“Why you need your whole body – from head to toes – to think”:
But why are we so reluctant to consider the brain as just another part of the body? There’s no evidence that the brain is made of a different kind of ‘physical stuff’ from the rest of the body.
We need to start with the cells that compose our humble toes before zooming into the mystery of the brain. Why? Because our cells solve the biggest and most urgent problem of this great and mysterious adventure called life without a brain, and before we had a brain: how to stay alive.
[B]ecause our body is a living system governed by the basic law of self-preservation, this means that all our experiences are necessarily embodied self-experiences. In perceiving and experiencing the world, we ‘smuggle in’ our own fundamental self-survival goals.
A growing body of evidence from neurobiology and biochemistry suggests that cognitive categories such as ‘sensing’, ‘memory’ and ‘learning’ can be applied non-metaphorically to the behaviour of simple organisms such as bacteria.
[A]ll bodily cells and their complex interconnections [are] fundamental for cognition, not just neurons. Among our cells, the immune system plays a very special role, working in tandem with the neural system to help us build the ‘self’.
To put it bluntly: one can experience without thinking, but one cannot think without experiencing. Experiences come to the surface of being through the body, and not through the minds, or some sort of homunculus sitting in our heads, trying to ‘make sense’ of a world he doesn’t see, because the world is hidden in the black box of the scalp. We don’t perceive the world through some sort of inner solitary lens situated in our heads. We perceive the world through every single cell of our body.
Interestingly, that famous Rodin sculpture was supposed to represent not a philosopher, but a poet – Dante, the author of The Divine Comedy. The artist represented the poet sitting at the door of the Inferno and other worlds, contemplating the space in between, the border, the passage between life and death. Perhaps what Rodin was trying to show us was that the meaning of all this lies not hidden inside one’s head, but in what lies in between us, the world, and others.