Thinking in action

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Tversky ◽  
Angela Kessell
Keyword(s):  
Mental Representations ◽  
The Body ◽  
Action Representation ◽  
Arbitrary Mapping ◽  
Visual Spatial ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the body and the world. Several studies reveal ways that people alone or together use gesture and marks on paper to structure and augment their thought for comprehension, inference, and discovery. The studies show that the mapping of thought to gesture or the page is more direct than the arbitrary mapping to language and suggest that these forms of visual/spatial/action representation are used to “translate” language into mental representations. It is argued that actions in space create patterns in the world that reflect abstractions, that the actions are incorporated into gestures and the patterns into diagrams, a network that integrates gesture, action, the designed world, and abstraction dubbed spraction.

scholarly journals Re-engaging the spirit: engaging traditional Anishinabek healing beliefs into an architecture for addiction wellbeing centres

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madison Dozzi-Perry
Keyword(s):  
Addiction Treatment ◽  
The Body ◽  
Spiritual Awareness ◽  
Cold Environments ◽  
Design Practices ◽  
The World ◽  
Current Design ◽  
Treatment Facilities ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Western Perspective

Current design practices for addiction treatment facilities reflect that of the western perspective on health, providing sterile, monolithic and cold environments. The quest for cleanliness, static and conditioned spaces robs the user of the richness of an engaging experience, isolating them into a sealed box. We further numb and anesthetize patients, disembodying them from the world and hindering their abilities to achieve physical, mental, emotional and spiritual awareness. This disengagement of the natural, human and spiritual realms proliferates the problems facing people with addiction. This thesis proposes an engagement of Anishinabek healing and wellbeing principles to inform the design of addiction healing spaces that stimulate the users, re-engages and enhances one’s awareness and understanding of one’s self, other beings and place in the world. By incorporating these principles into design, architecture can begin to re-engage the mind, the body, the heart and the soul of people suffering from addiction wellbeing issues.

scholarly journals El dolor de los marcianos. Un análisis fenomenológico contra Rorty

2014 ◽  
pp. 313
Author(s):  
Agustín Serrano de Haro
Keyword(s):  
Mental Representations ◽  
Physiological State ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Lived Body ◽  
Objective State ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Phenomenological Point ◽  
Person Experience ◽  
Sobre Todo

Mi ensayo trata de mostrar que es insostenible la ficción de Rorty de una civilización avanzada científicamente cuyos habitantes no sintieran el dolor como una vivencia sufrida en primera persona y que únicamente lo captaran como una excitación objetiva de su sistema nervioso. Entre otras dudas relativas a que esa captación objetiva y exacta se hallaría en indefinida reconstrucción teórica y a que ella no puede ser la experiencia primera del dolor ni siquiera en esa otra galaxia, aduzco que tener un estado fisiológico no equivale por principio a captarlo y que captar determinados rasgos objetivos no puede equivaler por principio a sufrir, a padecer. Concluyo señalando que Rorty, en su empeño por impugnar las representaciones mentales, pierde de vista cómo la experiencia del dolor manifiesta sobre todo la condición originaria del cuerpo vivido.My paper tries to show that Rorty’s fiction of a scientifically developed civilization whose inhabitants should not feel pain as a first-person experience, but would grasp it rather as an objective state of their nervous system, is unsustainable from a phenomenological point of view. I point out several doubts concerning the facts that such an objective apprehension would be in an indefinite process of theoretical reconstruction, and that even in that other galaxy it could not be valid as the original pain situation (for example, among children). But then I focus on the principles that to have a physiological state cannot be equiva-lent to grasping it, and second that to grasp several objective features cannot be equivalent to suffering or to undergoing pain. I conclude by suggesting that Rorty’s eagerness to discard mental representations made him neglect the lived body as implied in everyday experience: the body, not the mind, comes to the fore in the experience of pain.

scholarly journals Re-engaging the spirit: engaging traditional Anishinabek healing beliefs into an architecture for addiction wellbeing centres

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madison Dozzi-Perry
Keyword(s):  
Addiction Treatment ◽  
The Body ◽  
Spiritual Awareness ◽  
Cold Environments ◽  
Design Practices ◽  
The World ◽  
Current Design ◽  
Treatment Facilities ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Western Perspective

Current design practices for addiction treatment facilities reflect that of the western perspective on health, providing sterile, monolithic and cold environments. The quest for cleanliness, static and conditioned spaces robs the user of the richness of an engaging experience, isolating them into a sealed box. We further numb and anesthetize patients, disembodying them from the world and hindering their abilities to achieve physical, mental, emotional and spiritual awareness. This disengagement of the natural, human and spiritual realms proliferates the problems facing people with addiction. This thesis proposes an engagement of Anishinabek healing and wellbeing principles to inform the design of addiction healing spaces that stimulate the users, re-engages and enhances one’s awareness and understanding of one’s self, other beings and place in the world. By incorporating these principles into design, architecture can begin to re-engage the mind, the body, the heart and the soul of people suffering from addiction wellbeing issues.

scholarly journals The Thinking Body: a Study of the Architectural Ramifications of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Rendering of the Human Body's Capacities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Karan August
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
Phenomenological Experience ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

<p>Phenomenology offers a conceptual framework that connects and strengthens the architect' s intuitive understanding of the human experience of space with the theorist's more critical approach. Phenomenology is an ideal vehicle for architectural theorists to avoid the friction between first-hand or subjective experience and generalised or abstracted accounts of experience. In this thesis I extract an account of the human experience of space that is implicit in the Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Pontys work. I consider how this understanding has been employed in architectural scholarship and practice. In particular, I argue that the human body renders the richness of space through deliberate engagement with the indeterminate and independent possibilities of the world. In other words, as the body intentionally engages with the world, it synthesises objects that create determinate spatial situations. I account for Merleau-Ponty's depiction of the body' s non-rule governed, non-reflective, normative directiveness towards spaces and elements, and label it the thinking body. Furthermore I examine how the philosophical theory of Merleau-Ponty is represented in the explicitly theoretical works of Juhani Pallasmaa. In turn I then consider how the thinking body is physically and conceptually realised in the buildings of Carlo Scarpa. Finally I find that Juhani Pallasmaa's description of the phenomenological experience of space is incompatible with Merleau-Ponty's. The strategic importance of these different accounts emerges when projecting their implications for designed space. Pallasmaa' s account points towards an architecture that prioritises sensory experiences synthesised by the mind. The design focus of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy leads to spatial practices in line with Carlo Scarpa, that are sympathetic to the causal qualities of an intentional bodily engagement with spatial situations. In accord with Merleau-Ponty I argue that human body is our medium for the world and as such creates the spatial situation we engage with from a formless manifold of possibilities.</p>

scholarly journals IMAGE OF THE FUTURE: DESIGN AND REPRESENTATION

2020 ◽  
pp. 84-95
Author(s):  
M. K. Kremenchutska ◽  
І. V. Dobrynina
Keyword(s):  
Mental Representations ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Future Design ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Images Of The Future ◽  
The Impact ◽  
World Image

Problem statement. It is shown that the main scientific vectors of the study of the personality image of the future can be considered philosophical, sociological, psychophysiological and psychological. In psychology, the future is revealed as a property of the mental. It is determined that the psychological phenomenology of the image of the future is that it is a holistic view of the individual about the future. It is in the mind and constantly affects behavior, activities, and its emotional state. The ability of an individual to construct his own future is due to the peculiarities of his individual psychological representations. This aspect is little studied in psychological science.  The purpose of the article is to present methods and techniques of research of representations and designing the world image of the future by the person. Results of the research. It is noted that the process of forming the image of the future is not only a vision of the end result, but also the impact on the assessment of behavior, consolidation of moral, volitional, intellectual efforts to realize their own expectations. This emphasizes the subjective nature of this process. In the framework of the research of mental representations and the peculiarities of constructing personality images of the future in a particular individual context were identified the mediative and moderative components that influence this phenomenon. The author’s method of assessing the world image of the future is presented. It is a technique of subjective scaling — that is, it shows how the individual imagines his future. To assess the relationship between the studied indicators, which are operationalized as concepts of psychosemantic analysis, a multidimensional deployment was used. Conclusions and prospects for further research. It is concluded that the psychosemantic approach is the most informative in the identified abilities of the individual to construct images of their own future. It is noted that the prospects for further research will be to identify the re lationship between forms and strategies for building mental representations of the image of the future with strategies for individual behavior in difficult life situations.

Posthumanism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Marie Keeling ◽  
Marguerite Nguyen Lehman
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Quantum Physics ◽  
The Body ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
Dynamic Forces ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Posthumanism is a philosophical perspective of how change is enacted in the world. As a conceptualization and historicization of both agency and the “human,” it is different from those conceived through humanism. Whereas a humanist perspective frequently assumes the human is autonomous, conscious, intentional, and exceptional in acts of change, a posthumanist perspective assumes agency is distributed through dynamic forces of which the human participates but does not completely intend or control. Posthumanist philosophy constitutes the human as: (a) physically, chemically, and biologically enmeshed and dependent on the environment; (b) moved to action through interactions that generate affects, habits, and reason; and (c) possessing no attribute that is uniquely human but is instead made up of a larger evolving ecosystem. There is little consensus in posthumanist scholarship about the degree to which a conscious human subject can actively create change, but the human does participate in change. As distinguished from posthumanism, humanism is credited with attributing the conscious and intentional human subject as the dominant source of agency most worthy of scholarly attention. Since its inception during the Renaissance, humanism has been constituted in various ways throughout history, but as a collective body of literature, the human is typically constituted through humanism as: (a) autonomous from nature given the intellectual faculties of the mind that controls the body, (b) uniquely capable of and motivated by speech and reason, and (c) an exceptional animal that is superior to other creatures. Humanist assumptions concerning the human are infused throughout Western philosophy and reinforce a nature/culture dualism where human culture is distinct from nature. In contrast, a posthumanist scholar rejects this dichotomy through understanding the human as entangled with its environment. A posthumanist scholar of communication typically integrates scholarship from a variety of other disciplines including, but not limited to: art, architecture, cybernetics, ecology, ethology, geology, music, psychoanalysis, and quantum physics.

The Mead of Poetry: Old Norse Poetry as a Mind-Altering Substance

2019 ◽  
pp. 99-119
Author(s):  
Hannah Burrows
Keyword(s):  
Substance P ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Skaldic Poetry ◽  
The World ◽  
Norse Myth ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Over Time

This chapter examines the Old Norse myth of the mead of poetry in light of the distributed cognition hypothesis. It explains how Norse skaldic poetry scaffolds various cognitive processes, and then argues that the myth of the poetic mead, which sees poetry as an alcoholic substance, is exploited by Old Norse poets to understand and describe poetry’s effect on the mind. Examples are given that suggest poets saw poetry as ‘mind altering’ in ways that resonate with certain aspects of the distributed cognition hypothesis: in particular, that poetry is cognition-enabling through feedback-loop processes; that the mind can be extended into the world and over time in poetry; that cognition can be shared and/or furthered by engaging with other minds; that the body plays a non-trivial role; and that poetry performs mental and affective work in the world.

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