Body Versus Mind

Daniel Casasanto’s “Different Bodies, Different Minds: The Body Specificity of Language and Thought” presents the viewpoint that there is a substantial correlation between the body and cognitive processes. Essentially, the article evaluates this relationship by examining characteristics of right and left handers pertaining to speech, motion and cognition. The bulk of this research is predicated on the fact that right and left handers perform actions in distinct ways according to their hand of choice.

One of the more interesting revelations found in this article is that people who are right handed prefer things on their right, whereas those that are left handed prefer things on their left. According to the article, this statement applies to not just physical proclivities, but also to “positive and negative emotional valence like “goodness,”, “honesty”, and “intelligence” and how they communicate…these ideas” (Casasanto, 2011, p. 378). The author offers empirical evidence regarding the hands that presidential candidates used when emphasizing concepts that have a positive or negative value judgment; those who are right handed use their right hand to demonstrate positives and their lefts for negatives while left handed candidates took the opposite approach (p. 378). By examining various aspects of relationships between verb meaning and motor action, emotions and actions, as well as motivation and motor action, the author is able to suitably demonstrate that the way people use their bodies inherently influences concepts that pertain to cognition.

Lastly, it should be noted that one of the most convincing pieces of evidence for this conclusion was obtained via a test in which right handed and left handed people actually switched the side that they typically associated with positive and negative valences due to restrictions from using their favored hand. This test well corroborated the fact that there is a definite correlation between an individual’s body and his mind.

This article relates to aspects of psychology and cognition that pertain to motor skills. Although motor skills are carried out via the body, they are only able to work due to fundamental psychological processes that take place in the mind. According to the article, most research into the relationship between cognition and motor skills deals with the fact that neural activity actually causes motor skills to operate. However, Casasanto’s article offers evidence that alludes to the opposite fact. The author has demonstrated that there facets of the body that play a significant role in determinants of the mind. 

The implications of such a finding are vast, and worthy of additional research in this particular area of study. In some ways, the body has as much—if not more—sway over the mind than people previously thought. The study says that conventional psychology posits the viewpoint that the body merely functions as an outlet of mental processes. Casasanto’s work indicates that this traditional model of the relationship between the mind and the body must be adjusted, and that his results actually suggest some degree of parity—or at the very least, involvement—of the body in controlling elements of cognition. 

More importantly, the author alludes to the fact that since elements of his research prove that the traditional model of the relationship between the mind and the body (which is detailed in the article) needs to be updated, there may be other factors that determine the correlation between these two critical aspects of humanity. The author concludes that “a further challenge is to determine how influences of linguistic, cultural, and bodily experiences combine to shape our mental lives” (p. 382). Thus, the reader can infer, and future researchers can explore, additional cultural factors that may influence the relationship between cognition and the body. 

Reference

Casasanto, D. (2011). “Different bodies, different minds: The body specificity of language and thought”. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 20(6): 378-383.