Abstract Thoughts? The Body takes them Literally

Source: www.nytimes.com

ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND, January 2, 2010: Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to recall the past, their bodies leaned slightly backward. While fantasizing about the future, people made a two or three millimeter shift forward. Lynden K. Miles, one of the study’s conductors, said: “It was pleasing that we could take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.” Miles’ study is part of a popular field called embodied cognition, the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own.

Research in embodied cognition has revealed that the body takes language to heart and can be awfully literal-minded. In a recent study at Yale, students who had been cradling a warm beverage were far likelier to judge a fictitious character as warm and friendly then those who had recently held an iced coffee. Researchers at the University of Toronto found that student participants in a colder room were more likely to conjure up memories of rejection. Another study showed that participants asked to think of a personal moral transgression were more likely to request an antiseptic cloth than those instructed to recall a good dead.

In a report published last August in Pyschological Science, Dr. Jostmann and his colleagues at the University of Amsterdam explored the degree to which the body conflates weight and importance. They learned, for example, that when students were told that a book was vital to the curriculum, the students judged the book to be physically heavier. In a series of experiments, they found that study participants given questions on the city of Amsterdam, foreign currency and the level of student participation in university financial affairs to answer on heavier clipboards gave responses of higher “weight”/value.