the brains of “normal people.”

I am going to go out on a limb for a second. From studying the history of race and bad evolutionary racial “science” in the early twentieth century, I am wary to make any kind of argument about the connection between brain and disability. Remember the awful stuff about cranium size and race as a justification for why African-Americans could never attain full citizenship. Actually, even now if you do a google search on cranium size and race, you get a series of pretty nasty links, including one to a David Duke site. No link love from me, here.

But I also feel awkward about saying that all brains are the same. These days, we happily accept the idea that all minds don’t work the same way, and we value (except perhaps in grade school) the things different minds do. If we believe that disability is a social construct, made up in part of the negative judgments we impose out of fear and goodness knows what else, what would happen if we admit that brains — like minds and bodies — work differently, that such difference is a social benefit of the highest order, and that we aren’t so filled with fear that we have to denigrate people because their brains are different and work differently? Would difference matter in an objective sense?

What could difference could create? What would we have to set aside in order to see disability brains and minds as powerful creative forces, equal to those of non-disabled people? What if we explicitly worked on movement and cognition, if we could take classes in refining movement with regard to cognition and vice versa? Encouraged people to move and think?  What if dancers were critical to a new society?

Wheelie spins and leaves to go to studio.  I have work to do!

x-posted at my blog here.