°°°°~x§x-<@>
For a long time, the dominant metaphor for the mind has been that of a computer—a complex information processor housed inside the skull, receiving inputs from the senses and producing behavioral outputs. This image of a “brain in a vat” has shaped not only science fiction but also much of our everyday thinking about who we are. We tend to see our minds as separate from our bodies, and our bodies as mere vehicles for a disembodied consciousness.
This model, however, is being profoundly challenged. A growing wave of research from philosophy and cognitive science is painting a much richer and more dynamic picture. This new view sees the mind as fundamentally embodied, embedded in a world of action, and deeply interconnected with its environment. It suggests that thinking is not something that happens exclusively between our ears, but is an activity that extends through our entire being and even into the tools we use.
This post will explore four revelations from the frontiers of cognitive science, each of which dissolves a long-held boundary: between mind and body, between discrete emotions, between humanity and life, and between the self and its tools. Each one reveals a deeper, more integrated understanding of our own minds, moving beyond common sense to show how we are more than just brains in vats.
1. Your memories aren’t just in your head—they’re in your hands.
Of all our mental faculties, memory feels the most personal, the most “in our head.” But what if its deepest records aren’t stored in the brain’s archives, but are written in the language of the body itself? This is the core insight behind “body memory”—not the explicit recollection of past events, but the acquired dispositions, skills, and habits stored in the body’s capacity for action. As philosopher Thomas Fuchs defines it, body memory is the totality of bodily capacities developed over a lifetime.
Think of the muscle memory involved in riding a bicycle or the effortless way a pianist’s fingers find the right keys. These skills are not retrieved as a set of instructions; they are re-enacted through a body that has learned and remembers. This idea is surprisingly old, recognized even by thinkers like René Descartes, who is often associated with a sharp mind-body dualism. He observed:
Thus, for example, lute players have part of their memory in their hands, because the facility to move and bend their fingers in various ways which they have acquired by habit, helps them to remember passages that require them to move their fingers in that way in order to play them.
Modern experiments confirm this deep connection. A 2018 study by Camus et al. found that the specific type of physical action a person performs has a direct effect on memory performance, showing that memory is intertwined with the anticipated consequences of our movements. This supports the idea that the movements we make in the present moment actively shape how we recall the past.
This insight reframes memory not as something we passively access, but as something we actively re-enact. Our bodies don’t just carry our brains around; they hold a deep, practical memory of our history of interactions with the world. This re-enactment is not just physical, but deeply affective; the way our bodies hold the past is inseparable from how they generate the shifting patterns of our emotional lives.
2. Your emotions aren’t pre-installed programs—they’re self-organizing weather patterns.
Are emotions fixed programs we all share, or are they something more personal, fluid, and complex? A new perspective suggests our feelings have more in common with weather than with software. Popular psychology often presents emotions as a small set of pre-installed, universal programs hard-wired into our brains—anger, fear, joy, sadness, and disgust. This “basic emotions” theory suggests these feelings are universal building blocks for our entire affective life.
However, this view is increasingly being questioned. Researcher Giovanna Colombetti points out that the common list of “basic” emotions is somewhat arbitrary and, contrary to popular belief, was never proposed by Darwin. The idea that our emotional lives are built from a few fixed, pre-packaged programs is proving to be too rigid to capture the sheer complexity and nuance of how we actually feel.
An alternative perspective, drawing from dynamical systems theory, offers a more fluid and powerful metaphor. In this view, an emotional episode is not like a software program being run, but more like a weather pattern, such as a thunderstorm. A storm isn’t a single “thing”; it’s a temporary, self-organizing pattern that recruits various processes—wind, temperature, pressure, moisture—into a highly integrated configuration. Similarly, an emotional episode recruits and integrates various processes (neural, muscular, autonomic) into a coherent, but transient, state.
This perspective moves away from a rigid, “one-size-fits-all” model. It accounts for the vast complexity, context-dependency, and fluid nature of our emotional lives, seeing them not as a set of discrete programs but as ever-shifting patterns of mind, body, and world interacting together. This intimate dance between organism and world isn’t limited to our emotions; it is the very basis of cognition itself, a “sense-making” activity shared by all of life.
3. Thinking isn’t just for humans—all of life is engaged in “sense-making.”
One of the most radical ideas emerging from the enactive approach to cognitive science is that cognition—the process of knowing—is not limited to human-level problem-solving or abstract thought. The core tenet of this approach is that “all living systems are cognitive systems.”
In this expanded context, cognition is defined as “sense-making.” This is the activity of an organism bringing forth a world that is significant for it, based on its needs, concerns, and capacities for action. An organism doesn’t passively receive information from a pre-given world; it actively creates a world of meaning, a “Umwelt” (phenomenal self-world) as described by Jacob von Uexküll in the 1900s. The classic example, is the tick. The tick’s world is almost entirely defined by just two things: the smell of butyric acid and warmth. These are not just neutral data points; for the tick, they signify the presence of a mammal—its source of food and its entire reason for being. The tick makes sense of the world in a way that is relevant to its survival.
The philosopher Evan Thompson, a key figure in the enactive movement, offers a clear definition of this broad conception of cognition:
“Cognition” in this context ought to be understood broadly, to refer to “behavior or conduct in relation to meaning and norms that the system itself enacts or brings forth on the basis of its autonomy”
The implication of this idea is profound. It suggests that the roots of mind are not confined to the complex brains of vertebrates but are co-extensive with life itself. From the simplest bacterium to the most complex mammal, all life is engaged in a continuous process of creating meaning. But for humans, this ancient process of bringing forth a world is now deeply mediated by the powerful tools we’ve created—tools that are not passive objects, but active participants in our cognition.
4. Your phone isn’t just a tool—it’s a “pharmakon” that changes how you think.
The boundaries we draw aren’t just between ourselves and the living world, but also between ourselves and the things we create. We tend to see our technologies, from hammers to smartphones, as neutral tools—passive objects that we pick up to accomplish a task and put down when we’re finished, leaving us unchanged. But this view misses the deep and active role that technology plays in shaping our minds.
The philosopher Bernard Stiegler offered a more powerful concept: technology is a pharmakon, a Greek word for a substance that is simultaneously a cure and a poison. A substance can be medicinal in one dose and toxic in another, and the same is true for technology. Our devices are not neutral; they are “psychoactive” and fundamentally alter our ways of being.
Stiegler argued that technologies, especially digital ones, act as a form of “tertiary retention”—an externalized, collective memory. Think of the internet, your photo library, or your saved contacts. This external memory doesn’t just store information; it actively conditions our perception and shapes our future desires (“protension”). Following Martin Heidegger, the philosopher Yuk Hui notes that cybernetics is not just a technology but a “completed metaphysics”—a new way of ordering and revealing the entire world.
This means our phones, laptops, and apps are not passive instruments. They are active participants in our cognitive lives, shaping our attention, structuring our memory, and mediating our social interactions. Recognizing technology as a pharmakon requires a critical awareness of its dual nature. It calls for a conscious “technopolitics”—a critical awareness and deliberate engagement with the tools that are, for better and for worse, actively remaking the landscape of our minds.
Conclusion: Where Do You End?
The journey from a simple, brain-centric view of the mind to a more complex and integrated one is a radical shift in perspective. It asks us to see our minds not as isolated computers, but as processes that are fundamentally embodied in our actions, dynamically organized like weather patterns, enacted through a process of sense-making shared by all life, and deeply entangled with the technologies we create.
These four revelations don’t just update an old model; they dismantle it. The primary casualty of this new scientific paradigm is our conventional sense of a singular, contained self. The neat boundaries we once drew between mind and body, self and world, nature and technology, all begin to blur. This invites us to reconsider the very nature of who we are. If our minds are woven from our actions, our environment, and the tools we use, where do “we” truly begin and end?
°°°°~x§x-<@>