"The cognition that people need for language must of course be found in the head, and in that sense, cognition for language is located in individuals. But much research on how the mind works has shown that cognition is radically distributed. Much of our thinking and reasoning is not done solely between our ears. When we use our brains, we often hook them up to external systems. These may be physical objects, such as pencil and paper or smartphones, that supersize our capacities for memory and reasoning. In conversation, the external systems to which we hook ourselves up are the bodies and minds of other people.
"The cognition needed for language is especially attuned to what others think, feel, and mean, and it is oriented to what the members of the social unit (the 'us' currently having a conversation) are collectively doing or at least trying to do. Cognition for language is intrinsically dialogic."
--- How We Talk by N. J. Enfield, Introduction: What is Language Like?, p. 12.
It jumped out at me initially because it reminded me of the reading that we did in Choreolinguistics about materialist thinking, and the privileging of thinking happening in the head (LaMothe, ch 3 'To Dance is to Know'?). Enfield is guilty of this privileging even as he is arguing against it, when he says of course cognition must be found in the head. I love the idea of cognition as radically distributed, and it is an idea that we have already embraced when we talk about thinking with our bodies (in contrast to or in conjunction with thinking with our heads). I was surprised though that the author focused on external distribution (physical objects and other people) rather than also talking about internal distribution and the ways that we locate cognition and use language throughout our body.
The quote also made me think of my experience with your dialogic research and how as a collective group, we were able to decipher a message from the body in a way that we couldn't do individually.
And as I think about this quote more, it continues to grow on me. How is our choreolinguistics experience itself an example of radical distribution? Radical in its pairing, distributed across the curriculum, radical in its outcome to our student learners, distributed across time as we learn more each time we engage in the topic.
Love it. Here is a side by side writing I have done with it. In my computer version I have put my changes in blue, but that formatting didn't work here.
ReplyDelete"The cognition that people need for language must of course be found in the heart, and in that sense, cognition for language is located in individual’s needs to be with one another. But Much research on how the mind works has shown that cognition is radically distributed. Much of our thinking and reasoning is not done solely between the space between our ears, but between our fingers and our toes; and our fingers to twine with the fingers of another, our toes to dig into the sand. The base of the skull to the tailbone as we recall our fish ancestors and of course, the gorgeousness of the opposable thumb.
When we use our brains, we often hook them up to external systems via our bodies. These may be physical objects, such as pencil and paper in our hands or the smooth tactile texture of our smartphones to our hands with our capacity to swipe, drag, tap to create interactivity with this extension of ourselves, And with headsets into our ears, we can supersize our capacities for memory and reasoning. In conversation, the external systems to which we hook ourselves up are the bodies and minds of other people, whether in actual physical touch or in the sensate sensation of smelling, breathing, inhaling and exhaling as we are in the same physical space with one another. Sound triggering the physical functions of our ears, vibrations creating sounds that we can discern into patterns of language.
"The cognition needed for language is especially attuned to what others think, feel, and mean, and it is oriented to what the members of the social unit (the 'us' currently having a conversation) are collectively doing or at least trying to do. This “doing” engages our physical being and all our senses: visual, tactile, taste, sound, smell and the additional dimensions of time and space. Cognition for language is intrinsically dialogic, not just with the spoken but with the full sensory input/output capabilities of our bodies, and the additional realms or our humanness ."
--- How We Talk by N. J. Enfield, Introduction: What is Language Like?, p. 12./with the insert method of Celeste – putting our bodies into it.