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 to move beyond heuristics of localization and decomposition (Bechtel and Richardson, 1993). In this commentary, we focus solely on the functional connectivist blend of REN. Supporters of this position (see e.g., Kiverstein and Miller, 2015 for an interesting analysis of recent works on emotions and cognition) build their argument on the supposed failure of the project to divide the brain into functionally distinct areas responsible for particular cognitive processes. Drawing upon the work on functional connectivism (Anderson, 2010, 2014), they suggest a paradigm shift in brain research from neuroscience focusing on how the brain implements narrowly defined cognitive functions, to one in which the locus of explanation is determined by the dynamic interactions between the brain and the non-neural body embedded in the organism's ecological niche. We aim to point to two core challenges facing the line of argumentation adopted by the functional connectivist supporters of REN. Firstly, the " how " challenge concerns the lack of guidelines regarding how embodied cognitive neuroscience should proceed and build its explanations without reference to localizable neural underpinnings. This challenge is obviously directed at the more general proposal of a shift toward an embodied understanding of neuroscience. Secondly, the " why " challenge is concerned with the motivation for abandoning (or considering whether to abandon) localization and decomposition, given that current neuroscientific methods of analysis (e.g., network analysis) have meaningfully repurposed these heuristics by drawing on the insights of functional connectivity (Klein, 2012). Finally, we propose that both of these challenges are dissolved by the application of a mechanistic explanation of these phenomena, which not only provides a naturalistically plausible framework (e.