o Rhythm is similarly tied to the body. Music, exercise, making love, and even our understanding of time is a consequence of our body's natural rhythm - more exactly, our inner biological clock. This natural rhythmic pulse shapes our conception of music, as composer Aaron Copland informed us, as well as our self expressed through physicality.
o The act of drawing or the execution of a painting captures more than just visual qualities of people, objects, and scenes. It is also an expression of the body - hand, limb, and whole body movements - in depicting action as well as stasis, or the weight and "feel" of objects. A three-year-old drawing a circle will use the whole arm to render it. Depiction, one could say, occurs through extensions of bodily activity. In rendering the human form through drawing, an artist captures the "fullness" of the human figure by using her sense of her own body.
o In fact, thinking kinesically can be viewed as the use of our sense of touch in understanding the texture, size, and "feel" of objects. The world-renowned developmental psychologist Jean Piaget described a young child opening and closing her mouth in attempting to "figure out" how to get an object out of a closed matchbox. Children first learn to count using hands and fingers, and begin to enumerate their world using pointing gestures to make a one-on-one correspondence between objects and people. This natural learning mode has made its way into education as hands-on learning. When actual objects are used to demonstrate numerical concepts such as fractions, hands-on learning can be highly effective. When we construct something with our hands, knit or sew, build a tower with blocks or bricks and mortar, fix something around the house like an appliance or car engine, are we not thinking with our body? These suggest that mechanical skills underlie the development of technology and of civilizations.
Manipulating Ideas
Imagine the brain as an apple. The fleshy part of the apple is the thinking part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, the most evolutionarily advanced. The core of the apple is where the emotions and primitive memory functions reside, the subcortex. Researchers have shown that there are neural connections from the cerebellar cortex, in the back of the brain, to the frontal part of the cerebral cortex.
The cerebellar cortex is involved in the coordination of voluntary muscular movement as well as our capacity to maintain balance and equilibrium. The frontal cortex is the meeting place of our emotional life and our thinking part. That's where affective dispatches from the subcortex join information received from the rest of the cerebral cortex. It is where, neuroscientists now believe, our sense of self resides, not to mention our capacity to make decisions and think logically.
The connections between the cerebellar cortex and the frontal cortex suggest a novel hypothesis. A trio of neuroscientists - Henrietta and Alan Leiner, and Robert Dowchallenge the assumption that motor functions such as walking or raising your hand are under exclusive control of the motor part of the cerebral cortex. They believe the neural pathways from cerebellar to frontal cortex also enable the "skilled manipulation of ideas."
Our brain doesn't simply "manage" or "execute" what particular activity our body is engaged in at the moment; it appears that we literally "think" with our body. What we desire, believe, and feel is expressed entirely through our body's actions and movements - that is, we express thoughts and feelings kinesically. We can choose to wave to a friend or not. The skeletal muscles that carry out this task are under voluntary control. And if voluntary muscles are directed by our will, our thought, then they function as an organ of the mind.
"Moving" Experiences
The power to think with our body, then, should also affect our very personality, as it is conveyed through facial expression, gesture, posture, as well as vocal inflection.
Through this means, connection between the mind and the body turns out to be central to our core sense of self and our relationship to others. We know that facial expressivity, controlled by underlying musculature, is the chief conduit of emotions and underlies our ability to read social cues in others. It helps us establish social contact, convey thoughts and feelings, as well as understand another person's inner mental states.
William James, philosopher and psychologist, proposed that bodily changes affect our emotional states. That is, we label our emotional states based on our ability to interpret bodily experiences.
People who suffer from gross loss of bodily sensations, as in spinal cord lesions that disrupt visceral responses, report less intense emotional experiences. Indeed, Robert Zajonc, Ph.D., head of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, has evidence that simply by making the facial expression you abet development of the feeling. Forcing a smile actually puts you in a better mood.
So you can "think" yourself happier by changing the expression on your face, which in turn changes how you feel. Zajonc contends that the relaxing and tightening of facial muscles alters the temperature of the blood reaching the brain, which influences brain areas that regulate emotion.
Kidding Around
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