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How the Body Shapes the Mind
How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable. Because this insight has been developed across a variety of disciplines, however, there is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioural expressions in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Shaun Gallagher's book aims to contribute to the formulation of that common vocabulary and to develop a conceptual framework that will avoid both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and inflationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down cognitive states. Gallagher pursues two basic sets of questions. The first set consists of questions about the phenomenal aspects of the structure of experience, and specifically the relatively regular and constant features that we find in the content of our experience. If throughout conscious experience there is a constant reference to one's own body, even if this is a recessive or marginal awareness, then that reference constitutes a structural feature of the phenomenal field of consciousness, part of a framework that is likely to determine or influence all other aspects of experience. The second set of questions concerns aspects of the structure of experience that are more hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen before we know it. They do not normally enter into the content of experience in an explicit way, and are often inaccessible to reflective consciousness. To what extent, and in what ways, are consciousness and cognitive processes, which include experiences related to perception, memory, imagination, belief, judgement, and so forth, shaped or structured by the fact that they are embodied in this way?
284 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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Shaun Gallagher
33 books29 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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September 6, 2025
Really great book. Empirically based in a way that should be normal, but is not. For instance, I'm reading a Kriegel book right now, and I'm suffering. Some of my notes:
Distinction between the operative body schema and the thematic body image (p. 24): Ian Watterman, for instance, has lost proprioceptive awareness of his body from the neck down, so he has to rely on his body image exclusively to coordinate his movements.
Meltzoff’s experiments on neonate imitation show that there must be some kind of proprioceptive awareness at birth, hence an innate body schema, prior to experience, contra Piaget etc. More precisely, what the neonate imitation experiments show, is the existence of an innate intermodal translation process from vision to proprioception: the earliest proprioceptive feelings are elicited by others (pp. 80-1). Intermodality also manifests itself in illusions triggered by one sensory modality taking precedence over another, as in some configurations of the alien hand (cf. pp. 198-200), and rubber hand syndromes.
Phantom limbs and body schema: difference between aplasic (i.e. congenital) and non-aplasic (post-amputation) phantom limbs. Gallagher’s idea is that there is an innate, automatic neural matrix working according to an innate body schema that organizes, e.g., the earliest movements of the embryo in the womb, such as hand-mouth movements around the 12-15th weeks. When these movements don’t result in the expected tactile feedback (because of a congenitally missing limb), the neural matrix is reshuffled (plasticity), explaining the discrepancy between, and the timing of, phantom limb perceptions in aplasic and non-aplasic subjects respectively. Phantom limb perceptions may be later triggered in aplasic subjects by the constant perception of intact bodies around them, e.g. via constant activation of mirror neurons. The innate body schema may also never really go away, so that aplasic subjects may have phantom limb perceptions, either because they forget they don’t have that limb (confusion between the body image and the body schema: an interpretation Gallagher rejects), or, on the contrary, because their perception is parasitized by the body schema (“the body schema ‘remembers’” the limb). In non-aplasic subjects, by contrast, the deafferentation of the neural areas responsible for moving the now missing limb results first in the decay of that area, and later in its colonization by neighboring neural networks, which then revive the old connections, resulting in odd connections between foot and sexual stimuli, e.g., which are dictated by the geography of the brain areas, which themselves are connected to embryology (in this case, the proximity of feet and genitals in the womb, although this is speculative), and not by anatomy. Read Ramachandran & Blakelsee (1998).
Gesture: gesture is neither a purely motoric thing (the motor theory of gesture as virtual action: Streeck 1996 e.g.), otherwise Watterman could not gesture while he speaks, and he can, nor a purely linguistic thing, since it is affected by embodiment—Watterman does not spontaneously gesture when he can’t see his hands, but he can, because the gestures are in sync with his meaning. More specifically, gesture is not purely communicative, in the sense that it is not just a superficial way for the speaker to help the hearer visualize or understand what she is trying to say: on the contrary, it is inherent to the enactment of the meaning conveyed. Proof is blind people gesture to each other as they speak (and we often gesture when we talk alone, or on the phone). Goldin-Meadow (1998; 1999) has worked on this cognitive function of gesture as part and parcel of the accomplishment of meaning; Gallagher sees her work as consistent with Merleau-Ponty’s insights. So gesture is not a virtual, instrumental action, on a par with reaching or grasping, but an expressive action, on a par with speaking (which is a gesture, a gesticulation of the tongue and the mouth: cf. p. 125, and n. 11). Consistent with this is the evidence of phantom limb gestures in aplasic subjects in communicative, but not instrumental contexts (Ramachandran & Blakeslee 1998; see pp. 120-1). Read McNeill (1992).
Gallagher then presents Frith’s 1992 model for schizophrenic loss of agency and thought insertion as based on the idea of thought as an action. The action generates an efference copy, which induces a sense of effort, which identifies it as ‘yours’. The same efference copy mechanism, Frith surmises, is operative in thought. Without it, we have schizophrenic experiences. “Frith’s model assumes not only that thinking is a kind of action, but that, as in the case of a motor action, we experience an effortful intention.” (179) But it is not clear, Gallagher points out, that we can have intentions to think without having intentions to intend (that are not already thoughts), and so on (see also Akins & Dennett 1986 for this kind of criticism). At this point, Frith adds the requirement of metacognitive/reflective awareness of thinking. “Surely, however, most cases of normal thinking are neither prefaced by conscious intentions to think, nor followed by an introspective metarepresentation.” (180) Then, the suggestion arises (Campbell 1999) that the so-called intention to think is subpersonal, but this does not make sense of the specificity of the semantic content of the thoughts that are experienced as ‘inserted’ (188). (Beyond Gallagher’s remarks, the sense in which I experience my thoughts as ‘mine’ is not even clear). But Gallagher questions the basic premise that the efference copy mechanism makes sense in the case of thought: in motor contexts, the efference copy is supposed to make micro-adjustments possible, as it informs the vestibular and visual systems that “the organism, rather than the world, is moving” (182). But in thinking, consciousness, Gallagher notes, seems to be sending messages to itself. But then the efference copy’s sole purpose is verificational: it testifies that it is me that is doing the thinking, and for that, efference copies are not needed (“self-monitoring is built into consciousness as the longitudinal aspects of the retentional-protentional structure”, p. 203). Besides, according to Sass (1998) e.g., schizophrenia is due, not to a lack, but an excess, of metarepresentation (hyperreflection). Finally, Frith’s theory runs into problems to distinguish, as it should, the thoughts that are experienced as ‘inserted’ from those that are not, e.g. those expressed by the reports of thought insertion experiences themselves: if I have the impression that my thoughts are inserted, that impression necessarily isn’t (experienced as) inserted.
Instead of all this nonsense, Gallagher puts forward a temporal model of schizophrenic experience, understood as a disruption of the protentional, but not the retentional, structure of time-consciousness: intrusive thoughts are thoughts we are not ready for (194). A good way to test this is to appeal to Shafer & Marcus’s 1973 study, which showed that normal subjects respond more strongly to random than to self-generated tones. Frith & Done (1988) showed that this capacity to expect what is self-generated is precisely what is disrupted in schizophrenic subjects (196); we also know that schizophrenics can self-tickle (Clark 2016)—in short, they can surprise themselves. This idea about protention and surprise can be taken quite far to explain also the sense of bodily ownership: Cole, Sacks & Watterman (2000) report that subjects (with or without normal proprioception) who put on virtual reality headsets displaying robot arms where they would see their own arms, and have sensors on their arms to synchronize (after a short delay) the movements of their (invisible) limbs with those of the robot, soon experience the robotic arms as their own (“After a few minutes, we all became at home with the feeling of being in the robot. Making a movement and seeing it successful led to a strong sense of embodiment within the robot arms and body. This was manifest when one of us thought that he had better be careful for if he dropped a wrench it would land on his leg. Only the robot arms had been seen and moved, but the perception was that one’s body was in the robot.” From Cole, Sacks & Watterman 2000: 167, my emphasis). In fact, Gallagher’s idea about protention anticipates predictive processing: the feeling of embodiment is triggered by a certain form of prediction error minimization. But there is an unquestioned premise in such a reasoning, if it were to be carried out like this (Gallagher doesn’t): just because something (e.g. prediction error minimization) is sufficient to trigger the illusion of embodiment, does not mean it is the root of the phenomenon of embodiment itself. This sort of fallacy could perhaps be called ‘the argument from illusion’, and it can be seen at work in the predictive processing theory of perception as ‘controlled hallucination’ (Clark). Here, the Heideggerian point still has bite: so long as we are approaching embodiment as something that can be engineered, not something that is lived, we misunderstand it. In other words, the illusion of embodiment presupposes embodiment, it does not explain it.
The temporal theory of schizophrenia also accounts for the ubiquity of schizophrenic symptoms: “Schizophrenic patients feel alienated not just from thought and action; they also feel alienated from affects, from their own body and skin, from their own saliva, from their own name, etc…. It seems unlikely that all these phenomena can be explained by problems involving local failures of efference copy….” (204).
Distinction between the operative body schema and the thematic body image (p. 24): Ian Watterman, for instance, has lost proprioceptive awareness of his body from the neck down, so he has to rely on his body image exclusively to coordinate his movements.
Meltzoff’s experiments on neonate imitation show that there must be some kind of proprioceptive awareness at birth, hence an innate body schema, prior to experience, contra Piaget etc. More precisely, what the neonate imitation experiments show, is the existence of an innate intermodal translation process from vision to proprioception: the earliest proprioceptive feelings are elicited by others (pp. 80-1). Intermodality also manifests itself in illusions triggered by one sensory modality taking precedence over another, as in some configurations of the alien hand (cf. pp. 198-200), and rubber hand syndromes.
Phantom limbs and body schema: difference between aplasic (i.e. congenital) and non-aplasic (post-amputation) phantom limbs. Gallagher’s idea is that there is an innate, automatic neural matrix working according to an innate body schema that organizes, e.g., the earliest movements of the embryo in the womb, such as hand-mouth movements around the 12-15th weeks. When these movements don’t result in the expected tactile feedback (because of a congenitally missing limb), the neural matrix is reshuffled (plasticity), explaining the discrepancy between, and the timing of, phantom limb perceptions in aplasic and non-aplasic subjects respectively. Phantom limb perceptions may be later triggered in aplasic subjects by the constant perception of intact bodies around them, e.g. via constant activation of mirror neurons. The innate body schema may also never really go away, so that aplasic subjects may have phantom limb perceptions, either because they forget they don’t have that limb (confusion between the body image and the body schema: an interpretation Gallagher rejects), or, on the contrary, because their perception is parasitized by the body schema (“the body schema ‘remembers’” the limb). In non-aplasic subjects, by contrast, the deafferentation of the neural areas responsible for moving the now missing limb results first in the decay of that area, and later in its colonization by neighboring neural networks, which then revive the old connections, resulting in odd connections between foot and sexual stimuli, e.g., which are dictated by the geography of the brain areas, which themselves are connected to embryology (in this case, the proximity of feet and genitals in the womb, although this is speculative), and not by anatomy. Read Ramachandran & Blakelsee (1998).
Gesture: gesture is neither a purely motoric thing (the motor theory of gesture as virtual action: Streeck 1996 e.g.), otherwise Watterman could not gesture while he speaks, and he can, nor a purely linguistic thing, since it is affected by embodiment—Watterman does not spontaneously gesture when he can’t see his hands, but he can, because the gestures are in sync with his meaning. More specifically, gesture is not purely communicative, in the sense that it is not just a superficial way for the speaker to help the hearer visualize or understand what she is trying to say: on the contrary, it is inherent to the enactment of the meaning conveyed. Proof is blind people gesture to each other as they speak (and we often gesture when we talk alone, or on the phone). Goldin-Meadow (1998; 1999) has worked on this cognitive function of gesture as part and parcel of the accomplishment of meaning; Gallagher sees her work as consistent with Merleau-Ponty’s insights. So gesture is not a virtual, instrumental action, on a par with reaching or grasping, but an expressive action, on a par with speaking (which is a gesture, a gesticulation of the tongue and the mouth: cf. p. 125, and n. 11). Consistent with this is the evidence of phantom limb gestures in aplasic subjects in communicative, but not instrumental contexts (Ramachandran & Blakeslee 1998; see pp. 120-1). Read McNeill (1992).
Gallagher then presents Frith’s 1992 model for schizophrenic loss of agency and thought insertion as based on the idea of thought as an action. The action generates an efference copy, which induces a sense of effort, which identifies it as ‘yours’. The same efference copy mechanism, Frith surmises, is operative in thought. Without it, we have schizophrenic experiences. “Frith’s model assumes not only that thinking is a kind of action, but that, as in the case of a motor action, we experience an effortful intention.” (179) But it is not clear, Gallagher points out, that we can have intentions to think without having intentions to intend (that are not already thoughts), and so on (see also Akins & Dennett 1986 for this kind of criticism). At this point, Frith adds the requirement of metacognitive/reflective awareness of thinking. “Surely, however, most cases of normal thinking are neither prefaced by conscious intentions to think, nor followed by an introspective metarepresentation.” (180) Then, the suggestion arises (Campbell 1999) that the so-called intention to think is subpersonal, but this does not make sense of the specificity of the semantic content of the thoughts that are experienced as ‘inserted’ (188). (Beyond Gallagher’s remarks, the sense in which I experience my thoughts as ‘mine’ is not even clear). But Gallagher questions the basic premise that the efference copy mechanism makes sense in the case of thought: in motor contexts, the efference copy is supposed to make micro-adjustments possible, as it informs the vestibular and visual systems that “the organism, rather than the world, is moving” (182). But in thinking, consciousness, Gallagher notes, seems to be sending messages to itself. But then the efference copy’s sole purpose is verificational: it testifies that it is me that is doing the thinking, and for that, efference copies are not needed (“self-monitoring is built into consciousness as the longitudinal aspects of the retentional-protentional structure”, p. 203). Besides, according to Sass (1998) e.g., schizophrenia is due, not to a lack, but an excess, of metarepresentation (hyperreflection). Finally, Frith’s theory runs into problems to distinguish, as it should, the thoughts that are experienced as ‘inserted’ from those that are not, e.g. those expressed by the reports of thought insertion experiences themselves: if I have the impression that my thoughts are inserted, that impression necessarily isn’t (experienced as) inserted.
Instead of all this nonsense, Gallagher puts forward a temporal model of schizophrenic experience, understood as a disruption of the protentional, but not the retentional, structure of time-consciousness: intrusive thoughts are thoughts we are not ready for (194). A good way to test this is to appeal to Shafer & Marcus’s 1973 study, which showed that normal subjects respond more strongly to random than to self-generated tones. Frith & Done (1988) showed that this capacity to expect what is self-generated is precisely what is disrupted in schizophrenic subjects (196); we also know that schizophrenics can self-tickle (Clark 2016)—in short, they can surprise themselves. This idea about protention and surprise can be taken quite far to explain also the sense of bodily ownership: Cole, Sacks & Watterman (2000) report that subjects (with or without normal proprioception) who put on virtual reality headsets displaying robot arms where they would see their own arms, and have sensors on their arms to synchronize (after a short delay) the movements of their (invisible) limbs with those of the robot, soon experience the robotic arms as their own (“After a few minutes, we all became at home with the feeling of being in the robot. Making a movement and seeing it successful led to a strong sense of embodiment within the robot arms and body. This was manifest when one of us thought that he had better be careful for if he dropped a wrench it would land on his leg. Only the robot arms had been seen and moved, but the perception was that one’s body was in the robot.” From Cole, Sacks & Watterman 2000: 167, my emphasis). In fact, Gallagher’s idea about protention anticipates predictive processing: the feeling of embodiment is triggered by a certain form of prediction error minimization. But there is an unquestioned premise in such a reasoning, if it were to be carried out like this (Gallagher doesn’t): just because something (e.g. prediction error minimization) is sufficient to trigger the illusion of embodiment, does not mean it is the root of the phenomenon of embodiment itself. This sort of fallacy could perhaps be called ‘the argument from illusion’, and it can be seen at work in the predictive processing theory of perception as ‘controlled hallucination’ (Clark). Here, the Heideggerian point still has bite: so long as we are approaching embodiment as something that can be engineered, not something that is lived, we misunderstand it. In other words, the illusion of embodiment presupposes embodiment, it does not explain it.
The temporal theory of schizophrenia also accounts for the ubiquity of schizophrenic symptoms: “Schizophrenic patients feel alienated not just from thought and action; they also feel alienated from affects, from their own body and skin, from their own saliva, from their own name, etc…. It seems unlikely that all these phenomena can be explained by problems involving local failures of efference copy….” (204).
Read
October 3, 2022Lo he leído mal, con una mentalidad muy TFG-céntrica y sin pararme en algunos pasajes y capítulos que se merecen una relectura y una reflexión en profundidad. Pese a todo, basta una lectura poco pormenorizada para darse cuenta de que este libro es una puta maravilla. Sus excursiones por la fenomenología, la psicopatología y las ciencias cognitivas poniendo siempre el cuerpo en el centro dan pie a un relato de grandes dimensiones y con implicaciones importantes tanto en la filosofía en la psicología práctica y teórica. Espero volver a leer este libro en el futuro con la atención y el detalle que merece, que es mucha.
July 8, 2010
Shaun Gallagher is a phenomenal philosopher who is remarkably well in touch with the insights of neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Without being reductionistic or overly prone to jargon, Gallagher sets forth a well made case about how the human body shapes the human mind. In doing so Gallagher deploys new and important distinctions necessary to furthering the debate surrounding human embodiment and thinking, most notable among these is certainly his body schema/body image distinction. Although technical in parts, this is an important book to read for anyone interested in the topic of embodied cognition.
October 15, 2025
The title is what got me into this book, but it was a struggle to get through the “phenomenological” lens and heavy academic style. What follows is an attempt to summarize what this book is saying.
Perceiving the world begins with an innate component (preconscious, infancy) that is subsequently shaped and built by experience. The niche that is filled by this perspective is that it is not Descartes (mind as separate from the body), it is not Locke (experience only; no innate component), and it is not Piaget (constructing the world begins only after infancy). To this, Gallagher adds that, while a good part of our interaction with the world is of the automatic sort (he uses as an example, that in reaching for the glass we non-consciously shape our hands to fit the glass), it began with some sort of preconscious or conscious shaping. The overall point to what he puts forward is that the body integrates with its environment and this in turn, in a reciprocal way, “shapes the mind” in the way the world is perceived.
While the argument in this book that perception has an innate anchor and a significant automatic quality is good to emphasize, it still morphs into an overly heavy reliance on the role of conscious perception in two respects. I’d say that we are born to integrate with our group. We are structured to do so via the attunement emotions, which are largely unconscious and remain so in our day-to-day social behavior. We might think that we are consciously directing our behavior, via goal and intention, but most of the integrative work is done non-consciously via mirror neurons that address our need to be part of the group/tribe and body language. The lift of the eyebrow, the particular sight of the teeth, the tone expressed in certain contexts - these are the drivers that lie behind our perception.*
Taking this one step further, the mind here is just the vehicle for what the body wants to say. Though Demasio might quibble with some with this, I think this is somewhat what Gallagher says of him that “‘The mind is embodied…not just embrained.’” This is also much akin to Hume’s view that passions shape the mind, and Gallagher himself gives a nod in this direction by noting the recent studies that mental operations follow bodily promptings. Unfortunately, this insight gets bottled up in the barren determinism and free will argument that, in turn, is obscured by an over emphasis in the West, since Plato, that we are intellectualized beings who direct the body. What motivates the body, for survival and well-being, is a full-suite of invariant needs and fears. How those needs are satisfied, and how those fears are addressed, are variable across time and situation. This is the Locke component on the role of experience. It’s also the Darwin component - we are structured to adapt (change) our behavior to what the environment requires. It also pulls in the Schopenhauer question: It’s not what we do, but what we do what we do.
Gallagher ends the book by discussing the role of free will to counter, some, the argument that we are fully determined. In using the sight of a snake example, he states that our reaction is supplemented by conscious thought where we import context that leaves room for free will to engage itself. A snake example, interestingly enough, is used by Joseph LeDeux to illustrate the complementary role the mind plays in servicing instinct: When we see a shadow on the trail, we react by stopping or jumping back; then a fraction of a second later, the mind supplements that reaction by filling in with context - based on experience and models in our brain - and we see that the shadow is a stick and not a snake. All good, showing the evolutionary advantage of having both instinct (non-conscious action and reaction) and consciousness (and choices in how to respond depending on the information received) work together. LeDeux goes on to suggest that this mode of operation might apply across the board.
*Gallagher discusses two schools of thought that attempt to explain how we integrate with others and the group. The Theory of Mind school (the “Theory theory school”) says that at about the age of 4 we can understand what others are thinking and can predict what they are going to do. In contrast, the “Simulation theory” has us projecting our own way of seeing the world as a way to explain the way others see it. Both schools of thought suffer, significantly, from the failure of theorists to anchor their thinking in evolutionary theory: We are bred to integrate with our group, and the attunement emotions are the way that evolution makes that happen. So of course, via “empathetic” capacity, we are able to enter into the beings (which is far more fundamental than Mind) of others. (Theory of Mind strikes me as an overly ambitious term that not only emphasizes the mental over affect, but also “claims the field” about what the mind is all about. It is not “a theory of the mind,” but “the” theory of mind.) Jonathan Turner’s books on the origins and sociology of human emotions discuss these attunement emotions in some detail. And, regarding the simulation theory, it is natural enough, embedded as we are in our own ego world, to project ourselves into others, which creates a full-suite of problems in the way of misunderstanding, intolerance, and imposition.
Perceiving the world begins with an innate component (preconscious, infancy) that is subsequently shaped and built by experience. The niche that is filled by this perspective is that it is not Descartes (mind as separate from the body), it is not Locke (experience only; no innate component), and it is not Piaget (constructing the world begins only after infancy). To this, Gallagher adds that, while a good part of our interaction with the world is of the automatic sort (he uses as an example, that in reaching for the glass we non-consciously shape our hands to fit the glass), it began with some sort of preconscious or conscious shaping. The overall point to what he puts forward is that the body integrates with its environment and this in turn, in a reciprocal way, “shapes the mind” in the way the world is perceived.
While the argument in this book that perception has an innate anchor and a significant automatic quality is good to emphasize, it still morphs into an overly heavy reliance on the role of conscious perception in two respects. I’d say that we are born to integrate with our group. We are structured to do so via the attunement emotions, which are largely unconscious and remain so in our day-to-day social behavior. We might think that we are consciously directing our behavior, via goal and intention, but most of the integrative work is done non-consciously via mirror neurons that address our need to be part of the group/tribe and body language. The lift of the eyebrow, the particular sight of the teeth, the tone expressed in certain contexts - these are the drivers that lie behind our perception.*
Taking this one step further, the mind here is just the vehicle for what the body wants to say. Though Demasio might quibble with some with this, I think this is somewhat what Gallagher says of him that “‘The mind is embodied…not just embrained.’” This is also much akin to Hume’s view that passions shape the mind, and Gallagher himself gives a nod in this direction by noting the recent studies that mental operations follow bodily promptings. Unfortunately, this insight gets bottled up in the barren determinism and free will argument that, in turn, is obscured by an over emphasis in the West, since Plato, that we are intellectualized beings who direct the body. What motivates the body, for survival and well-being, is a full-suite of invariant needs and fears. How those needs are satisfied, and how those fears are addressed, are variable across time and situation. This is the Locke component on the role of experience. It’s also the Darwin component - we are structured to adapt (change) our behavior to what the environment requires. It also pulls in the Schopenhauer question: It’s not what we do, but what we do what we do.
Gallagher ends the book by discussing the role of free will to counter, some, the argument that we are fully determined. In using the sight of a snake example, he states that our reaction is supplemented by conscious thought where we import context that leaves room for free will to engage itself. A snake example, interestingly enough, is used by Joseph LeDeux to illustrate the complementary role the mind plays in servicing instinct: When we see a shadow on the trail, we react by stopping or jumping back; then a fraction of a second later, the mind supplements that reaction by filling in with context - based on experience and models in our brain - and we see that the shadow is a stick and not a snake. All good, showing the evolutionary advantage of having both instinct (non-conscious action and reaction) and consciousness (and choices in how to respond depending on the information received) work together. LeDeux goes on to suggest that this mode of operation might apply across the board.
*Gallagher discusses two schools of thought that attempt to explain how we integrate with others and the group. The Theory of Mind school (the “Theory theory school”) says that at about the age of 4 we can understand what others are thinking and can predict what they are going to do. In contrast, the “Simulation theory” has us projecting our own way of seeing the world as a way to explain the way others see it. Both schools of thought suffer, significantly, from the failure of theorists to anchor their thinking in evolutionary theory: We are bred to integrate with our group, and the attunement emotions are the way that evolution makes that happen. So of course, via “empathetic” capacity, we are able to enter into the beings (which is far more fundamental than Mind) of others. (Theory of Mind strikes me as an overly ambitious term that not only emphasizes the mental over affect, but also “claims the field” about what the mind is all about. It is not “a theory of the mind,” but “the” theory of mind.) Jonathan Turner’s books on the origins and sociology of human emotions discuss these attunement emotions in some detail. And, regarding the simulation theory, it is natural enough, embedded as we are in our own ego world, to project ourselves into others, which creates a full-suite of problems in the way of misunderstanding, intolerance, and imposition.
June 27, 2019
”... Nothing about the human experience remains untouched by human embodiment.” I must say it was very enjoyable to read this book day after day on my walk to work. My the contents of my mind being shaped while walking and reading a book about how the mind is shaped by embodiment.
I found this text through Eleanore Stump’s Wandering in Darkness and many of the themes she picks up from this book are interesting to me as well: autism and 2nd person shared experience; the import of our having mirror neurons, neurons which fire in the pre-frontal lobe the same whether we take and action or watch someone take that same action, and generally how our embodiment as humans shapes the way we think.
I found this text through Eleanore Stump’s Wandering in Darkness and many of the themes she picks up from this book are interesting to me as well: autism and 2nd person shared experience; the import of our having mirror neurons, neurons which fire in the pre-frontal lobe the same whether we take and action or watch someone take that same action, and generally how our embodiment as humans shapes the way we think.
August 28, 2025
加拉格爾持現象學觀點，強調身體在心智中的重要性。現象學講的是體驗、第一人稱、自我等等。顯然與主流科學的還原、第三人稱、客觀等背道而馳。有些人把它當作現代科學的反省。我程度太差，無法置評。但這種具身認知，依我看有些難點。難點在，當大家都有相似的身體時，爲何心智可以有這麼大的差異？或者，當我們身體有極大差異的時候，心智看來卻無甚差別？前者是天才，後者是某些殘疾者。現象學還講意義，但我們生活真的需要意義嗎？沒有意義不能生活？不能科研？再者說，意義是誰的意義？所有意義都有意義嗎？從幻肢的研究來看，我還是喜歡拉瑪錢德朗簡潔的解釋。什麼自我，什麼痛覺，一個神經刺激，就讓你明白一切都是幻象。
December 9, 2018
This book has really changed how I think about people. And the worlds. It actually profoundly changed the last two chapters of the book I was writing while I was reading this book.
Want to read
August 16, 2019Zoran's recommended reading SEAUS3 Segment 2
February 8, 2016
Shaun Gallagher's How the Body Shapes the Mind is a well written contemporary phenomenological account of the body and how it structures our mind. Drawing from contemporary neuroscience but avoiding the reductionist trap of much of contemporary science Gallagher offers a comprehensive account of both the phenomenology of the body and the empirical research that backs it up.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews