It's time to jettison antiquated ideas about the relationship between mindand body. Your body "thinks" just as much as your mind
Imagine the following scenario. You have lost the keys to your car, probably quite a common occurrence for many of us.
You are in a hurry to get to the store and pick up some groceries for dinner. Only you seem to have misplaced your car keys and just can't remember where you put them earlier in the day. You scratch your head. Then you unfurl your fingers, one by one, using them as external memory prompts to enumerate the places you've been and rule out where you may have left them. You visualize the rooms where you spent the better part of the afternoon and then literally retrace your steps, looking atop and underneath chairs and tables.
Your facial muscles register frustration as you ask a family member for help, using your motor articulatory apparatus - that is, your vocal tract - to wonder aloud, "Now where did I leave those keys?" At some point, you throw up your hands in disgust as you recognize the futility of your search. Finally it dawns on you that you probably left your keys in the car. You saunter outside, delighted to retrieve them.
In every case, movement or action of the body ran parallel with thought and emotion. You scratched your head while thinking, calculated with your fingers as a kind of bodily abacus, followed your thoughts on foot from room to room, expressed your feelings through facial and bodily gestures and vocal intonation, and communicated your thoughts through your voice. Activity or motion always accompanied thought and emotion. Is this just a happy coincidence? Or do we really think with the body?
Ordinarily we consider the thinking process a purely mental activity. As our 17th century philosopher friend Rene Descartes declared, "I think, therefore I am" just a mind separate from my body. Almost all of us still believe this is the way things work, and take it for granted that mind and body are totally different things. Our popular ways of speaking even signify this. We refer to athletes as "dumb jocks." We denigrate thinking types as "nerds" or "eggheads." We regard these two realms as separate and unequal.
We are caught up in the persistent Cartesian dualism that we are comprised of two fundamentally different things - an extended substance (body) and an unextended substance (mind). But what if the mind and the body are really two different aspects of the same thing? What if the brain systems for movement and the brain systems for thought and emotion are intimately connected to each other so that we are literally a "thinking (and feeling) body?"
As it turns out, there are indeed extensive neural connections in the brain from those parts that oversee movement, equilibrium, and balance of the body to those parts that direct - thought and emotion. This suggests a novel hypothesis. Our brain doesn't simply manage or regulate the body in the way that a chief executive manages a corporation. The brain doesn't direct the body and the body follows slavishly. What the brain communicates to the body depends on what information the body has imparted to the brain and vice-versa. The two are in an indissoluble union. The implication is that we literally think with our bodies, that is, we think kinesically.
Thinking Kinesically
Consider some ways we think with the body in everyday experience:
o Athletes and dancers think through their bodies in returning a tennis serve, for example, or in completing a complicated dance step. They can capture these "thoughts" on paper using a kinesic language. The coach records the diverse positions of players on a team and their organized movements in a playbook. The choreographer chronicles the steps and body motions in dance notation.
o We "reason" with our hands when we are playing or improvising at the piano or any other instrument. The idea is suggestively captured in the advertisement that says, "Let your fingers do the walking."
o Similarly, when we "speak" with our hands we are using a gestural language. Gesture often accompanies speech - but it also substitutes for it. When deaf persons communicate with each other through sign language, they articulate their thoughts and feelings through movement and gesture in place of vocalizations.
o We also use "body language" in interacting with others, whole-body movements expressed through posture. in America, for example, men communicate power and status by standing obliquely to one another during conversation. Women strive for interpersonal connection and are more inclined to face one another. Without even being aware of it perhaps, they are using the body to disclose intention.
o Moreover, the voice carries important emotional information in the way we intone what we say. The vocal sounds and their inflections are, of course, a part of the body; they originate in the larynx and are products of our motor articulatory apparatus. We can be sarcastic or surprised; both are conveyed by tone of voice. Such vocal prosody operates like an emotional subcarrier signal, much the way the FM signal is transmitted to our radios. Clearly, we express our thoughts and feelings through the tone of our voice.
o Facial muscles, too, carry a tremendous amount of information about our emotional life and what we may be thinking. Surprise on the face in response to a joke suggests that we understand its intellectual content at the same moment we apprehend its emotional dissonance. We appreciate the wisecrack through our body's reaction to it.
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