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In Varela, F., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive
Science and Human Experience (2nd ed.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, in press.
Introduction to The Embodied Mind 2nd Edition
Eleanor Rosch
This book is about something real. For that reason it does not fit easily
into any of the usual academic disciplines. It is not science; it is not
philosophy; it is not phenomenology, and it is certainly not Buddhism,
although it touches on all of these. Nevertheless, for twenty plus years the
book has served as a provocateur for academic and nonacademic readers
alike. During that time, the issues with which it deals, such as relations
between the sciences of mind and human personal experience (your personal
experience), have become more prominent and culturally visible, but by no
means resolved.
A bit of history: I confess that working on The Embodied Mind with the
late Francisco Varela sometimes felt to me like entering an Indonesian
shadow-puppet play. A center-piece of these plays is a sequence in which the
protagonists cross into “the forest,” a charmed space where it becomes
possible for beings from different orders of reality – humans, gods, clowns,
heroes, demons – to meet and interact, thereby propelling the drama on its
way. In a somewhat analogous fashion, the aim of The Embodied Mind was to
create an open space in which normally separated aspects of human
knowledge represented by different modes of discourse and different
academic disciplines could meet, speak, and perhaps cross-fertilize one
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another. We were particularly concerned with the gulf between the human
mind as studied by science and the mind as personally experienced—now
often spoken of as the disconnect between first person and third person
knowledge. To approach this disconnect we juxtaposed three disciplines
usually considered worlds apart: the new interdisciplinary science of the
mind called cognitive science, the phenomenological tradition in philosophy,
and some aspects of the Eastern religion of Buddhism. Through the interplay
of these three voices we emerged with the outline of a new kind of cognitive
science called enaction that we argued would provide the ground for a
science both embodied and experientially relevant.
Now, twenty-five years later, much has changed in the cultural and
intellectual environment in which ordinary people live and in which research
on body and mind is performed, changes that make The Embodied Mind even
more relevant and probably more accessible than when first published.
1) This is the era of body, particularly of the brain. New techniques
such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and an enhanced
electroencephalogram (EEG) have made it possible to observe changes in
blood flow and electrical activity in the brain in real time, thus providing a
window into the relation between thoughts, emotions, and brain activity.
Increasingly the prevailing assumption in psychology, cognitive science and
many other fields is that the mind (and hence experience) is just the brain
and that the gold standard for studying anything human is to observe
changes in the brain. Note our new vocabulary: not only is there
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neuroscience but also neuro-economics, neuro-ethics… even neuro-theology.
But body is not necessarily the same as embodied; what is that body that is
under scrutiny?
2) This is also the era of personal technology. Hence it is not
surprising that the brain (and thus the mind with its experiences) is
increasingly assumed to work like a computer, i.e. for all its subtlety to be a
machine, just as is a computer, that should be studied accordingly. A personal
side of this technological change may be the overriding of much self-
awareness. Where once there were spaces in the day between events to
digest information, reflect on occurrences, notice one’s reactions, and be with
one’s thoughts and emotions, now there is only time to whip out the cell
phone.
These first two trends have to do with the objectification of science
and the externalization of our lives; they provide the background from which
the quest of this book and our concept of enaction stand out as contrast. The
next three, more local in scope but potentially of great generative
importance, are efforts toward reclaiming the mind.
3) Interest in phenomenology is growing, particularly in Europe and
Latin America. In strict usage, phenomenology refers to work stemming from
the school of philosophy originated by Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-
Ponty, but it is now also applied to research that looks into experience
through a variety of other methods. While phenomenology is the province of
my co-author Evan Thompson, I wish to make just one point about it here.
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We began The Embodied Mind with a single phenomenological insight that
can turn objectivist science (and one’s world view) on its head if one allows it
to. Everything perceived, believed, theorized, researched, and known is done
so by an observer. The brain is seen, dissected, experimented on, believed to
be the cause of mental events…by the minds of scientists -- and likewise for
the other sciences. (This is what those circular diagrams in the first chapter
are trying to convey.) From that point of view, the brain is inside the mind
rather than vise verse. And it is from that point of view that phenomenology
throws down the gauntlet and challenges cognitive science, thus initiating,
though by no means closing, our conversation.
5) “Mindfulness” training derived from Buddhist practices has been
shown to have both physical and mental therapeutic effects, and use of it is
spreading exponentially. There is a corresponding outpouring of research on
mindfulness not only to confirm its clinical effectiveness but, as we might
expect, to relate it to the brain and to develop methods to define it, measure
it, and to understand it within the framework of our already existing
mechanistic science. Such work has been anointed with names such as
contemplative clinical science and contemplative neuroscience, and one can
only hope that this will be a case of “If you build it (here “if you name it”) they
will come.” One positive result is that Buddhism and the large family of
concepts being called “mindfulness” are no longer treated as visits from an
extra-terrestrial as they were twenty five years ago; both are now -- however
poorly understood -- on the cultural and scientific radar. On the other hand,
