http://www.edge.org:80/q2006/q06_6.html
Brains cannot become minds without bodies
by ALUN ANDERSON
A common image for popular accounts of the "The Mind" is a brain in a bell jar. The message is that inside that disembodied lump of
neural tissue is everything that is you.
It's a scary image but misleading. A far more dangerous idea is that brains cannot become minds without bodies, that two-way
interactions between mind and body are crucial to thought and health, and the brain may partly think in terms of the motor actions
it encodes for the body's muscles to carry out.
We've probable fallen for disembodied brains because of the academic tendency to worship abstract thought. If we take a more
democratic view of the whole brain we'd find far more of it being used for planning and controlling movement than for cogitation.
Sports writers get it right when they describe stars of football or baseball as "geniuses"! Their genius requires massive brain
power and a superb body, which is perhaps one better than Einstein.
The "brain-body" view is dangerous because it requires many scientists to change the way they think: it allows back common sense
interactions between brain and body that medical science feels uncomfortable with, makes more sense of feelings like falling in love
and requires a different approach for people who are trying to create machines with human-like intelligence. And if this all sounds
like mere assertion, there's plenty of interesting research out there to back it up.
