Commentary: The embodied brain: towards a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience

Commentary: The Embodied Brain: Towards a Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience

There is a tension between the embodied approach to cognition (e.g., Varela et al., 1991; Anderson, 2003; Wilson and Foglia, 2011; Myachykov et al., 2014) and the neurocentric way of thinking. It manifests in the research on mirror neurons (Caramazza et al., 2014), action language understanding (Meteyard et al., 2012), or decisionmaking (Kubanek and Snyder, 2015), to mention just a few examples...

Commentary: The embodied brain: towards a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience

Citation: Matyja JR and Dolega K (2015) Commentary: The embodied brain: towards a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged in mind and brain sciences. Radical embodied neuroscience (REN) aims to respond to the problems of mapping particular cognitive functions to narrowly defined brain regions. Accordingly, the proponents of this approach call for research t...

The embodied brain: towards a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience

In this programmatic paper we explain why a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience is needed. We argue for such a claim based on problems that have arisen in cognitive neuroscience for the project of localizing function to specific brain structures. The problems come from research concerned with functional and structural connectivity that strongly suggests that the function a brain region serv...

Radical Embodied Cognitive Science

The Embodied Brain: An Argument from Neuroscience for Radical Embodied Cognition

In this programmatic paper we develop an account of embodied cognition based on the inseparability of cognitive and emotional processing in the brain. We argue that emotions are best understood in terms of action readiness [1, 2] in the context of the organism’s ongoing skillful engagement with the environment [3, 4, 5]. States of action readiness involve the whole living body of the organism, ...