Cognitive science explains mind and brain in terms of computation, information-processing, and representationalism: the ability of a cognitive system to change internal microstructure so as to correspond with important features of the internal or external world. One could do worse than to sum up the cognitivist model of the mind as “computations over representations”, in [...]
Arthur Barsky on unexplained symptoms: clinical existential-physiological discrepancy
Arthur Barsky has a thought-provoking chapter entitled “The Validity of Bodily Symptoms in Medical Outpatients” in Arthur Stone’s important Science of Self Report (more available here):
“Although history-taking is the key to diagnosis in clinical medicine, and symptom relief is the goal of medical treatment, symptoms are often unreliable and invalid measures of the extent and [...]
How accurate are people at knowing what is happening inside their bodies?
Were people utterly inaccurate at judging their body state and reporting on it, clinical medicine would be deprived of a critical tool. Evidence has accumulated that in certain circumstances, some people are evidently able to access information about the physiological processes inside of their bodies, and to report on it. Experiments seem to demonstrate that [...]
Body-knowledge: what is it?
I use the term“body-knowledge” in my dissertation research primarily to refer to the experience of knowing about one’s own body, and especially embracing perception and assessments of the body through the body. It is meant to straddle the classic cognitive psychology distinction between explicit knowledge that is verbalizable, and implicit knowledge that may only be [...]
A critical look at the information-processing theories used to explain body-knowledge
The psychologist Raymond Gibbs (2006) in Embodiment and Cognitive Science asks (pg. 28) “What underlies people’s abilities to move as they do and have any awareness of their bodies?”
The conventional answer given by psychology, medicine, and cognitive neuroscience is physiological and cognitive systems using information-processing. Gibbs cites the work of Bermudez, Marcel, and Eilan (1995) [...]
The brain and the internal state of the body
Hugo Critchley et al. (2004) state that (pg.189) “the internal state of the body is conveyed through a dedicated lamina-1 spinothalamocortical pathway that converges with vagal afferents”. These afferent nerves are noteworthy for the smallness of their diameter in comparison with the larger afferents that apparently deal with proprioception, the perception of the body in [...]
Modularism vs. globalism in cognitive neuroscience: implications for a science of body-knowledge
Models of how people are able to access physiological state information should take into account a long-running divide in cognitive neuroscience about to what extent explanations, models, and purported mechanisms privilege local, reductionistic, and/or modular theories, as opposed to global and holistic theories that emphasize connectedness with and interdependence of particular systems to the entire [...]
Gallagher and Coles on body schema vs. body image and the body percept
The philosopher Shaun Gallagher has collaborated with neurologist Jonathan Coles on the significance of patients with enigmatic body-knowledge problems (Gallagher and Coles, 1998). Gallagher has analyzed this clinical data in the light of phenomenology and neuroscience, and has an essential book for anyone interested in neurophenomenology: How the Body Shapes the Mind
Gallagher is formulating a [...]
