A reset of consciousness

Posted on 29/08/2011 by admin

ScienceDaily reports (here) on research by Zacks, Kurby, Eisenberg, and Haroutunian, Prediction Error Associated with the Perceptual Segmentation of Naturalistic Events, reported in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Zacks and his colleagues are building a theory of how predictive perception works. At the core of the theory is the belief that a good part of predicting the future is the maintenance of a mental model of what is happening now. Now and then, this model needs updating, especially when the environment changes unpredictably.

“When we watch everyday activity unfold around us, we make predictions about what will happen a few seconds out,” Zacks says. “Most of the time, our predictions are right.

“Successfull predictions are associated with the subjective experience of a smooth stream of consciousness. But a few times a minute, our predictions come out wrong and then we perceive a break in the stream of consciousness, accompanied by an uptick in activity of primitive parts of the brain involved with the MDS (mid-brain dopamine system) that regulate attention and adaptation to unpredicted changes.”

Here is the abstract:

Predicting the near future is important for survival and plays a central role in theories of perception, language processing, and learning. Prediction failures may be particularly important for initiating the updating of perceptual and memory systems and, thus, for the subjective experience of events. Here, we asked observers to make predictions about what would happen 5 sec later in a movie of an everyday activity. Those points where prediction was more difficult corresponded with subjective boundaries in the stream of experience. At points of unpredictability, midbrain and striatal regions associated with the phasic release of the neurotransmitter dopamine transiently increased in activity. This activity could provide a global updating signal, cuing other brain systems that a significant new event has begun.

When events are not what we expect, we probably have to, in effect, close one event and open a new one, store memories and start with a clear working memory, re-assess what we are perceiving – we have to ‘do a reset’ in the steam of consciousness.

Navigating the up and down

Posted on 26/08/2011 by admin

ScienceDaily has a item (here), R.Hayman, M.Verriotis, A.Jovalekic, A.Fenton, K.Jeffery (2011) Nature Neuroscience, Anisotropic encoding of three-dimensional space by place cells and grid cells, about the coding of vertical position.

Animal’s brains are only roughly aware of how high-up they are in space, meaning that in terms of altitude the brain’s ‘map’ of space is surprisingly flat, according to new research….The study looked at two types of cells known to be involved in the brain’s representation of space: grid cells, which measure distance, and place cells, which indicate location. Scientists found that only place cells were sensitive to the animal moving upwards in altitude, and even then only weakly so… “This finding is surprising and it has implications for situations in which people have to move freely in all three dimensions — divers, pilots and astronauts for example. It also raises the question — if our map of space is flat, then how do we navigate through complex environments so effectively?”… It seems as if grid cells do not “know” how high they are…. Place cells, found in the hippocampus itself, produce single activity hotspots in the environment and seem to function to encode specific places. These neurons were only weakly sensitive to height too — but they did show some responsiveness, suggesting they received information about height from some other, possibly non-specific, source.

So, there is a lot more to learn about navigation!

Here is the abstract:

The subjective sense of space may result in part from the combined activity of place cells in the hippocampus and grid cells in posterior cortical regions such as the entorhinal cortex and pre- and parasubiculum. In horizontal planar environments, place cells provide focal positional information, whereas grid cells supply odometric (distance measuring) information. How these cells operate in three dimensions is unknown, even though the real world is three-dimensional. We investigated this issue in rats exploring two different kinds of apparatus: a climbing wall (the pegboard) and a helix. Place and grid cell firing fields had normal horizontal characteristics but were elongated vertically, with grid fields forming stripes. It seems that grid cell odometry (and be implication path integration) is impaired or absent in the vertical domain, at least when the rat itself remains horizontal. These finding suggest that the mammalian encoding of three-dimensional space is anisotropic.

Using unconscious information

Posted on 23/08/2011 by admin

The phenomenon of ‘conflict adaptation’ is a cognitive control function that has been thought to only apply when conscious information is used, that is, information that can be held for some time in working memory. Conflict adaptation happens in priming experiments: when a prime corresponds to the target, the target is more quickly and accurately identified but the correspondence has affects not just in its own trial but the following one, so that an incongruent prime-target produces less priming effect in the next trial. Although the priming correspondence effect applies to both conscious and unconscious primes, the conflict adaptation appeared to apply only to conscious primes. Conflict adaptation is thought to occur because following a conflict (incongruent prime-target) pre-frontal cortex control processes increase control over perceptual processes in a top-down way.

In a recent paper (see citation below), the researchers found that if attention was not relaxed between trails, the conflict adaptation could occur with unconscious priming. They used the same experiment setup as Kunde in which the priming had to be conscious to get conflict adaptation. They made only two changes: they did not use a warning sound before a trial which forced the subject to maintain vigilance between trials; and, they shortened the gap between trials to less that 1.5 seconds from about 2-2.3 seconds. Under these conditions, unconscious priming also gave conflict adaptation.

These results add to the growing body of literature suggesting that unconscious information can influence high-level (prefrontal) cognitive control functions, such as inhibitory control, task switching, error correction and conflict adaptation (present study). These results further elucidate and expand the potential influence of unconscious information on our direct, but also future decisions.

van Gaal, S., Lamme, V., & Ridderinkhof, K. (2010). Unconsciously Triggered Conflict Adaptation PLoS ONE, 5 (7) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0011508

Memory outside the hippocampus

Posted on 20/08/2011 by admin

ScienceDaily reports (here) on a paper by Bindschaedler, Peter-Favre, Maeder, Hirsbrunner, Clarke in Cortex, Growing up with bilateral hippocampal atrophy: From childhood to teenage.

A child with damage to the hippocampus at birth did have some memory: memory of events was affected but not memory of general knowledge. His episodic memory was almost 90% gone while his semantic memory was within normal levels. This means that the two types of declarative memory (memory that can be accessed consciously) are different and that semantic memory is not just a consolidation of episodic memory.

The paper also seems to discuss evidence that recall and familiarity are separate.

Here is the abstract of the paper:

The respective roles of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures in memory are controversial. Some authors put forward a modular account according to which episodic memory and recollection-based processes are crucially dependent on the hippocampal formation whereas semantic acquisition and familiarity-based processes rely on the adjacent parahippocampal gyri. Others defend a unitary view.

We report the case of VJ, a boy with developmental amnesia of most likely perinatal onset diagnosed at the age of 8. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), including quantitative volumetric measurements of the hippocampal formation and of the entorhinal, perirhinal, and temporopolar cortices, showed severe, bilateral atrophy of the hippocampal formation, fornix and mammillary bodies; by contrast, the perirhinal cortex was within normal range and the entorhinal and temporopolar cortex remained within two standard deviations (SDs) from controls’ mean. We examined the development of his semantic knowledge from childhood to teenage as well as his recognition and cued recall memory abilities. On tasks tapping semantic memory, VJ increased his raw scores across years at the same rate as children from large standardisation samples, except for one task; he achieved average performance, consistent with his socio-educational background. He performed within normal range on 74% of recognition tests and achieved average to above average scores on 42% of them despite very severe impairment on 82% of episodic recall tasks. Both faces and landscapes-scenes gave rise to above average scores when tested with coloured stimuli. Cued recall, although impaired, was largely superior to free recall.

This case supports a modular account of the MTL with episodic, but not semantic memory depending on the hippocampal formation. Furthermore, the overall pattern of findings is consistent with evidence from both brain-damaged and neuroimaging studies indicating that recollection requires intact hippocampal formation and familiarity relies, at least partly, on the adjacent temporal lobe cortex.

Blind geometry

Posted on 17/08/2011 by admin

Would you believe there are blind mathematicians – great ones and specializing in geometry? I am fascinated. Here are a few:

Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) was one of the most prolific mathematicians of all time, having produced around 850 works, half after he became blind. Nicholas Saunderson (1682-1739), blinded in his first year, was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. Lev Semenovich Pontryagin (1908-1988), was a renowned Russian topologist. And Louis Antoine (1888-1971) is another. But the list goes on.

A paper mentioned in MindHacks (here) and cited below is mainly about Bernard Morin, famous for showing how to turn a sphere inside out. There are some very interesting observations on blind thought from a few blind mathematicians.

Morin believes there are two kinds of mathematical imagination. One kind, which he calls “time-like”, deals with information by proceeding through a series of steps. This is the kind of imagination that allows one to carry out long computations. “I was never good at computing,” Morin remarked, and his blindness deepened this deficit. What he excels at is the other kind of imagination, which he calls “space-like” and which allows one to comprehend information all at once.

Thus long strings of calculations are hard to keep track of … By contrast, “in geometry, the information is very concentrated, it’s something you can keep in mind,” Giroux said. What he keeps in mind is rather mysterious; it is not necessarily pictures, which he said provide a way of representing mathematical objects but not a way of thinking about them.

Alexei Sossinski points out that it is not so surprising that many blind mathematicians work in geometry. The spatial ability of a sighted person is based on the brain analyzing a two-dimensional image, projected onto the retina, of the three-dimensional world, while the spatial ability of a blind person is based on the brain analyzing information obtained through the senses of touch and hearing.

In a private communication, Sossinski also noted that sighted people sometimes have misconceptions about three-dimensional space because of the inadequate and misleading two-dimensional projection of space onto the retina. “The blind person (via his other senses) has an undeformed, directly 3-dimensional intuition of space,” he said.

Diderot, who involved blind people in his research, concluded that people can gain a good sense of three-dimensional objects through touch alone. He also found that changes in scale presented few problems for the blind, who “can enlarge or shrink shapes mentally. This spatial imagination often consisted of recalling and recombining tactile sensations.”

It seems there are many ways to think about space, especially if you want to play with spheres in 7 dimensions.

Citation: The World of Blind. Mathematicians. 1246. NOTICES OF THE AMS. VOLUME 49, NUMBER 10. (Author was not identified.)

Another look at LIDA

Posted on 14/08/2011 by admin

One of the interesting things about the Madl, Baars, Franklin LIDA model is the number of memory stores that it envisages. I have thought of consciousness as the ‘leading edge of memory’, at least of episodic memory. Hence my interest in the model’s use of memory.

Let us walk through their cognitive cycle to see what forms of memory are mentioned.

In the perception part of the cycle, the percept is held in the preconscious buffers of LIDAs working memory (workspace) and temporary structures are built. I assume the temporary structures are a preliminary world model. This seems definitely wider than the local sensory memories like visual memory.

The residual contents of the working memory is associated with the incoming percept and with associations from episodic and declarative memory in order to create an updated working memory. In summary, a number of memory stores are associated to give the current workspace: the new percept, the previous workspace, episodic memory, declarative memory. But they do not include and input from a motor system memory.

This resulting workspace is examined by attention processes to bring some parts of the workspace into consciousness. These parts (the novel, relevant, urgent and insistent) are transferred to another memory, the global workspace. This is equivalent to conscious broadcast as the contents of the global workspace are available to many process in the brain.

A procedural memory is postulated, hold various relevant behavior schemes which can retrieve the information they require from the global workspace. Goals are adjusted, actions selected and taken. Results of the action are fed back into the cycle through effects on the environment being included in sensory input.

In summary and in different words we have: individual stores in each sensory mode, a store with the preliminary precept, a store for finished world model, stores for episodic/declarative long-term memory, a store for ongoing behavior plans/goals, a store of action implementation procedures. This model gives a look at the sort of memory stores that are likely to be needed for cognition.

I have a big reservation about this cycle (although in general it is attractive), it does not deal well with prediction. For improvement, if we start with an action procedure rather than incoming sensory information and draw the cycle from that starting point. The action procedure, as well as, and before, producing the action, also is integrated into the existing workspace so as to create a model of the world as it is expected in a fraction of a second. What fraction of a second? Long enough for the conscious broadcast of the global workspace to coincide with the prediction – so that ‘now’ is ‘now’. The incoming sensory information can be compared with the workspace to register any errors and allow the action procedure to be amended if required. In other words, sensory and motor systems have two links: there is an external link through the environment and an internal one through prediction and they are compared in the workspace.

Madl, T., Baars, B., & Franklin, S. (2011). The Timing of the Cognitive Cycle PLoS ONE, 6 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0014803

Dualism in many guises

Posted on 11/08/2011 by admin

One of these days we have to get over dualism! Most scientist and philosophers (not all) give lip services to having thrown out Descartes’ dualism but then some bring dualism back in under another name.

One way in which this happens is in computer science. Recently Kay Sotala put on the Less Wrong site the draft of a paper. Here are some quotes from the draft:

The ability to transfer a human mind to a computer, creating an “upload”, will have a considerable impact on society. Previous work has examined some of the economical consequences of the ability to copy minds, as well as the improved coordination ability stemming from being able to copy, delete and restore minds. …A digital mind running on a computer system can upgrade the system to utilize more powerful hardware, while biological humans cannot drastically upgrade their brains. Suppose that there is some minimum hardware configuration that provides a digital mind with roughly the same processing power and memory as a human brain. Any increase in hardware resources past this point is a hardware advantage in favor of the digital mind.

The notion that the mind and brain can be separated with one translated into a digital program and the other into electronic computer is hard to visualize without a type of dualism – not spirit and matter but software and hardware.

Another division goes back to Plato. In a conversation with Alfredo Pereira Jr., he wrote this in response to my saying that Double-Aspect Monism sounded like Dualism to me:

Monism is not Dualism! Double-Aspect Monism (DAM) assumes a difference between the physical and the mental, holding that they are two aspects of the same being. The difference may be just epistemological (each aspect derives from a different perspective, first-person or third-person) or ontological (as in Aristotle’s hylomorphism: everything in Nature is composed of Matter and Form, they work together but are intrinsically different principles)… These conscious mental patterns (feelings) are embedded on physical (energy) processes, but they are not reductible to physical properties (like the form of a geometrical figure that cannot be reduced to the material substrate of a physical object having the form, e.g. of a triangle, rectangle, etc.).

I have encountered other similar divisions based on reifying an abstract concept (form, mathematical expression etc.) as real but distinct from physical reality. Here we have the separation of mental and physical (as opposed to spirit and matter). It says that something can be real without being part of physical reality; that concepts, numbers or forms can somehow interact with one another without touching the material world, but staying on their own (magical) level.

Then we have another division between consciousness and unconsciousness, a division that Freud made. Freud’s theories are not taken very seriously by most people today but this division survived. Very many envisage a conscious mind that is able to make decisions and an unconscious mind that is automatic. This is the ‘my brain made me do it’ attitude. Many coaching and self-help groups have simple descriptions of this type of dualism.

An iceberg can serve as a useful metaphor to understand the unconscious mind, its relationship to the conscious mind and how the two parts of our mind can better work together. As an iceberg floats in the water, the huge mass of it remains below the surface. Only a small percentage of the whole iceberg is visible above the surface. In this way, the iceberg is like the mind. The conscious mind is what we notice above the surface while the unconscious mind, the largest and most powerful part, remains unseen below the surface.

More scientific people tend not to use ‘mind’ but instead use ‘process’ so we have conscious processes and unconscious processes. This still assumes there is a division but it is an acceptable one. But sometimes in reading authors who use ‘process’, I get the feeling that they are still making a firm division in their thoughts.

There is an notion sometimes put forward that it does not matter whether dualism is a faulty concept, because we are doomed to believe it. On the Edge site Paul Bloom had an article on inborn dualism.

Where does common-sense dualism come from? One reasonable answer is it is learned. Children are raised in environments where they hear dualistic stories, they see movies where souls are depicted as independent from bodies, and they usually get some sort of religious training. And this dualism is inherent in the language that they learn; when we talk about the relationship between a person and his or her brain, we use the language of possession, not of identity. …There are also certain universal experiences that support a dualist worldview, such as the sensation of leaving one’s body in a dream, or the experience of our bodies disobeying our will…. So it is perfectly plausible that children start off innocent of any body-soul separation, and come to be dualists through experience. But I want to defend a very different view. I think children are dualists from the start. …Once children learn that the brain is involved in thinking, they don’t take it as showing that the brain as the source of mental life; they don’t become materialists. Rather they interpret “thinking” in a narrow sense, and conclude that the brain is a cognitive prosthesis, something added to the soul to enhance its computing power.

I, personally, have great difficulty with forms of dualism – I do not feel divided. This is one of the things that produced my interest in neurobiology. When I was about 12, I made a really stupid remark along dualist lines and my mother sharply criticized it. I was mortified because I had just been playing at being a clever smart-ass beyond what I could backup and I knew it. There was real shame at being catch talking nonsense. I got busy thinking about whether I was divided and found no reason to think I was. As a teenager in the ’50s I could not believe what I was being taught and read. At that time I found no one who disputed that one way or another our thinking was divided and I could not accept that as true. I am sure that I am not the only person in the world that is not doomed to be a dualist. Now I find that some scientists are leaving dualism behind and I follow their work with great interest.

Making the vague visible

Posted on 08/08/2011 by admin

What does anger, joy, fear, sadness, or love look like? A graphic designer, Orlagh O’Brien, has researched this with a survey. Here is the link – Emotionally}Vague. It is worth a good long look on all the pages, at the body feelings, colours and words associated with each emotion made graphic.

The LIDA model

Posted on 05/08/2011 by admin

Madl, Baars and Franklin have proposed a model of cognition they call LIDA (Learning Intelligent Distribution Agent). It is a series of cycles, each cycle preforming an ‘atom’ of cognition. (see citation below) A series of these ‘atoms’ would make up the performance of a cognitive task (problem solving, deliberation, volitional decision making for example). LIDA is an elaboration of the global workspace theory but takes under its wing other theories – they site embodied cognition, perceptual symbol systems, working memory, memory by affordances, long-term working memory, transient episodic memory, H-CogAff cognitive architecture, and Action Selection paradigm as contributing.

Here is their description of the Global Workspace idea:

The global workspace theory can be thought of as ‘‘… a theater of mental functioning. Consciousness in this metaphor resembles a bright spot on the stage of immediate memory, directed there by a spotlight of attention under executive guidance. Only the bright spot is conscious, while the rest of the theater is dark and unconscious’’. In case of sensory consciousness, the stage corresponds to the sensory projection areas of the cortex, its activation coming either from senses or from internal sources. After a conscious sensory content is established, it is distributed to a decentralized ‘‘audience’’ of expert networks sitting in the darkened theater. Thus, the primary functional purpose of consciousness is to integrate, provide access, and coordinate the functioning of very large numbers of specialized networks that otherwise operate autonomously. In the neuroscientific study of consciousness, this idea of consciousness having an integrative function has proven very useful, and is supported by much recent evidence.

This global workspace is where consciousness occurs, just once in each cognitive cycle. The cycle goes through perceive – understand – act and back to perceive. They strongly state that in LIDA these three types of process run continuously and are not confined to a particular block of time. But consciousness does occur only once and for a limited time in each cycle.

The most impressive aspect of this paper for me was their review of many published measurements of timing in the brain. The LIDA cycle is based on the theta rhythm and the gamma rhythm synchronizations phase locked to it. In the end they settle on a timing for a cycle based on their review:

t0 stimulus start

perception (80-100ms)

understanding (perception & understanding together = unconscious processing)

unconscious processing (260-280ms)

conscious broadcasting

action selection (60-110ms) (cannot start before conscious broadcasting)

total cognitive cycle (260-390ms)

I may return to this paper in future postings as there are some very interesting corners in it. This model has consciousness as distinct frames, however they do allow for elements from previous frames to linger. It also has a number of memory stores in its scheme: sensory memory, perceptual associative memory, transient episodic memory, declarative memory, procedural memory, sensory-motor memory. These are for future postings.

The LIDA model has been stimulated by computer programs and tested in very simple scenarios in preparation for more elaborate stimulations.

Here is the abstract :

We propose that human cognition consists of cascading cycles of recurring brain events. Each cognitive cycle senses the current situation, interprets it with reference to ongoing goals, and then selects an internal or external action in response. While most aspects of the cognitive cycle are unconscious, each cycle also yields a momentary ‘‘ignition’’ of conscious broadcasting. Neuroscientists have independently proposed ideas similar to the cognitive cycle, the fundamental hypothesis of the LIDA model of cognition. High-level cognition, such as deliberation, planning, etc., is typically enabled by multiple cognitive cycles. In this paper we describe a timing model LIDA’s cognitive cycle. Based on empirical and simulation data we propose that an initial phase of perception (stimulus recognition) occurs 80–100 ms from stimulus onset under optimal conditions. It is followed by a conscious episode (broadcast) 200–280 ms after stimulus onset, and an action selection phase 60–110 ms from the start of the conscious phase. One cognitive cycle would therefore take 260–390 ms. The LIDA timing model is consistent with brain evidence indicating a fundamental role for a theta-gamma wave, spreading forward from sensory cortices to rostral corticothalamic regions. This posteriofrontal theta-gamma wave may be experienced as a conscious perceptual event starting at 200–280 ms post stimulus. The action selection component of the cycle is proposed to involve frontal, striatal and cerebellar regions. Thus the cycle is inherently recurrent, as the anatomy of the thalamocortical system suggests. The LIDA model fits a large body of cognitive and neuroscientific evidence. Finally, we describe two LIDA-based software agents: the LIDA Reaction Time agent that simulates human performance in a simple reaction time task, and the LIDA Allport agent which models phenomenal simultaneity within timeframes comparable to human subjects. While there are many models of reaction time performance, these results fall naturally out of a biologically and computationally plausible cognitive architecture.

I was a bit surprised that there was no mention of a small prediction being built into the workspace contents. This is really needed for error monitoring in cognition and action. Surely this will be part of the model at some point in its development.

Madl, T., Baars, B., & Franklin, S. (2011). The Timing of the Cognitive Cycle PLoS ONE, 6 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0014803

Embodied cognition – what is it?

Posted on 02/08/2011 by admin

I have posted 7 pieces on embodied cognition and it is time to ask whether I have come any closer to a description of what it is. Each post was looking at something very different from the others. Whether or not I’m closer to what embodiment is but I sure know what I think it isn’t. Here is L. Shapiro’s view of the other kind of cognition:

Cognition, on the traditional view, is the same kind of process one finds in a calculator. An organism’s sense organs serve as input devices, translating stimulation from the environment into a syntactic code that the nervous system can then manipulate according to various rules that are either innate or learned. This symbol manipulation is cognition, and its products are additional symbols, some of which might be translated into a form that causes bodily motions or other sorts of behavior. The nervous system, on this account, performs the same function that a CPU does in a computer. For this reason, traditional cognitive science has typically claimed that cognition is computation and that minds are programmes that run on brain hardware. Of particular note in this description of traditional cognitive science is the insular nature of thought. Cognition is cut off from the world in the sense that cognitive processes operate only on symbolic deliverances from the sense organs. Conceivably, were a psychologist able to create sensory code, she could deliver to the nervous system of an organism in her laboratory the same symbols it would have received were it roaming a jungle or a university. In such a case, the organism’s cognitive processes would not differ from those of the freely roaming organism. Because cognition begins and ends with inputs to and outputs from the nervous system, it has no need for interaction with the real world outside it.

… the greatest success stories emerging from traditional cognitive science involve analyses of symbol driven tasks that lend themselves to easy algorithmic description, like playing chess or solving the tower of Hanoi puzzle. In contrast, building a robot that can move about a cluttered environment, which seems to call for cognitive capacities far less impressive than those necessary for chess, is a terribly difficult engineering problem from the perspective of traditional cognitive science. Robots that depend on symbol manipulation to perform activities that would be easy for a cockroach might take days to calculate a course through a busy room and tend to be very slow and inflexible.

It was pointed out by D. Wolpert that treating cognition as a computer algorithm results in a computer that can play good chess but is rubbish at picking up a chess piece, moving it, and stopping the move clock in a reasonable length of time. What seems to us hard is easy, and what seems easy is hard.

To quite unfairly parody the brain-is-a-computer attitude, here is what the extreme sounds like to me. The brain calculates and therefore is a type of general digital computer, so further, it is a Turing machine (or if not can be stimulated by one). Further a machine will some day be created into which a real human brain state can be ‘uploaded’. This electronic copy of someone can operate in a stimulation of its body and environment and thus be immortal. There need be no biochemistry in the whole system. This is the ultimate ‘en-vatted’ brain. (Of course, I do agree that computer science makes large contributions to understanding brains.)

It is all very well to know what embodied cognition is not, but we really want to know what it is. Well, it is about how a biological organism deals with its environment. It is organisms that eat, move, chase, escape and whatever else they do; the brain is only part of the organism and it does not eat or move etc. As soon as we picture an multicellular animal that moves, we know we need some sort of system for the movement. The animal must answer the questions like where am I? Where do I want to be? How can I get there? “Look before you leap”, or according to the old joke, “I can’t yump if I got no place to stood.” What the animal needs is inter-neurons between the sensory neurons and the motor neurons to do some real time, real life type cognition, or in other words it needs a brain. Underneath all the cleverness, cognition is about the survival and flourishing of a real organism in a real world. Embodied cognition is about how the brain is fitted to its body and the environment the body exists in. We can see this embodiment in many ways that may seem disparate, but are all evolved biological adaptations to improve cognition.

In the previous posting I have taken 7 very different sorts of embodiment: posture, facial expression, space, the gut, morals, handedness, language. They are linked below and so are a number of earlier posts that touched this subject.

Links to embodied cognition series:

http://charbonniers.org/2011/06/15/embodied-cognition-posture/

http://charbonniers.org/2011/06/18/embodied-cognition-face/

http://charbonniers.org/2011/06/27/embodied-cognition-space/

http://charbonniers.org/2011/07/06/embodied-cognition-gut/

http://charbonniers.org/2011/07/15/embodied-cognition-morality/

http://charbonniers.org/2011/07/21/embodied-cognition-handedness/

http://charbonniers.org/2011/07/30/embodied-cognition-language/