Why the Mind has a Body

Why Your Body Can Jog Your Mind

Philosophical tradition influences the way we think about body and mind (Rogers, 1936). We have a body to move around and a mind to think and to learn (Descartes, 1637). At school, we sit, listen, and read, but we are not allowed to move. However, cognitive science has shown that our body is tightly linked to the mind (Wilson, 2002; Pecher and Zwaan, 2005; Gärtner, 2013). In this paper, we prov...

Why the Mind Wanders

The mind wanders. Ideally, it does not wander so far that it forgets it is reading this chapter. But consciousness does have an inevitable drift, changing its contents moment by moment. The focus seems to move relentlessly, shimmering and fidgeting no matter how hard we may try to concentrate on a thought, preserve an image, or otherwise freeze the instant. Not only does it seem quite impossibl...

Commentary: Why Your Body Can Jog Your Mind

Neuropsychiatry: grasping the body-mind and mind-body problems.

I f the brain is the most complicated material object in the known universe, the mind is its most wondrous product (1). Precisely how the brain generates mental events is an unsolved mystery. The field of neuropsychiatry concerns itself with psychopathology caused by structural brain disease, brain electrical malfunction, and extrinsic toxic metabolic disturbances. As such, neuropsychiatry is i...

The Body-Mind Relation

[Michael Polanyi's "The Body-Mind Relation" was a paper delivered at a 1966 conference sponsored by the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences and the University of California, San Diego .. The conference and the book that grew out of it, Man and the Sciences of Man, edited by William R. Coulson and Carl R. Rogers (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Pu...