From Action to Cognition: Neural Reuse, Network Theory and the Emergence of Higher Cognitive Functions

The aim of this article is to discuss the logic and assumptions behind the concept of neural reuse, to explore its biological advantages and to discuss the implications for the cognition of a brain that reuses existing circuits and resources. We first address the requirements that must be fulfilled for neural reuse to be a biologically plausible mechanism. Neural reuse theories generally take a developmental approach and model the brain as a dynamic system composed of highly flexible neural networks. They often argue against domain-specificity and for a distributed, embodied representation of knowledge, which sets them apart from modular theories of mental processes. We provide an example of reuse by proposing how a phylogenetically more modern mental capacity (mental rotation) may appear through the reuse and recombination of existing resources from an older capacity (motor planning). We conclude by putting arguments into context regarding functional modularity, embodied representation, and the current ontology of mental processes.

Nations of bankers and Brexiteers? Nationalism and hidden money

This article examines the relationship between nationalistic mobilisations, hidden funds and undisclosed campaign contributions, commonly known as dark money. Contextualising Brexit alongside the Icelandic economic crash of 2008 shows how nationalist mobilisation and racism can secure economic and political interests for a small minority and thus create space for what Zygmunt Bauman has called ‘evasion’ or ‘slippage’ as a primary technique of power in the present. Both the build-up to Brexit and the Icelandic economic crash were characterised by a strong national-centred rhetoric of ‘us-the-nation’ versus ‘others’ that diverted attention from massive minority interests, which had access to hidden funds. The Panama Papers showed that many of the same people celebrated in Iceland as the embodied representation of the country were simultaneously moving money into tax havens. Exposés have also revealed the way that dark money secretly funded campaigns using anti-migrant racism to facilitate the Brexiteers’ longer-term interests.

The Heroine’s/Hero’s Journey—A Call for Transformation? Transformative Learning, Archetypal Patterns, and Embodied Knowing/Learning

This article explores the phenomena of personal transformation within the frame of a self-experiential workshop, named the Heroine/Hero’s Journey. The Heroine/Hero is the archetype who sets out on an adventurous journey, in pursuit of her or his call for transformation. Rebillot based on Campbell’s (1949) mythological work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces created an experiential approach in the form of a one-week workshop, which utilizes methods from theatre and Gestalt therapy. This phenomenologically oriented vignette research draws on interviews and co-experienced observations, which were conducted during the workshop in order to explore the participants’ experiences and the content of participants’ transformation. The embodied representation of personality patterns, conscious and unconscious and especially the confrontation of these patterns, created transformative experiences for the participants. The depth psychological understanding of transformative processes, highlighting the potential of embodied and archetypal ways of knowing, provides the theoretical frame for giving meaning to these experiences.

Milton Among the Iconoclasts

This chapter seeks to focus on an aspect of Milton’s alleged Puritan persona, namely his iconoclasm. Since E. B. Gilman’s subtly nuanced Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation (1986), it has become fashionable to discuss Milton the iconoclastic polemicist or to debate the extent of his iconoclastic poetic strategies. All too often this criticism rehearses the old Puritan / Laudian binary and assumes that Milton the Puritan is intrinsically iconoclastic. Yet, as the notorious 1632 Star Chamber trial of Henry Sherfield demonstrates, Calvinist iconoclasm was but the most extreme end of a rich spectrum of Protestant attitudes to images in seventeenth-century England. By reading Milton’s embodied representation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in Paradise Lost in the context of the Sherfield trial, I hope to make the case for a more iconophile poet, thus rescuing Milton from the refashioning conducted by later writers and critics.

Actions as a Basis for Online Embodied Concepts

In co-speech gesture research, embodied cognition implies that concepts are associated with haptic and motor information that provides a framework for a gestural plan. When speakers access concepts, embodied action images are automatically activated. This study considers situations in which speakers need to create online concepts of events to investigate the aspect of the event that forms the basis of a new concept. Speakers watched short event video clips with familiar or unfamiliar attributes. They described those clips to partners who had to perform a matching task. Experimental results show that speakers gestured less and produced shorter gestures when relaying longer event descriptions. Speakers were more likely to produce gesture when some aspect of the event was unfamiliar, and they were most sensitive to the familiarity of the event’s main action. Further, when speakers did gesture, they were most likely to gesture to represent the action of the event over the physical attributes of it (the instrument used to enact or the object acted upon). These findings suggest that in creating an embodied concept for something unfamiliar, the motion of the event acts as a basis for their online embodied representation of the concept.

Embodied Representation in Staged Opera

The singing and acting performer in staged opera has and also performs a body that is both a biological entity and an ideological construct: its race, sex, physique, and age are all given meaning by directors—and audiences. Within the contexts of feminist, queer, and disability studies, this chapter reads the “marked” body of the protagonist of David Alden’s 2008 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s 1835 Lucia di Lammermoor as the literal embodiment of the excruciating vulnerability of Lucia as subject through the medium of her youthfulness and her mixed race: a Down syndrome child sexually abused by her brother on stage. Just as the opera’s use of coloratura is a marked musical gesture of madness in dramaturgical terms for the “voice in performance,” so the specifically marked corporeal body of Lucia was crucial to this production’s dramatic power, as well as the ethical and political issues it raised.

Reward activations and face fields in monkey cingulate motor areas

Several premotor areas have been identified within primate cingulate cortex; however their function is yet to be uncovered. Recent brain imaging work in humans revealed a topographic anatomofunctional overlap between feedback processing during exploratory behaviors and the corresponding body fields in the rostral cingulate motor area (RCZa), suggesting an embodied representation of feedback. In particular, a face field in RCZa processes juice feedback. Here we tested an extension of the embodied principle in which unexpected or relevant information obtained through the eye or the face would be processed by face fields in cingulate motor areas, and whether this applied to monkey cingulate cortex. We show that activations for juice reward, eye movement, eye blink, and tactile stimulation on the face overlap over two subfields within the cingulate sulcus likely corresponding to the rostral and caudal cingulate motor areas. This suggests that in monkeys as is the case in humans, behaviorally relevant information is processed through multiple cingulate body/effector maps. NEW & NOTEWORTHY What is the role of cingulate motor areas? In this study we observed in monkeys that, as in humans, neural responses to face-related events, juice reward, eye movement, eye blink, and tactile stimulations, clustered redundantly in two separate cingulate subfields. This suggests that behaviorally relevant information is processed by multiple cingulate effector maps. Importantly, this overlap supports the principle that the cingulate cortex processes feedback based on where it is experienced on the body.

Reversing the Manual Digit Bias in Two-Digit Number Comparison

Though recent work in numerical cognition has supported a strong tie between numerical and spatial representations (e.g., a mental number line), less is known about such ties in multi-digit number representations. Along this line, Bloechle, Huber, and Moeller (2015) found that pointing positions in two-digit number comparison were biased leftward toward the decade digit. Moreover, this bias was reduced in unit-decade incompatible pairs. In the present study, we tracked computer mouse movements as participants compared two-digit numbers to a fixed standard (55). Similar to Bloechle et al. (2015) , we found that trajectories exhibited a leftward bias that was reduced for unit-decade incompatible comparisons. However, when positions of response labels were reversed, the biases reversed. That is, we found a rightward bias for compatible pairs that was reduced for incompatible pairs. This result calls into question a purely embodied representation of place value structure and instead supports a competition model of two-digit number representation.