Your embodied cognition refers to how your body contributes to your thinking. First, the body influences how the cerebral cortex (of the head brain) of the human brain acquires, evaluates, and processes information. Second, the body itself has a completely different way of thinking, called the body-brain. It experiences and processes the wholeness of its experiences through the senses and metaphors rather than language. When looking for what will make you smarter, first turn to what’s already available – your embodied cognition. Learn to access and use the wisdom of your body-mind.
How the Body Relates to Your Mind
The mind is not a product of the head and the head alone. An important part of the mind resides in the body and the subconscious. Humans are born sensory-motor beings who initially and continually throughout their lives learn through experience. This experience is used to construct a second brain, the head brain, which takes about 25-28 years to fully develop. Still, the body remains the sole location for a significant amount of information and wisdom. Arguably, a larger portion of the mind resides in the body in the form of inner wisdom.
Furthermore, 80 percent of a person’s nerve fibers are dedicated to communication from the body to the brain. The body or embodied mind informs and influences the analytical mind through neuro-signaling, biochemistry, and physics in an iterative process. Together, the embodied brain and head brain make up the whole brain. Therefore, embodied cognition is a significant component of what undergirds a person’s smarts.
Sorting Out How Intelligence, Smarts, and Cognition Differ
A whole series of terms are used to describe how a person thinks. Though these terms are similar, they differ in significant ways. A quick review of definitions illustrates how each can influence decision-making and navigation of daily life in different ways. Or, in other words, how smart a person is.
Define Intelligence
According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, intelligence is “..the ability to learn, understand, or deal with new or trying situations.” In addition, it’s “…the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests).” An example is the intelligence quotient (IQ).
As these two definitions imply, the word intelligence stresses a person’s ability to learn and apply new knowledge and skills. The focus is on the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex, the language-based, thinking, and analytical brain. Also important, it’s measurable.
Define Smart
An article from Brainmanager makes insightful offers the following remarks about the word smart. “Being smart entails practical wisdom, adaptability, and the ability to navigate real-world situations effectively.” This includes “an intuitive understanding of social dynamics, negotiation skills, and the ability to make informed decisions swiftly.” In other words, smart is inherently practical and extends beyond intellect.
Notice that smart doesn’t mention being “book smart.” A smart person could know how to operate and get things done, but not necessarily have a high IQ or advanced academic degree. Similarly, intelligence doesn’t necessarily imply smarts. Intelligent people can be impractical and ineffective in many different areas of their lives. And, they can do stupid things.
Define Cognition
According to the Oxford Dictionary, cognition is “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.” These senses include the five well-known ones (vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell) as well as proprioception (tracking the body in space) and interoception (sensing the internal state of the body). Using your power of interception, you tap into your heart-brain and gut-brain intelligence as well.
The dictionary goes on to say it is “a perception, sensation, idea, or intuition, resulting from the process of cognition.” Thus, cognition embraces all of your seven senses, six psychic or “clair” senses (e.g., claircognizance, clairvoyance, or clairsentience), and other innate human capacities.
Interestingly, both smart and cognition embrace processes and knowledge that are difficult to measure or immeasurable, while intelligence doesn’t, at least not explicitly. The former two include sensory-motor awareness as well as intuition and other forms of spontaneous knowing and the ability to adapt to real-life circumstances and events.
Not everyone consciously and deliberately accesses all these information sources within the body, but they make up an important share of cognition nonetheless.
Define Embodied Cognition
Embodied cognition is an evolving concept within the sciences. While some Eastern schools of thought have long embraced the wholeness of mind, body, and spirit, Western science has a long history of resistance. However, interest in embodied thinking has grown from the late 20th century onward.
Today embodied cognition can be defined as “the idea that the body (sensations and bodily experiences) is essential to our understanding of the world, the construction of conceptual knowledge, as well as meaning formation.”
You have to get beyond the notion that cognition is limited to the head and, more specifically, the cerebral cortex. Once you do this and tap into your body using all of your senses to access more of your innate capacities and wisdom, you’ll greatly expand your perception, develop a more confident understanding, and increase your overall smarts.
Working With Your Whole Brain and Whole Mind
The idea is to blend the sensory information you retrieve from the body with the thoughts of your analytical or thinking mind of the head brain. Importantly, body-derived information ought not to be treated as a residual concern or simply additive or worse yet entertaining. After all, it’s continuously creating and influencing the information stored in the head brain.
When you embrace the value of the whole brain and the whole mind, you access more information and resources from within, greatly widen your perspective, and increase your options and potential. You’ll be more self-resourced, giving you more personal power. This is what will make you smarter.
3 Everyday Issues Embodied Cognition Helps You Manage
Embodied cognition benefits you in countless ways. Some are immediately relevant to practical everyday living. These three common everyday issues are examples of how you can apply embodied cognition to make you smarter so that you manage your life better and with greater confidence.
1. Untangling Your Emotions, Feelings, and Thoughts
People often become muddled when they try to sort out their emotions, feelings, and thoughts. This is because the three are related but still distinct.
Emotions are instinctual biochemical and energetic signals alerting the body to adjust to change. You experience these signals as your emotions, a sense within the body such as tightness in your chest or gut.
In contrast, feelings are the labels you assign to your experiences when you think about them. In other words, feelings are thoughts about the emotional experience. (For more, see my blog post on how emotions are different from feelings)
Fortunately, when you become adept at distinguishing the three, you can more easily untangle them and respond to a change with greater clarity and ease. This is clear embodied cognition.
For example, when you go inside the body, you can be aware of the sense of sadness (an emotion) as it arises within you. Compare this to thinking something is or could be sad (a thought). Put another way, you know with certainty you’re in a state of sadness (emotion) because of the sense of it. Analyzing a situation (thinking) and deciding that you feel sad is a thought in itself and thus less certain or real.
Embodied cognitive clarity helps you sort out a cluttered or confused state or one that seems to have no obvious or preferred solution. Thus, it’s powerful for decision-making, prioritizing, and engaging constructively on emotionally charged issues with loved ones, coworkers, and others.
2. Standing in Your Power and Projecting Your Authentic Self to Others
Everyone has an impression of how they hold themselves and how others see them. They sense how they feel and are perceived as competent, appreciated, admired, desirable, undesirable, lonely, or defeated. If you place your attention on this, you’ll notice you can sense this as well. This is how you embody these various experiences and portray them.
Interestingly, just as your mood influences your posture and what you sense on the inside, you can intentionally choose a particular posture or persona such as confidence, and your mood will tend to follow your body’s signals and align with your intention (i.e., to be confident). Using your embodied cognition, you can mold your mood, persona, and presence out of your intentions.
In addition, the mirror neurons of the people around you reinforce the power of your posture and its underlying intention. Mirror neurons are innate in humans. They respond to the actions of others and recreate the sense of the action within you so that you can understand or empathize with the other person.
Therefore, other people via their motor neurons will likely consciously or unconsciously pick up on your vibe, internalize the sense of it, and then recognize what you are projecting. In this case, confidence. Thus, they perceive you as confident, validating you and further boosting your apparent confidence.
With enough positive stimulus from others, you’ll believe it too. Then, you can stand in your power and project your authentic self to others.
3. Knowing With Confidence What You Want or Need
Because embodied cognition gives you the whole sense of a situation, different options, aspects of a relationship, and even simple choices like what to eat or which movie to see, it brings clarity and greater certainty to decision points.
Turning inward and tuning into your embodied sensory information opens your focus to more, sharpens your perception, and solidifies your commitment to particular choices. This helps you:
- Puzzle through tough or complicated decisions
- Better manage and improve self-care for better health and well-being
- Identify and follow your North Star
- Choose friends and lovers
- Show up more authentically and confidently
Your embodied cognition has been with you your whole life. It’s created the head brain’s ‘thinking mind” that you rely on every day to live your life and survive. And, it resonates with your personal truth. How could it not make you significantly smarter – if you listen to it?
