Today, we're going to talk about
embodied cognition.
This is a contemporary theory that claims that our minds are not a separate entity from our bodies, rather are extremely interconnected with each other.
As
Samuel McNerney writes, "
What exactly does this mean? It means that our cognition isn't confined to our cortices. That is, our cognition is influenced, perhaps determined by, our experiences in the physical world."
Furthermore, this means that our metaphors are rooted in physical experiences. I'm not just referring to metaphors you might read in literature either, where you might expect that sort of thing. Think of all the metaphors you use in daily speech without even noticing. Like when you are sad/depressed, you're "down in the dumps", "feeling down", "at a low point", "feel like you hit rock bottom". Sad = Down. Conversely, happiness is generally interpreted as up, and thousands of similar metaphors permeate our daily lives. Here's the catch: the metaphors aren't random! In fact, our associations with generally abstract ideas can be rooted in physiological responses. Anger is often coupled with heat (think "he blew up", or "he's fuming") because when we are angry our skin temperature rises, along with a quickening of the heartbeat.
One notable experiment had subjects hold a cup of warm or cold liquid before an interaction with a stranger. When asked if they would potentially hire the stranger for a permanent position, those holding the warm water were much more likely to grant the job than those who held a cold beverage.
Otto Santa Ana writes about this in his essay "Immigration as Dangerous Waters: The Power of Metaphor". His claim is that immigration as an idea is often associated with ideas of dangerous waters, such as "a sea of brown faces", "foreigners who have flooded into the country", "relentless flow of immigrants", or "awash under a brown tide".
The implications are obvious, equating immigrants with something dangerous will cause us to fear them. But the real question is, why do we make that association in the first place? Sure the media helps propagate the metaphor, but in accepting it, we allow the media to continue using it. What came first, the chicken or the egg?
In any case, it is important to remember that subliminal messaging (or "priming") has scientific backing. Word choice and connotations can have real physical effects on our perception because our bodies take abstract ideas literally, and our mind seems to be a product of our bodies (after all, if you have no body, you can no longer think. But if you can't reason, you can still be technically be proclaimed living, or just dumb).
