Mind in Movement at the National Museum of Scotland Pembridge Helm, 14th century, Image © National Museums Scotland In a 2011 lecture titled ‘The real reason for brains,’ neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert states that:We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that’s to produce adaptable and complex movements. There is no other reason to have a brain. Think about it. Movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you. Now, that’s not quite true. There’s one other way, and that’s through sweating. But apart from that, everything else goes through contractions of muscles. Think about communication—speech, gestures, writing, sign languages—they’re all mediated through contractions of your muscles. So it’s really important to remember that sensory, memory and cognitive processes are all important, but they’re only important to either drive or suppress future movements (2011, online). iological organisms have a neurological system topped by a brain when their survival depends on their capacity to move autonomously. Typically, trees don’t have a brain. If the brain is for movement, then the perspectives of embodied, embedded and enactive cognition are easily granted. Cognition is to mind our steps, adaptably, all the way to the highest levels of complexity and abstraction. The mind occurs, in the sense that it is not a thing but a relational process. It is the dynamic possibility of procedural interactions with the environment via movements and a cognition that is elicited by such interactions. Operating in close relation to sensorimotor contingencies, the mind primarily takes place by processing perceptions and sensations, which are geared towards action and interaction. No mind exists that is not already embedded in a concrete, sensorimotor environment, and triggered by intra- and extra-corporeal distributed factors.How might this viewpoint make us reconsider three artefacts held by the National Museum of Scotland? All three objects are tokens of complex human actions and activities in many different ways and on different registers. They all bespeak the interconnection between cognition, embodiment and the environment. The Pembridge Helm is the result of medieval warfare developments, including the practice of training by jousting. The Lewis chess piece stands for the act of playing a game of intelligence, strategy and anticipation. And it also gestures through its human shape towards the potential intensity of human expressiveness. Finally, the photograph of Victorian firefighters is a token of two technological developments: the first is that of using light and chemistry to capture visual data and turn them into a stable object, the photograph; the second is that of fighting fire by means of a water tank, a hand pump and a hose, possibly requiring two persons instead of a chain of people passing water buckets. In all three cases, the artefact would simply not exist were it not for the human action it encapsulates in its very presence. To relate to such objects is to enact cognitively their pragmatic meaning and to gain access to the human endeavours they manifest, in relation to an ever-changing environment.In regard to the cognitive enactment of pragmatic meaning, my talk will focus on our ability to infer sensations of movements (called kinaesthetic sensations) in another human’s gestures, in a representation of gesture, as well as in gestures implied by an artefact. For example, we may readily infer a sensorial difference in carrying a stick and carrying an anvil. In carrying a stick we may infer the possibility of wielding, jabbing or flourishing it; not so with the anvil. Because of the difference in shape and weight in the two objects, we mentally adapt our posture, gestures, and hence the sensations of movements we infer. The pragmatic meaning we thus adduce regarding both artefacts is grounded in our sensorimotor knowledge and our propensity to activate our embodied cognition. This being said, we all have different ways in which we cognitively enact such postures, gestures and actions. Our cognitive styles, our interests and personal histories will thankfully add variable aspects to our cognitive processes. Guillemette Bolens, University of Geneva (2016) This article was published on 2024-11-06