{"id":151,"date":"2012-09-10T15:42:05","date_gmt":"2012-09-10T15:42:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/?p=276"},"modified":"2022-01-04T19:50:31","modified_gmt":"2022-01-04T19:50:31","slug":"why-you-are-not-just-your-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/2012\/09\/10\/why-you-are-not-just-your-brain\/","title":{"rendered":"Why You Are Not Just Your Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" In the introduction to their 1991 book The Embodied Mind<\/em>, Francisco Varela<\/span><\/a>, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch noted that as of that writing, the cognitive sciences had little to say about what it means to be human in the concrete situations of everyday life. This criticism was aimed directly at the prevailing paradigm<\/span><\/a>, according to which the human brain worked somewhat like a computer<\/span><\/a>, with input, information processing, symbolic representation, output, and so on.<\/p>\n

In contrast, the approach proposed by Varela and his colleagues, to which they gave the name \u201cenaction\u201d, emphasizes how much our reasoning depends on our bodies and on the environmental context in which they are situated.<\/p>\n

This conception of thought as \u201cembodied\u201d thus involves not only the human brain, but also its dynamic relationship with the rest of the body, as well as the relationship between this brain\/body system and the environment in which it operates.<\/p>\n

Alva No\u00eb, a philosophy professor at the University of California at Berkeley, studies the nature of perception and consciousness<\/span><\/a> from this perspective of enaction. Though recognizing the undeniable, necessary contributions of neuroscience<\/span><\/a> to our understanding of the human mind, No\u00eb invites us to \u201cget out of our heads\u201d (from the title of his 2009 book, Out of Our Heads<\/em>: Why You are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness<\/em>) and to realize just how closely our brain processes are interlinked with our environment.<\/p>\n

From March 17 to 19, 2011, Alva No\u00eb went in Montreal, Quebec, Canada to deliver a series of three lectures, one of which was preceded by a day-long symposium on his work.<\/p>\n

\"i_lien\" Announcement for lectures by Alva No\u00eb in Montreal, March 17 to 19, 2011<\/span><\/a>
\n\"a_rec\" Alva No\u00eb\u2019s Web Site <\/span><\/span><\/a>
\n\"i_lien\" 2009 Interview with Alva No\u00eb: You are not your brain<\/span><\/a>
\n\"a_lien\" 2008 Interview with Alva No\u00eb: Life is the way the animal is in the world<\/span><\/a>
\n\"a_lien\" Video of No\u00eb presenting his book Out of Our Heads<\/em> <\/span><\/a>
\n\"a_lien\" In search of the enactive: Introduction to special issue on enactive experience <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the introduction to their 1991 book The Embodied Mind, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch noted that as of that writing, the cognitive sciences had little to say about what it means to be human in the concrete situations of everyday life. This criticism was aimed directly at the prevailing paradigm, according to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,14],"tags":[81,42,16,74,82,18],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1034,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions\/1034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}