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Taken together, the studies just mentioned, and thousands more, are the basis for a new view of the mind called embodied cognition. Evidence for this view, which is commonly referred to as just embodiment, has been building for decades and is considered “the most exciting idea in cognitive science right now.”¹⁴

Embodiment proposes a theory of mind that, at its most broad and blunt, says simply this: Descartes was wrong. René Descartes, you may recall, was a 17th century French philosopher who introduced the idea of mind-body dualism, distilled most famously in his dictum, Ego cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). Everything in the world was made of physical matter, Descartes observed, but the mind was different. You can’t ever point to something and say “that is a mind.” As a result, Descartes reasoned, the body was made of flesh and blood and was part of the world, but the mind was not.¹⁵ With this proposition, Descartes changed the course of Western philosophical and scientific thought.

Embodiment is a counterargument to four centuries of mind-body dualism. It contends that we cannot explain the human experience if we have cleaved mind from body, perception from cognition, and action from understanding. We must stitch together what Descartes pulled apart. The psychologist Arthur Glenberg summarizes the embodiment perspective this way: “All approaches to embodiment agree that behavior is produced by more than a disembodied Cartesian mind manipulating symbols according to rules. In other words, embodiment is in strong contrast to cognitive psychology as developed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.”¹⁶ The computational theory of mind has produced decades of solid science. The embodied theory of mind says, hold on, that isn’t the whole story.