Embodied Cognition (Lakoff Reading)

Embodied Cognition, in Lakoff's reading, is the thesis that mind is not separable from body — that cognition is constituted by and implemented in the neural circuits of a specific kind of body interacting with a specific kind of environment. The claim is stronger than the observation that bodies house minds. It is that the specific architecture of human cognition — the categories we can form, the reasoning patterns we can follow, the abstract domains we can comprehend — is shaped at its root by the sensorimotor interactions available to human bodies. Image schemas derived from bodily experience structure abstract thought. Conceptual metaphors ground abstract domains in concrete bodily interactions. The neural circuits originally evolved for motor control and sensory processing are recruited for abstract cognition through a process of metaphorical mapping. On this view, a disembodied system is not a mind with a missing body; it is something categorically different, processing the linguistic surface of embodied thought without the grounding that