Embodied Cognition

Historical Context

Embodied cognition is often conceptualized as a corrective or even a replacement hypothesis to earlier models of cognition. In particular, it challenges two common paradigms. First, the embodied approach rejects mind-body dualism (also known as Cartesian dualism, from the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes). Rather than conceiving mental processes as something ontologically distinct from the flesh, it views the two as inextricably connected. Second, the embodied perspective modifies the modern paradigm of cognitivism, a position that views the mind in computational terms as a device for the processing and manipulation of symbolic representations. While it does not deny the importance of such higher-order processes in human cognition, the embodied view emphasizes the corporeal grounding of symbolic thought, specifically the relationship between sensorimotor systems and the environment. While certain aspects of contemporary embodied cognition have historical roots in antiquity and resonate with diverse thought systems around the world, the modern research program dates to the 1980s and 1990s.

Disciplinary Perspectives and Application to Music

Evidence for embodied cognition comes from diverse disciplinary orientations, including linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, among other fields. Some music scholars have incorporated perspectives from this burgeoning field into music theory, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music psychology research.

Insights from cognitive linguistics have proven influential to music scholarship. Conceptual metaphor theory, developed by linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson, posits that conceptual thought is enabled by the ubiquitous use of metaphor in human language. Founded upon basic bodily patterns (or “image schema”) arising from perception, action, and proprioception, metaphors structure cognition by allowing humans to map concrete experiences in the sensorimotor domain (source) onto subjective experience (target). To illustrate, the primary metaphor “knowing is seeing” relates understanding to vision (e.g., “I see what you mean,” “shedding light on the issue”); the complex metaphor “love is a journey” conceptualizes long-term love relationships as motion through space (e.g., “look how far we've come,” “the relationship is not going anywhere”). [Page 373]Music theorists—including Arnie Cox, Richard Echard, Steve Larson, Janna Saslaw, and Lawrence Zbikowski—have applied this theory of metaphor to pitch relationships (e.g., notes get “higher” and “lower”), musical motion and temporality (e.g., the experience of music “moving”), the interaction of music and text, and affect, among other dimensions of music.

Ecological psychology is another important perspective for the embodied cognitive sciences. Developed by psychologist James J. Gibson (1966, 1979), the theory holds that perception is the immediate and direct consequence of sensorimotor engagement with the environment. Different kinds of material percepts provide the perceiver with “affordances” for different kinds of bodily interaction. This model stands in contrast to the information-processing paradigm, which views perception and cognition as largely symbolic and representational. For example, musicologists (e.g., Eric F. Clarke, Rolf Inge Godøy, David Lidov, and Marc Leman) have drawn on perspectives from ecological acoustics to argue that musical meaning is grounded in the contingencies of human perceptual systems, while ethnomusicologists have argued that ecological, embodied modes of perception play a constitutive role in “deep listening” (Judith Becker), music-induced trance (Gilbert Rouget), and musical instrument performance practices (John Baily).

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