Why Your Body Can Jog Your Mind

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...

Commentary: Why Your Body Can Jog Your Mind

Mind Your Body

Method of Production: First the appropriate supplied data files (150000 data points, 500Hz sampling rate, corresponding to 5 minutes of acquisition) were given headers so that they could be recognised as 16 bit aiff 44.1kHz audio files. A Python routine was written to do this; the purpose of this was to permit using them as audio files with realtime audio rate reading and manipulation of the da...

A Flashing Line Can Warp Your Mind

Keeping pace with a constantly changing world requires the ability to make predictions about the future on a variety of timescales. A very basic example of this is the ability to predict the future location of a moving object in the brief time that it takes to perceive and respond to that object. In this issue of Neuron, experiments by Sundberg, Fallah, and Reynolds reveal a potential neural su...

Microbes Manipulate Your Mind

Take Toxoplasma gondii, the single-celled parasite. When mice are infected by it, they suffer the grave misfortune of becoming attracted to cats. Once a cat inevitably consumes the doomed creature, the parasite can complete its life cycle inside its new host. Or consider Cordyceps, the parasitic fungus that can grow into the brain of an insect. The fungus can force an ant to climb a plant befor...