127. Your Body Knows: The Science of Embodied Cognition

The body remembers the bones. Remember the joints. Remember even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in cells themselves."        -Clarissa Pinkola, Estes

Episode Summary:
In this episode, Dr. Amy Backos explores embodied cognition — the scientific and soulful understanding that our bodies think, remember, and know in ways beyond words. From the comforting scent of freshly baked bread to the gestures we make when we talk, Amy reveals how our physical experiences shape emotion, memory, creativity, and healing.

Drawing from psychology and art therapy, she explains the four main tenets of embodied cognition, the science behind mirror neurons, and even the fascinating concept of “enclothed cognition” — how what we wear influences our mental state. Through personal stories and practical examples, you’ll learn how to deepen your awareness, enhance your creativity, and connect more fully with the wisdom already living in your body.

Key Themes:

• The science and psychology behind embodied cognition
• How sensory memories (like scent and touch) shape emotion
• Mirror neurons and the art of “action understanding”
• How your posture, gestures, and clothing influence your mindset
• Using embodied awareness in art, therapy, and daily life

Takeaway:
Your body is a source of intelligence, insight, and creativity. By tuning in to your sensory experiences and movements, you can access new ways of knowing — and a deeper connection to yourself.

Transcript

127. Your Boody knows: embodied cognition

 The body remembers the bones. Remembers the joints. Remembers even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in cells themselves. This quote from Clarissa Pinkola, Estes Jungian analyst starts us off today, and we take a deep dive into the science behind embodied cognition. 

Welcome in. I'm Doctor Amy Backus, your hostess on this audio creativity journey. I wanted to share a little bit about something that I am loving right now, and maybe you want to try it too. I have created some beautiful art looking charts for myself. I know that tracking our goals has a huge impact. It causes us to think differently. We respond differently, and anything we're measuring will begin to change because we're focusing on it so much. I have some really big goals for the last three months of the year, and so I made some old fashioned charts, checkboxes and thermometers and bar graphs, and I did them on watercolor paper. I've got them pinned on my inspiration board, and I'm tracking what my goals are in this really beautiful visual way. It's reminding me every single day that this is what I'm focusing on. It keeps me from being confused about what I'm working on, and each line that I put in my bar, graph or square that I fill in, I am doing it with my favorite watercolor paints so it looks really cool. It's this ongoing art project slash tracking accountability form for myself and it's going swimmingly. I have a favorite olfactory memory. My grandparents used to make bread once a week, and my mom used to make bread once a week. And the smell of homemade bread is such a pleasing smell to me. It just delights me to no end. I knew there would be hot bread with cold butter and it would be my favorite snack. When I bake bread, or I'm going into a bakery where I can smell that it's bread and not pastries, this smell just brings me right back to a lot of happy childhood memories, and how incredibly loved I was as a child, and how my mom and my grandmother and my grandfather used the culinary experience to show some of that love. So that memory lives in my body. It's an olfactory memory, the smell. And then it's linked to emotion, being cared for and pleasure and real joy. I know that my grandfather really loved participating in the baking process. He did not make dinners, he would make lunches, and he made the bread for lunches. And it's such a cool memory that involves so many people in my family. My grandmother and my mom are amazing cooks and they would make dinner and. But the bread are so good. If you're salivating, so am I. The way that our body holds on to these kinds of memories. Makes sense, doesn't it? It's a smell. It's part of five senses that we have to take in information. And what happens in our brain is there's this memory that gets linked to all the emotions, and then it gets tied to a story that I just told you. And this memory and emotion and just pure pleasure comes up every time I smell that smell. And the brain is really crafted knowledge about what that means to have that smell. This is a great example of embodied cognition, and it's about the memories that are sensory, body somatic and how they interplay with our environment and then other aspects of our memory, including how we might tell a story. I wanted to share some of the science behind embodied cognition, because there's so much information floating around without the scientific backing about how our body remembers. And this is information that's going to help you get more out of your yoga class, or more out of a visit with a friend or going out to dinner. The way that you can use. Embodied cognition or thinking. Basically, brain activity is cognition, the way that you can use that to enhance your experience every single day is really powerful. It also helps researchers understand the best protocols and treatments for people who've experienced trauma, and are linking those sensate memories into the story of their lives and being triggered on a regular basis. So this information is helpful for so many different reasons. So let's get into this. Let's get this started. Embodied cognition is a concept that began around 2002 to be present in the psychological literature. And it's considered this really multifaceted psychological concept. You can ask yourself, how can we quote unquote think and quote unquote know in ways that are different than using words? And because our brain is so thinking dominant, language dominant and focused on words, this is a different way of knowing. And in fact, if you start tapping into your own embodied cognitions, you'll have a much more rich experience, and you'll be able to deeply understand so many more ways that your brain is dealing with situations. It can offer you insights to healing from something that is upsetting, and also feeling more wonder and awe. And it's also been described as, you know, the next significant influence on cognitive psychology and cognitive science. This idea of how the body understands and how the body is cognizant using these theories. Let me give you a brief overview, and I'll tell you some of the core tenets that this idea rests on. Embodied cognition postulates that our thoughts are not just these abstract processes in the brain, but really they're shaped by our physical bodies and our sensory experiences. And by that, I mean, you know, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling. Mhm. And the idea that all of this is happening while it's interacting with the environment. So what's happening around us informs how our body is having cognitions. How our body is knowing isn't just about our sensory experiences. It's about the environment that we are in. Essentially, the body is informing the mind. The body is influencing our perception of things. It's also influencing our memory. The bodily experiences are influencing then our language and emotion. And so often we're focused on what we think, the words we say, and then how we feel. And yet to really deeply understand ourselves, we have to walk it back to these embodied cognitions, these physical ways of knowing. The four main tenets of embodied cognition give you the layout of how all of these ways of knowing that come from our body, get integrated into our memories and our stories. As I go through each one, try and picture how you've learned in these ways, and I'll keep referring back to the bread memory, and also relates to how we're recovering from upsetting memories. So the first core tenet is that cognitive processes are influenced by the body. What that means is our brain is taking in information from the body, and what we think about is coming from the body. It influences the quality and category of our thought. Second, that cognition exists in the service of action. The purpose of thinking is not to think more. The purpose of thinking is to be in your life and take action on something. If you're thinking about a cup of coffee. Well, that's a lovely thought in the morning, and ideally it will inspire you to get up and make your coffee. We have ways of expressing our desires through action, our interests through action. We might desire breakfast and so we'll get up and make breakfast. We have a thought about how nice it would be to see a friend, and rather than just thinking about the friend, we would text them and invite them for lunch. That the purpose of cognition is to do a thing or respond in a way of our choosing. The third tenet of embodied cognition is about how cognition is situated in the environment. That how we think, what we learn, what we know, takes place in an environment. In Act, we would say in a context, it's a contextual science. So this idea that what we think is situated in an environment, we're not sitting on an empty planet, in an empty room thinking thoughts. We're out in the world. We're in our home or going for a walk or at work. There is an environment. There are people engaging with us which will inspire thought as well. And we're not passive recipients of thought. We're actively generating thought through our body and in response to the environment. And the fourth tenet of embodied cognition, which relates really well to our therapy. Is that cognition may occur without internal representation, that your body has ways of knowing without creating a symbol for it. There's not necessarily a word. When I was a kid that would describe the smell of bread, for me, it was an embodied knowing, the smell of the bread walking down the hallway, smelling the bread, getting excited, getting hungry. There was not thoughts of bread, bread, bread running through my head. It was all pure awareness, especially as a small child. The the smell, the urge, the enthusiasm. That's all embodied cognition. Those are the ways of knowing and then leading to action. Right? There's an environment I had to wait until the bread was done baking, and then it had to cool for a few minutes. The environment put barriers, so I couldn't just stick my hand in the oven and grab a piece of bread. So the environment influenced that. I was building. Anticipation in these four tenets emerged in the early 2000, and they still are extremely relevant to how we think about the cognitive sciences and act as the contextual science considers the environment and how we choose to respond in any given situation. Now, later, research starts looking at how this relates to re-enacting these moments and these memories. These higher cognitive abilities really are depending on reenactment of that smell. Oh, I'm smelling the bread again and I'm having a memory. It can also depend on motor representations. There is the act of putting food in our mouth. We learned. Right. That's a habit. Now it's got muscle memory, motor representations. We move our body in a certain way and it invokes a certain feeling. We'll talk more about that in just a little bit. You've likely heard about mirror neurons, and there was a lot of research around the 2015 related to mirror neurons, and really the core electrophysiological findings. That are in support of the mirror neuron theory are they're about action understanding. So it's about an action a movement and then an understanding. And this goes back to um, say a mom holding the baby. The baby says, ooh. And then the mom makes the same shape of an O with her mouth and says, ooh. And then they go back and forth and they're mirroring, mirroring each other, literally. But this is what also shows up when you're in yoga class and your teacher shows you a move that you've never done before, and you watch, and while you're watching, your brain is showing activity in those mirror neurons. Your brain is trying to replicate what you're observing. So you watch your yoga teacher, then you follow along. You try and mimic the move. You look at her, you move your body, and then you're able to, over time, move it closer and closer into that position. So you keep like checking maybe there's a mirror and you check your position in the mirror and then you check the teacher. All of that is active in the mirror neuron space. Think about that idea of action understanding. Taking action is a way of knowing, and I am definitely biased towards go experiment with the woman that I work with inside the membership or in the private consultations. Like let's experiment, let's run an experiment, let's test this out. Let's look for evidence that this might be not true or be true. Mirror neurons are really one of the kind of most influential examples of embodied cognition in the research. I did a search in the worldwide database Mendeley, which gives you access to research from all over the world. It's a fantastic resource for researchers, and I found almost 6000 peer reviewed articles on embodied cognition in the last five years alone. So it's really gaining quite a bit of traction in the cognitive sphere. I always want to make this practical for you. So let's figure out ways that you're using embodied cognition already. And then throughout the week, I want you to pay attention to these kinds of examples. Gesturing while I'm talking to you right now, I am gesticulating wildly with my hands. I am definitely a person who moves her body when she talks, so using hand gestures while talking helps process and convey ideas. So even though you can't see it, it's helping me process the information that I want to get to you. Moving my hands and engaging in conversation to me go together. It helps convey ideas. If you're with a friend and they're talking and they're moving their hands or gesturing, or they make a certain expression with their mouth or their eyes, you understand more about what's happening than if they didn't do those movements. And gesturing really is considered a bridge between abstract thought and physical experience, because words are just words, and adding it as a bridge to these more physical experience helps understand. For both the speaker and the listener. Another example is reading body language, and everyone has body cues that they give, and we can all observe our friends or people on the street moving in a certain way, and we can have a sense of what's going on. So someone who's slouched, slumped over, slouching down lower and lower, you might get the impression that they're feeling sort of down or dejected, whereas someone who has straight posture and chin up, you might have the impression of confidence or certainty. So we use our own body experiences and the mirror neurons to understand the actions as well as the intentions of others. Now, we may not consciously realize it. This happens pretty quickly in our brain, but reading body language and picking up those environmental cues is a really big part of this cognition. Then there's people who are trained specifically to look at body language. So therapists, social workers are considering how body language is part of a therapeutic experience. Another example would be emotional influence, and how we can use our body very intentionally to influence our own emotions and the emotions of others. There's these physical actions that can deeply influence our mental state. The work of Amy Cuddy on body postures is really fascinating. She's looked at how holding our bodies in certain positions can give us a certain mood. One of her ideas turned out to be extremely helpful and pragmatic. Taking a power pose can boost your confidence. So that means before a job interview, you go stand with your hands on your hips like your Wonder Woman, and you'll start to feel more confident. Same works for Superman pose. The idea of allowing your body to have that way of knowing prepares your brain to give a really good interview. There's also some kind of fun research that shows holding a warm drink can make you feel more emotionally warm and towards people that you're talking to. So having a party serve hot cider and people will be able to connect in a more emotionally warm way. There's also these sensory triggered sensations where we hear something out, we smell something, and we have an immediate association to it. And this works in trauma examples where a sound or a smell will act as a cue to someone who has PTSD in their brain. They will be cued to other memories of their trauma. So when they have that bodily experience in their brain, it's been paired with other aspects, and they'll go down a path in the brain that is linking that smell. It goes from a smell to a trigger into a series of memories. This works for all of us. If you go into the dentist office and you hear the whirling of the dentist drill, you might have, you know, a sensation of discomfort in your mouth because you know that the drill goes to your teeth and it feels uncomfortable. Same thing holds true if you open the cat or dog food and your pet comes running. They've really paired things together. And there's. You know, this classic conditioning that happens for the animals, but the sound of the bath running makes my dog run away, doesn't want a bath. So there's like a learning piece to it that we can observe in animals. Next time, experiment in observing that inner peace the the part of you that is able to connect the sound of the drill to discomfort in your mouth, you'll know that it's not merely an association, it's a bodily experience. That embodied cognition also shows up in spatial understanding. And if you are stuck on something, you can use your imagination or past memories as a cue to remind you. So all of my cars in the past had the gas tank on the driver's side, and then the car currently drive has the gas tank on the passenger side. I had to work really hard to override how many decades of pulling up the same way at the gas station to fill up my tank. So, knowing what I know about embodied cognition, I visualized the first time that I came across the problem and drove up to the wrong side. I visualized myself and paid really close attention when I drove up correctly, and I stood on the passenger side. And so now, pulling into the gas station, I pictured myself on the passenger side, filling up my gas tank. There's this bodily memory of visual sensation of me looking at the gas tank on the passenger side. So you can use this spatial understanding or tie things to a memory, and it really helps you change very quickly. There is one variation on the embodied cognition that I've mentioned before, and I want to make sure that you can connect to it here. Researchers in 2012 made a connection from embodied cognition to unclothed cognition, and their research showed that there is systematic influence. That's what they call it, that clothes have on our psychological process. So what you're wearing is part of the environment. That's the the influence on our embodied cognition. What you're putting on your body influences your psychological process. You've heard of dopamine dressing, wearing bright colors to improve your mood. You've heard the hypothesis that wearing athletic clothes gives you a feeling of being more fit or more active. It's also true that dressing a little more formally for your job gives you greater focus. If you're just appropriately, you're going to stick with tasks longer. And by appropriately, I'm referring to one of the early studies with people coming in to take a math exam, and they were all given white coats. Some people told, um, we're told by the researcher, this is a doctor's coat. So, you know, you're here to do complicated things. So this will help. And other people were told, oh, this is a painter's smock. And a third group was told that you can wear this dust cover jacket because we're doing construction. And there is a statistically significant difference between the people who were told, this is the doctor's coat. It's what we wear when we do math. Compared to the other people who were told the same outfit was just for other purposes, those people wearing the quote unquote doctor's coat completed more problems and stuck with the math exam far longer than the other people who gave up earlier. When I first read that study, I was amazed. I was not totally surprised, but I was amazed that someone had been able to put the research to it. When I was getting my master's degree, we had some assignments of show up, just like your future art therapist self, and that's an assignment I give to my doctoral students now come dressed like an art therapist. If you show up in pajamas or athleisure, it's a different sensation than if you show up to be an art therapist. So that original work that I'm citing is from Harjo and Galinsky, and that's from 2012, Journal of the Experimental Social Psychology. So I'm wondering, what are your own examples of embodied cognition? And I would love to hear from you. You can certainly drop a message to me in your, um, DM in Instagram. You can message me in the show notes. I would love to hear where you've noticed this embodied cognition, where you're knowing things that are separate from the words and the language. There's a great book by Pat Allen called Art as a Way of Knowing, and she's really picking up this idea that there are many ways of knowing things that have nothing to do with thinking words or saying words, or writing words, that the ways of knowing are many and diverse, and they're integrated into the environment. Let me give you a couple more examples. Imagine cutting with scissors, just like move your hand across as if you were holding scissors and cutting. And you can now imagine holding a newspaper. You know how it is to pick up and hold a newspaper that you're reading. You can then move your body like you're hugging a tree. You can move your hand like you're turning a key. And I bet you know which direction you have to turn the key to get into your house. You can also imagine hugging a small child. Right. It's a different kind of hug than if you're hugging a friend. A small child gets kind of wrapped around each of these is the physicality of knowing and being in that embodied cognition state allows you to pay better attention to your own creativity. So observing yourself, making art, and seeing what's happening in that process, how do you know when it's time to change colors? How do you know to pick up a different material? What are you learning from that? What emotion is showing up? When you pick up different colors? There's a knowing that comes out of the creative process that we simply cannot get anywhere else. It gives us access, of course, to our unconscious, but it also gives us pretty fast access to this embodied cognition. We're moving our body to make art. The bigger the movements, the more the knowledge becomes available. So now that you know, what will you create? I would love if you would share this podcast with some of your friends. If you leave a review and click five stars, it also makes the podcast show up in a different way for people who are interested. Look forward to speaking with you in the next episode.