Movement

We think with our bodies. This isn’t metaphor. Cognition isn’t confined to the brain — it’s distributed through nervous system, muscles, posture, gesture. How you hold yourself affects how you feel. How you move affects what you perceive. The body isn’t a vehicle carrying a mind; mind and body form a single system.

The philosophical tradition mostly ignored this. Descartes separated mind from body. Cognitive science treated the brain as a computer processing abstract symbols. But embodied cognition research increasingly shows that thought depends on having a body and moving it through space.

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Consider gesture. People gesture even when on the phone, when no one can see them. Preventing gesture impairs performance on spatial reasoning tasks. The hands think. Children learn math better when they gesture while explaining. The movement isn’t communication — it’s cognition.

Balance affects judgment. People standing on unstable platforms rate situations as less stable, relationships as less secure. Temperature affects social judgments: holding warm cups makes us rate others as warmer. These aren’t flaws in reasoning; they’re features of how embodied minds work.

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Somatic disciplines develop the body as an instrument of attention and skill. Yoga, martial arts, dance, Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais — each tradition cultivates bodily awareness and capability. The premise: the body can learn, and its learning transforms experience.

Most people live largely unaware of their bodies until pain demands attention. Somatic practices reverse this: sustained attention to sensation, movement, posture. The benefits extend beyond physical health. Athletes, musicians, surgeons, craftspeople — anyone whose work requires skilled physical action — develop perceptual capacities that serve their practice.

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Modern life compresses movement. We sit at desks, in cars, on couches. The range of motion narrows. The body adapts to this constraint — muscles shorten, ranges reduce, options diminish. The somatic traditions suggest this isn’t just physical impoverishment but cognitive impoverishment.

Moving differently may enable thinking differently. This is the claim behind walking meetings, standing desks, movement breaks. The evidence is mixed but the intuition is persistent: stagnant bodies correlate with stagnant minds. Whether the relationship is causal, and in which direction, remains open.

Related: [[feldenkrais]], [[alexander-technique]], [[proprioception]], [[embodied-cognition]]