Why the Body Still Matters
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The Lived Body and Its Place in Posthuman Society
7. "Consciousness is not something the brain achieves on its own…Consciousness requires the joint operation of the brain, body and world. ... It is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context.“ - Alva Noe, Professor at UC Berkeley from a 2009 lecture.
12. ..."Donna Haraway draws the conclusion that there is no longer a boundary between what is artificial and what is real, that we live as cyborgs in a cyborg culture and that we are in fact now all cyborgs. With the human body increasingly enhanced by new products, activities, technologies and understandings there comes into question the nature of boundaries between nature and culture. The rise of the cyborg makes us question how we define the human body. "By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs." (Donna J. Haraway)
19. "It can be seen that there is a trend in western society towards a certain ‘disembodied’ style of life. We live in houses that protect us ensuring that we do not have to have bodily engagement with the elements and outside world. The wealth of western society means that for most of us we do not experience physical need or distress. We are now freed from many tasks and activities once requiring human physical effort and this can be seen to allow us to transcend the human body and to begin to experience a decorprealized existence."
24. In his research in to this link between embodiment and cognition, professor Alejandro Lleras’s recent experiments have high lighted his theories of how use of body movements influence cognitive problem solving. In an interview given in May 2009 he said:
“ Our manipulation is changing the way people think. In other words, by directing the way people move their bodies, we are – unbeknownst to them – directing the way they think about the problem…..The results are interesting both because body motion can affect higher order thought, the complex thinking needed to solve complicated problems, and because this effect occurs even when someone else is directing the movements of the person trying to solve the problem.”
“People tend to think that their mind lives in their brain, dealing in conceptual abstractions, very much disconnected from the body,” he said. “This emerging research is fascinating because it is demonstrating how your body is a part of your mind in a powerful way. The way you think is affected by your body and, in fact, we can use our bodies to help us think" (Alejandro Lleras, 2009).
