How does Embodiment Science shift how we think about Thinking? (with Guy Claxton & Emily Poel)

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast. Hi everyone, my name's Tim Logan, and this is the last of 4 short episodes exploring Guy Claxton and Emily Poole's take on embodiment science that opens up to much-needed scrutiny our core concepts and deep grammars of schooling and education. Following on from episodes on intelligence, learning, and memory, this is a deeper dive into thinking and reasoning. You can check out more of the background to this work in chapters 5 to 8 in Guy and Emily's book Bodies of Learning, which is linked in the show notes. I started out by asking Guy, how does embodiment science shift how we think about thinking?

Well, when we were talking about memory, we talked about these 2 planes, the 2 interacting, not entirely compatible planes inside our conceptual minds, the livescape and the wordscape. And the embodiment perspective almost requires us, or it opens up the strong possibility that even our more abstract reasoning processes are grounded in the more concrete, which is another metaphor, of course, realities of our lives and of our bodies. So for example, one of the things that's been going on recently in cognitive science is rethinking thinking. What is the purpose? What is the function of thinking? And you might say the internalized function of thinking Is it's another way of trying to come up with a good idea to try. It's a way of trying to squeeze situationally relevant meaning or possibilities out of what you already know. So learning broadly is expanding the range of things over which you have some kind of functional grasp. Private thinking is a way of exploring the way you would, you know, go on holiday to Lisbon. You explore all the little alleys of the streets. It's a way of exploring latent but as yet unactualized forms of connection within that internal landscape. So contemplating, thinking, wool gathering, daydreaming can all be seen as ways of trying to extract relevance, extract ideas about what it might be a good thing to do next by squeezing more meaning out of what's been latent but not yet evident. In your understanding. The other aspect of thinking is, of course, thinking aloud, is sharing arguments. And there's lots of interesting work now around the original function of reasoning was to be able to express through words, through symbols, an attempt to grasp a complex domain of understanding or thinking, an attempt to map that terrain, to put it out there for public consultation, so to speak, so that a group of people could get together and offer contrasting ideas or offer criticisms, and that you wanted your product to be as coherent, as cogent, as plausible, as practicable as it could be. But we can get together and share those ideas and come up with something better than any one brain on its own could have done. So work, for example, by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, a very influential book called The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding, makes a very strong case for the idea that reasoning evolved, that we evolved the capacity for reasoning as a social function, as a way of persuading, as a way of engaging so that 2, 3, 4, 10, 12, 20 minds could be better than one. And we could submit our ideas to public scrutiny, which is, of course, the basis of science. The idea that you can formulate ideas in a way that are capable of being scrutinized by your peers. Of course, that functionality gets corrupted often in public discourse. So what is shaped to look like a consultative product is actually a sophistical product. It's an attempt to manipulate other people's thinking. So almost entirely the kind of political discourse that you see is not attempts to put out into the public domain ideas for discussion. It's the attempt to hoodwink other people into behaving in the way that you want them to behave, which is very often not in the way that is in their own best interests. So thinking gets corrupted. And there are occasions, opportunities, and institutions within education that have contributed to that function of corruption. Debating societies, for example, can be a very useful apprenticeship in public speaking. But the formalized notion, the simplified notion of a debate in which you have a proposition and its pros and cons so simplifies The idea, you know, there's no scope for nuance, there's no scope for collaboration in the formalized debate. It just becomes a kind of sophisticated, slightly corrupt verbal warfare about who can conscript the most volunteers or the most believers to your way of thinking and looking at things. And many forms of formal education, Oxford in the 1980s, for example, revolves very strongly around that idea, around the development of skills of sophistry or oratory, the ability to get your own way, to charm or persuade or bamboozle people to do what you want them to do, like leave the European Union, for example. And then that becomes a gamification of reasoning rather than an exploratory process of what Neil Mercer, another Cambridge researcher, a friend of mine, calls interthinking, which is the work that Emily and I have been doing in putting this book together of 2 minds pooling, to use Emily's surname, their current ideas and resources in a way that allows both minds to develop ideas and sophistications which the one mind alone might never have achieved. And it's that kind of exploratory interthinking, that kind of resonant cognition is the true, you might say, the original purpose, the true purpose of reasoning and thinking. And we need to get youngsters in school back to that, back to seeing thinking as a collaborative, exploratory venture rather than as a way of getting good marks on an essay or a way of winning an argument.

That's exactly what I wanted to add, is, is that I think thinking is a form of action. Like, I'm zooming in, I'm zooming out, I'm exchanging with you, I'm picking up an idea, I'm looking at it over there. And there's— that's what our interthinking— it's a very active process.

Yeah.

And, and there's A lot of movement in it. And I think thinking is a kind of movement that we do. Again, we're back at the 3 C's or the 4 E's of that. I think our thinking is another aspect of our embodiment.

Beautiful. There's a really good book called The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals. And there's a little bit of kind of human exceptionalism going on. But he says, and just exactly as you've been saying, he says the thing that separates us humans from other animals is our ability to Imagine and reflect on scenarios, and then our insatiable drive to link our minds together. So imagining and then imagining together and linking our minds together to then creatively act. I mean, again, it's just another confirmation of everything you're saying.

Right. The ability to use thoughts, to use ideas, to bamboozle may have a kind of minor evolutionary function, but when it becomes the only game in town, Then we're lost really, aren't we?

Yeah. But the other, the other thing is, I forget the name of the researcher, that there was this theory that the actual origin of language was, I find this just such an interesting idea, that the origin of language was to help me explain this peak experience to you that I've just had. So like they were, they were experimenting with natural psychedelics, right? And, and then it's like you have this really profound experience on a, like, spiritual experience or psychedelic experience or whatever. And all I want to do is tell you about it because I'm just so bursting at the, like, internally bursting to tell someone that I've had this amazing experience. And that was the evolutionary drive to develop language. Whether it's true or not, it's just a brilliant idea.

I don't know, but there's a wonderful piece from a very influential spiritual writer, a guy called Alan Watts, Who in one of his books was writing about the difficulty of doing exactly what you've just described. The dilemma, the almost impossible job of being able to speak the unspeakable, scrut the inscrutable, and the best one, eff the ineffable.

Brilliant. But that's why The Wordscape and the Livescape is such an amazingly brilliant metaphor because it's like we want to put everything into the wordscape to make it real. And that's exactly what we're trying to do, right? In effing the ineffable is like, oh, well, it doesn't exist if I can't say it. And so something that opens up this possibility of just the experience being more important than the ability to describe the experience. I mean, it's like, it just feels like such a timeless human tension and issue. It's like, it's the surreptitious substitution from Husserl. We've substituted the map for the territory. We've substituted the wordscape for the livescape, but we forget we've done it. And that's the blind spot. That's Evan Thompson's book, The Blind Spot.

Well, and that leads to thinking that it's perfectly logical to then sit all day long and try to memorize stuff. Instead of moving in the world and trying things out and talking to people. And I think all of this builds on each other.

Exactly. We've, we've built this like wall of mirrors that takes us to a particular point, which is a bunch of stationary bodies in a room learning disconnected facts.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And that's, and that's why it's such an undoing, right? This whole thing is such an undoing, which is why reform doesn't work because we've got to undo and unlearn. to your chapter on learning, so much of what we have imbibed somehow surreptitiously substituted. Exactly.

Yeah. Or my horticultural metaphor is you have to dig down deep to get the taproot of this out. Otherwise it just keeps regrowing.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us at Good Impact Labs, on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.

Thank you.