The mind and distributed cognition: The place of knowing in a maths class

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 717-737 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estrid Sørensen
Keyword(s):  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
The Mind

The Medieval (Music) Book: A Multimodal Cognitive Artefact

2019 ◽  
pp. 190-204
Author(s):  
Kate Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Book History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Augustine Of Hippo ◽  
Case Study Analysis ◽  
Creative Cognition ◽  
Medieval Music ◽  
Single Opening ◽  
The Mind

This chapter considers the medieval book as an example of embedded creative cognition. Through a detailed case-study analysis of a single opening from the interpolated Livre de Fauvel, the chapter shows how the modern-day reader takes an active part in the cognitive ecology that produced the book. The argument draws on theories of distributed cognition, multimodality, book history, and the writings of Augustine of Hippo to demonstrate the close connections between the mind, the body, and the book that are both still in action and under transformation today.

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.

Surrealism, Chance and the Extended Mind

2020 ◽  
pp. 171-188
Author(s):  
Kerry Watson
Keyword(s):  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Objective Chance ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Exquisite Corpse ◽  
Automatic Drawing ◽  
Unconscious Mind ◽  
Artistic Skill ◽  
Unconscious State

This chapter discusses how the Surrealists engaged with techniques like automatic drawing, the exquisite corpse, collage, frottage and decalcomania, and how this might be interpreted in the context of theories of distributed cognition, enactivism, embodiment, and the extended mind. The Surrealists’ use of ‘objective chance’ was driven by a belief in the existence of an unconscious state of mind which could only be accessed obliquely, by using techniques which bypassed both artistic skill and conscious thought. ‘Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?’. This question is posed by Clark and Chalmers (1998) as an introduction to the concept of the extended mind, but it could just as well be the very question the Surrealists were trying to address in their search for a universal truth, the key to which they believed to be the unconscious mind as defined by Freud.

Nietzsche’s Genealogie der Moral Pro and Contra Distributed Cognition

2020 ◽  
pp. 209-231
Author(s):  
E. T. Troscianko
Keyword(s):  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Analysis ◽  
Conceptual Content ◽  
Moral Reality ◽  
Rhetorical Form ◽  
Rhetorical Structures ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Genealogy Of Morals

Nietzsche’s writing and thought about the mind challenge some of the same Cartesian dichotomies that the more recent frameworks of 4E and distributed cognition do. Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals), a highpoint in Nietzsche’s project of the ‘Umwertung aller Werte’ (revaluation of all values), is a proclamation of perspectivism: there is no objective perception and nothing objectively to be perceived, only perspectives on objects. This thesis is expressed through evocations of space and movement that, the chapter argues, promote and depend on readerly cognition in which embodied and enactive imagining is central. In these same passages, however, the equivocations underlying the whole perspectivist enterprise are exposed: the supposed discovery of a new extra-textual moral reality through philosophical agility is undermined by rhetorical structures that turn out to merely simulate movement, and so ask readers’ imaginations not to be too enactive. This equivocation has important consequences for readers’ engagement with the interplay of rhetorical form and conceptual content. Cognitive analysis thus gets us to the heart of a grand paradox of Nietzschean philosophy – absolute assertion of the relativity of language – while also shedding light on current questions about action-based distributed cognition as an intellectual force.

Technologies of Séparation and the Evolution of Social Extension

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Gamble
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Internal Model ◽  
Global Distribution ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Psychological Continuity ◽  
The Social ◽  
External Model ◽  
The Mind

Archaeological accounts of cognitive evolution have traditionally favoured an internal model of the mind and a search for symbolic proxies. This chapter argues for an external model of cognition and uses this perspective to develop the understanding of Palaeolithic material culture as based on sensory experience. It explores ways of investigating the evolution of cognition by using the social brain model combined with a theory of distributed cognition. The emphasis is on social extension, which was a necessary step to a global distribution and which was achieved by mechanisms such as focused gaze that amplified the emotional content of bonds. The discussion examines the importance of these mechanisms through three aspects of social extension — ontological security, psychological continuity and extension of self.

Directionality and Duration in Distributed Consciousness: Modernist Perspectives on Photographic Objectivity

2020 ◽  
pp. 134-151
Author(s):  
Adam Lively
Keyword(s):  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
Photographic Image ◽  
Continuous Evolution ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Unstable Dynamics

This essay begins by exploring how the “immersive objectivity” of the photographic image highlighted by the Surrealists tends to collapse distinctions between what is internal and external to consciousness. It goes on to show how, in the photography-incorporating fictions of Georges Rodenbach and W.G. Sebald, perceptual immersion in the photograph engenders a “dysfunctional” state of melancholic stasis in the viewer, problematizing assumptions about agency common in many contemporary accounts of distributed cognition. It concludes by arguing that the internalization of the photographic image by consciousness, as exemplified in these modernist responses to photography, with their topologically unstable dynamics as between that which is “inside” and “outside” consciousness, strikingly demonstrate the relevance to contemporary debates over the “extended mind” of Bergson’s argument that the mind should be conceived not in spatial but in durational terms, as a continuous evolution of heterogeneous states.

Distributed Cognition and Women Writers’ Representation of Theatre in Eighteenth-Century England: ‘Thoroughly to unfold the labyrinths of the human mind’

2019 ◽  
pp. 170-186
Author(s):  
Ros Ballaster
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sarah Fielding ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cognitive Experience ◽  
The Mind

Readers in the mid-eighteenth century were increasingly invited to translate their knowledge about the social extension of mind learned in the experience of theatre to ‘new’ prose forms of the periodical and the novel. Women writers in these forms found opportunity to present women as cognitive agents rather than affective vehicles. Four works by women serve to illustrate this case: Eliza Haywood’s The Dramatic Historiographer (1735), Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s The Cry: a new dramatic fable (1754), Charlotte Lennox’s Shakespeare Illustrated (1753-4), and Frances Brooke’s The Old Maid (1755-6). These printed prose works invoke memories of performance – the co-presence of the real bodies of audience and actors. But they often do so to claim the superior cognitive experience of the reader’s engagement through print with a fictional persona in the ‘mind’. The prose work is imagined as a repository of socially extended mind for its audience, an opportunity not only to recreate the experience of communal consumption of the artwork which theatre affords, but also to provide a more sophisticated form of narrative scaffolding. Distance and reflection are enabled by the absence of the performer’s body and the judicious authority of a framing narrator.

How Homo economicus lost her mind and how we can revive her

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter DeScioli
Keyword(s):  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Homo Economicus ◽  
Economic Theories ◽  
Target Article ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
And Behavior

AbstractThe target article by Boyer & Petersen (B&P) contributes a vital message: that people have folk economic theories that shape their thoughts and behavior in the marketplace. This message is all the more important because, in the history of economic thought, Homo economicus was increasingly stripped of mental capacities. Intuitive theories can help restore the mind of Homo economicus.

Metaphors in the Mind

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeannette Littlemore
Keyword(s):  
The Mind
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document