(a)
“Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason. Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanisms of neural binding. In summary, reason is not, in any way, a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.” (Lakoff & Johnson 1999, Philosophy in the flesh. The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought)
(b)
As gestalts, image schemas are both internally structured, i.e., made up of very few related parts, and highly flexible. This flexibility becomes manifest in the numerous transformations they undergo in various experiential contexts, all of which are closely related to perceptual (gestalt) principles. (Beate Hampe 2005 Image schemas in Cognitive Linguistics: Introduction)
(c)
The environment is part of the cognitive system. The information flow between mind and world is so dense and continuous that, for scientists studying the nature of cognitive activity, the mind alone is not a meaningful unit of analysis. (Margaret Wilson 2002 Six views of embodied cognition)
Embodied Cognition Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
