Beyond the Brain - How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds

Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds is an eye-opening and thought-provoking book that sets out a much-needed contribution to the study of the relationship between animals, cognition and the environment. The volume provides remarkable new insights into how to understand animal (including human) behavior, raises interesting questions about the role of environmental affordances in the emergence of complex cognitive processes and provides the reader with a refreshing break from the wearisome excess of brain-centric literature that still pervades much of the debate surrounding evolutionary psychology. In embracing the theoretical framework endorsed by proponents of embodied cognition, Barrett adopts an ecological approach to psychology that aims at challenging any attempt to describe complex thinking and flexible behavior as mere by-products of internal cognitive activity. Ecological approaches in psychology typically provide a powerful and coherent alternative to standard information-processing paradigms [see Marr (1982); Poggio (1981) just to name a few], that postulate the existence of distinct and hierarchical theoretical levels to understand complex information-processing tasks such as visual perception. [Rowlands (2006), p.8]. Ecological approaches resist these computational understandings of visual perception and rather explain perceiving as " an achievement of the individual, not an appearance in the theater of his consciousness; as a keeping-in-touch-with the world and experiencing of things rather than a having of experiences; as an awareness-of instead of just awareness ". Perceiving, they continue, may be awareness of something in the environment or something in the observer or both at once, but there is no content of awareness independent of that of which one is aware ". [Gibson (1979), p.239]. On these accounts, visual perception is not therefore the mere reception of stimuli from the environment followed by the construction of internal representations, but rather an active sampling of the optic array, driven by environmental affordances 1 , that allows an animal to discover the information present in the world. (p.106). In endorsing this " Gibsonian " perspective, Barrett successfully merges and deeply interweaves different disciplines (ranging from ethology and ecological psychology to artificial intelligence, robotics and philosophy) to create an interdisciplinary space for the study of the evolution of cognition that ultimately calls into question any orthodox, brain-bounded, purely intracranialist understanding of the nature of the human mind. Barrett's criticism is essentially directed at those views that deny any possibility of body-brain integration. Such views, she notices, find both their communal ancestor …