Why Every Teacher Should Know About Ecological Psychology! A Conversation with Miguel Segundo-Ortin and Vicente Raja

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Organism-environment systems have evolved together, developed together, so environments are already meaningful to organisms in terms of their biological functions, the way they move around, the things they can do. So it's not that organisms need to attribute the meaning there. The meaning is in this rich interaction.

Hi, thanks for joining me again with this week's podcast. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. As educators, a great deal of our understanding of what learning is has been dominated by behaviorist and cognitivist ideas. But what if our decisions about how we design learning environments and think about pedagogy and curriculum had taken in the ecological insights of Eleanor Gibson and James Gibson and the branch of psychology known as ecological psychology? Still, so few educators know that such a subdiscipline even exists. So this week, it's a huge pleasure to be able to chat to Miguel Segundo Huotin and Bitente Raja, who are both experts and researchers in the discipline of ecological psychology. Both Miguel and Bitente are postdoctoral research fellows in the Minimal Intelligence Lab at the University of Murcia in Spain. Miguel's research focuses on the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, particularly embodied cognition, comparative cognition, and human agency. And Bitente's research focuses on the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and the history of the sciences of the mind. Together, they are the authors of the Cambridge Elements book Ecological Psychology, which came out last year. You can find more information about Ecological Psychology and the work of Bitente and Miguel, as well as James and Eleanor Gibson, in the show notes.

Awesome. Well, muchas gracias. Thank you very much. You're going to challenge my pronunciation here. I'll do my best. No, thank you so much, Vicente and Miguel, for taking the time to have this conversation. I'm super excited for myself to learn more, but also the bit of learning I have done already about ecological psychology. I have a feeling that it's something that all educators should know about, but I don't think they do. You know, there's quite a lot of dominance of certain discourses in certain branches of psychology that many people are aware of in education, but not so much ecological psychology, I think. So yeah, super happy to be able to have the conversation.

Thank you.

Thank you for having us.

Awesome. Now, good. So maybe I heard one of you talking about the ecological handicap, which I thought was a good phrase, and it feels like in a way, you know, we're trying to do something about that by having this podcast, but maybe, yeah. Why, why do we not know anything about ecological psychology?

Yeah, so I mean, it was kind of a joke or just a comment, but with, you know, with some foundation in the true interactions we ecological psychologists or people who are interested in ecological psychology having in places in which ecological psychology is not known, which is most of the places actually. So when we go to a conference or when we write a paper and the conference is in some mainstream trend, you know, in cognitive science or even philosophy, or the paper is for a general audience, we always need to spend some time to explain what ecological psychology is. This means that if the talk is 20 minutes, we actually only have 15 minutes because we have to spend 5 or 6 explaining what ecological psychology is. If the paper is 10,000 words, we only have 7,000, right? And you You know, it's that handicap, which is— I would say it's not exclusive of the, of the ecological approach. I would say that any minority framework within the sciences needs to do that, right? If you work within the mainstream, you don't need to self-justify. You don't need to claim that you exist and that it makes sense that you exist. But when you are in a kind of in the periphery of it, then you are in a small paradigm like ecological psychology. You often need to justify why you are there and why it makes sense that you are there.

Yeah, no, interesting. And I guess it's a justification, but it's also, even for many people, it's an actual— it's an explanation of what are, you know, how is this a different paradigm and way of thinking. And maybe before we go into that, could you— did you have any reflections about why do people not know about it? I mean, because historically, obviously, with, you know, James Melo Gibson, and it— honestly, I'm not sure what were some of the historical reasons why it was perhaps overlooked.

Yeah, I think there's a group of factors that apply there. During the '50s, the '60s, and even the '70s, especially James Gibson was very prominent, was one of the most important psychologists or, you know, vision psychologists. And Eleanor was gaining prominence on learning development and that stuff. But eventually James Gibson and Eleanor too moved away from the standard. And started challenging the core assumptions of psychology as we understand it now, and of cognitive psychology especially. So at the end of their lives, they were like, especially James, this kind of important figure that went a little bit crazy, kind of, you know, like, okay, it started to be regarded that way, like, oh yeah, his work was important, but now he's just too radical kind of thing, right? And by that time, only a few people continued, a few hundreds or even less. A few people continued that approach, which is still alive, but it never got to the, to the mainstream discussion. Right. Among other things, it's because the differences in the approaches are so deep that it's difficult to reconcile them. Right. And early ecological psychologists even needed to found their own journal to be able to publish. Now ecological psychology can be found in more mainstream places, but you know, it was a matter of sociology of science more than any epistemological—

Yeah, sure. Ah, interesting.

I think, well, I want to make a comment about the ecological handicap. I mean, the way that Vicente put it on social media was like a kind of a joke with a lot of truth in it. But it's also like a part of the ecological handicap that maybe is not that stuff for philosophers, but for psychology, it's actually more complicated. So we have a very good friend, it's a psychologist, a professor in psychology. And this person always says that when they have to submit a grant, they have to be very careful in the way they explain their paradigm and very careful to disguise and not say very openly they're doing ecological psychology because what they find is that reviewers have rejected the grant straight away. So, well, yeah, ecological psychology is dead or ecological psychology is just behaviorism or it's just So the political handicap for us is kind of a joke, but some people actually have problems to get their grants awarded because of that, because they are actually outside of the mainstream and they have problems.

Interesting. So it's still a bit too radical somehow.

Well, I'm not too radical. For me, it's not that radical. You get too outside of the mainstream.

Yeah.

Okay. Again, I mean, it's interesting that within philosophy journals, like, political psychology is more accepted than within psychology journals. I don't know if Vicente has the same feeling.

Yeah, it seems like the open discussion to what extent ecological psychology is a legit paradigm to do things happens more in the philosophy camp, because again, what we are discussing are very core foundations of that science, and philosophers tend to feel happy about it. Actually, there's an interesting paper. It's a 1967 paper in which James Gibson writes in Synthese, which is one top philosophy journal, asking philosophers for help because he—

interesting—

he claims that philosophers are more open-minded. I'm not sure, but, but that's what he, he says.

Oh, nice. I'll check it out and I'll put a link to it in the show notes as well. But maybe— I'm conscious also we're talking about ecological psychology and many of the listeners for the podcast are teachers, educators, leaders in schools. They may not have any point of reference for what it is we're talking about. So perhaps could we just spend a little bit of time laying out some of the, like, key differences? Like, why is it maybe a challenge to the kind of institutional biases around more behaviorist or more cognitivist psychology? And just in, in some kind of more basic terms, what are those core fundamental assumptions that are so, I think, are so interesting and important for educators to kind of understand because of the biases that certain dominant narratives in psychology have propelled? They're not necessarily true as such, but they, they have become to be seen to be true because of these, yeah, a particular way of, of framing what learning is or what, you know, action in the world is. So if you just give a bit of a basic overview, it would be really useful, I think, to orient people.

Let's see if I can make it concise and precise at the same time. Well, I think the first assumption of psychological psychology that in a way challenges traditional assumptions in psychology is the hypothesis of direct perception, the possibility that actually we can perceive the world, meaning that we can be aware perceptually of what is there and what we can do there just by picking up, by detecting information. I mean, traditionally speaking, psychology and perceptual psychology started with the assumption that, for example, for visual perception, retinal pictures are fundamentally ambiguous. Therefore, you need to make some sort of internal the coding and so to build a 3D representation of the world, because what you have is a 2D picture in your retina. Ecological psychologists believe that actually perception starts with something far richer than just pictures. And there's information in the environment that allows you to be immediately aware of what is there and what you can do, what the environments afford. The other assumption is the embodied cognition assumption. I mean, the idea that perception and cognition in general is an embodied process, meaning that it happens not only in the brain, even though the brain is part of your body. But if you want to make sense of how you do things and how you get along in the world, how do you achieve some tasks, you need to pay attention to the contribution of the body and the environment in total, right? And that's why Gibson has this beautiful quote as well. Why one doesn't see with the eyes, but with the eyes in the head, in the body, resting on the ground. So this idea that the visual system is Actually, not just the eyes and the optic nerve and the brain, but the whole organism-environment system.

Yeah.

So those are two big assumptions that challenge core assumptions and core principles of psychology, I would say. I know Vicente has more ideas with that.

That's great. If maybe just, if I could just reflect, definitely the resonance for educators in what you've said is in a traditional Western weird education, formal education system, it's very much focused on the brain, you know, the, the memories, the cognitive architecture, what is the brain doing to process information? This is very much dominant about what learning means. And so this idea, this is part of what I love about it, and I think is really important, opening it up to be about your connectedness, your embeddedness in the environment through your body. And, you know, learning becomes a much richer landscape of exploration somehow, rather than just this like information transmission from one brain, the brain of the teacher, into the brain of the student, right?

Yeah, actually, I think this is kind of the, the core distinction and the main departure, as Miguel has put it, and as you just commented, is like mainstream psychology, cognitive psychology tend to think that we live in our head somehow, right? And actually not only psychology, but the mainstream media, things like that. If I like to refer to, to the famous movie Inside Out, which is this kid's movie in which you literally have some intelligence inside that, that in this case are small emotions, right? That have a control panel and a screen and they kind of, you know, rule the body from there. Right. And then you go to the memory, which is a library with a lot of archives and that kind of stuff. This, of course, is a movie, but it is the way we see that, right? What is important about our cognitive life happens inside us. We get some impoverished input from our environment and from our body, and our brain is in charge of constructing an internal model, manipulating it, processing it, enriching it with experience. So we learn, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? While ecological psychologists say, well, if you open the system, if you get out your brain and you understand that the cognitive system has to do with the brain-body-environment system and the relationships, there, you will see that some of these mental gymnastics that you are attributing to the brain are actually not needed because you have the environmental resources and the bodily resources, along with, of course, the neural ones to explain what you want to explain. And of course, in terms of how we learn, well, it is not the same to learn in terms of how to recombine resources from the environment, the body, and the brain, that thinking that learning is about somehow constructing a better model our brain that with experience and with memory and with information is able to do the task, right?

Yeah, no, absolutely. And that's where it really feels like what you were saying about philosophers being more comfortable with this, you know, because there's somehow, there's somehow built in a separation, like a dualism, right? A Cartesian dualism that ecological psychology perhaps challenges, right? Between, like, really fundamentally between the world and how I know the world. You know, this like the mind and then reality out there, and then somehow these things are separate. And that's what the cognitivist kind of frame has continued to perpetuate, I think. I don't know, would you agree with that? There's like a quite a profound ontological assumption or challenging of this Cartesian split that we're all kind of wrestling with still, like trying to figure out what does that mean for the way we do learning and teaching in schools or how we just even how we live, right?

Yeah, if I'm allowed to be an old philosopher for a moment.

Always, absolutely.

And the overarching philosophical question here to me, and actually James Gibson acknowledged it when he says something like, if you don't do what I'm doing, you fall in the arms of Immanuel Kant, which is this, you know, old German philosopher. The idea or kind of the standard since Descartes, actually, maybe even earlier, but at least since Descartes, or sure is that we live in kind of in a meaningless world, physical world with forces, everything, and mind, that is the thing that attributes meaning to stuff. And something happened, right? Because we accept that the world is organized. You know, there's light, there is ground, there's the sky, whatever, air, right? But somehow when that world gets into our retina, that organization fades off, it's lost. And then we need to reconstruct it inside. And through that reconstruction, we attribute the meaning again. What ecological psychology says, no, no, look, organism-environment systems have evolved together, developed together. So environments are already meaningful to organisms in terms of their biological functions, the way they move around, the things they can do. So it's not that organisms need to attribute the meaning there, but the meaning is in this rich interaction. Right. So we move from a mind that puts meaning out there to a relationship between organisms and environment that is meaningful by virtue of the properties of the environment and of the properties of those organisms that has not only evolved but also developed to be in that environment. Right.

Yeah.

And that seems to be something about of this term affordances, which comes up, that the meaning is a function of the relationship there, as you say, not just out there, something that we compute in our heads, but something that is this real relationship with the affordances. Maybe, so I don't know, Miguel, could you perhaps say something about affordances?

I mean, affordances are in a way the most important, is one of the most famous concepts of ecological psychology. I mean, is it one of those concepts that actually, uh, traveled outside of the paradigm and is being used by many different people from many different paradigms, including non-ecological, including heavily cognitivist paradigms. And in a way, I think that even though affordances is the most well-known and famous concept of the theory, I think the most important concept is the one of information, because it's the one that actually goes against the assumption that what you get from the environment is impoverished data that you need to combine, recombine, and enrich internally. So yeah, affordances are the opportunities for interaction that the environment offers to an organism with a specific body, with specific body capabilities and learned developed abilities. But again, affordances by themselves don't need to be cashed out in the ecological paradigm. I mean, however, what makes sense of affordances in the ecological paradigm is the information. The fact that there is structured, non-ambiguous information in light, in sound, in odor, in all kinds of energy fields. That you can detect and you can be aware of the environment by detecting those.

Yeah. Could you just give an example of, you know, like in your talks, the mug, or, you know, did a practical concrete example of what affordances are just so that maybe people who are not familiar with this can feel where's the meaning coming from in the relationship?

Well, for example, imagine like a chair, for example, you know, you can sit on a chair depending on the chair has some specific properties, is robust enough, is big enough. But those properties need to be scaled to your own properties, right? It's just big enough within your body. I mean, chair designed for my little kid probably will be useless for me, at least as a chair. I mean, I won't be able to sit there because I won't fit or because it's too small for me or it's not robust enough because it's designed for a 20-kilo kid, for example, right? So a chair is seatable, so affords seating to me only if the chair has specific properties. This is the relationship. So my physical properties need to be somehow consistent with the physical properties of the chair for the chair to afford the possibility of sitting to me.

Yeah.

The same with, you know, the mug is graspable for me, but not for a little kid if they're not strong enough or their hand is not big enough to grasp it. So this is the relational part of affordances.

Yeah. And in addition, for example, I'm just, I've just moved into a new house and I'm using all sorts of things to stand on because the ladder is not close by. So a chair becomes a ladder in the context of I need to step higher than I can with my physical body. I can then use it as a something to step on to get higher. So it, it's not sittable anymore. It's standable or, or, you know, it has other affordances also related to the context in which it's in. Again, I think that's just a, like a reconnection with context, which I think I, I had Alicia Juárez on the podcast a while back about context changes everything, and it's just such an important thing, I think, for us as educators to remember is this, as you say, this relationship with the environment, but also the very specific context in which a chair can be used for many, you know, probably other things too. You know, if someone wants to throw it through a window or whatever they might do with the chair, right?

100%. I mean, a chair for sitting on it, but also like standing on it, or as you say, I mean, grabbing it, throwing it away. I mean, many different things. But again, the important thing here is that the affordances don't depend on properties of objects only. So properties of objects scale to properties of the specific organism. I mean, if I have like problems in my legs, probably I wouldn't be able to sit. Therefore, the chair doesn't afford sitting to me anymore, right?

Yeah.

And Vicente, what you said about the organism-environment system also, I think I find a really useful framing because then we're not just thinking about, well, disembodied brains moving through and processing information, or even isolated individuals moving through a meaningless world. There's this, like, again, this is like reconnection somehow, that getting moving past the, the old separation. And it's a, I am a system with the environment in which I am embedded somehow. Seems important.

I think that's it. I, I think that's, this is the place where affordances make sense. Of course that they have been used outside that place.

They, yeah.

Sometimes when a concept gets famous, it's because it is ambiguous enough as to accommodate the different views. Yeah, that's true. Then it kind of spreads. But for ecological psychologists, with, you know, there's an inheritance that comes from William James and pragmatism and that kind of stuff in which the meaning is in the action. So the meaning of an environment has to do with the kind of things you can do on it, the kind of actions you can do there. And yet, depending on the context, depending on the situation or on what you are doing in that moment, the meaning of a particular object can change. But yeah, it's kind of recovering the environment for psychology, right? It's to understand that organism environment are an inseparable pair. There's just no organism without an environment. The physical world becomes an environment for an organism, but not on its own. Right. And then, you know, of course, ecological psychology is not a monolithic thing. And there are different views on what affordances exactly they are or how to understand this thing. I, for instance, I know that Miguel and I slightly disagree on, for instance, what's the cognitive system. I claim that perception, for instance, is a property of the organism-environment system. It's not a thing the organism does. It's a property of the whole system.

Wow, interesting.

And Miguel is not really, you know, like, I think we talk about the perceiver for some reason, right? And, you know, but it's, recovering the environment to understand our minds. And you can do it to different extents.

That's— I mean, that's fascinating because, I mean, there are some really fundamental assumptions about being in the world, right? Perceiving the world or what, or at taking action in the world or whatever. And yeah, no, a bit of healthy disagreement, always good. But I guess again, for the education audience, I'm really interested in what learning means in this context. So traditionally, and almost recently there's been a resurgence of the, just the restatement of cognitive architecture of like cognitive load theory, all of these things about memorization of embeddedness in long-term memory and recall and schemas and all of these ideas, which sure, I mean, of course have merit, but they're not the whole picture, far from it. And they often are told as the whole story, the whole picture about what learning is. In an educational context, and I fundamentally disagree with that. And I imagine you probably have some opinions as well. So how would you differentiate this thing called learning from action or perception, or like, how would you describe what learning is from an ecological psychological perspective?

Well, there is, I mean, there is a whole tradition of studying learning within the ecological tradition. I mean, We speak of James Gibson as kind of the father figure of the paradigm, but it's Eleanor Gibson, James's wife, who like ran her own research project through her life. So she died in early 2000s, and basically her own research program was on learning. And in a way, she's even more recognized than James within psychologists. I mean, Eleanor Gibson is actually a prominent figure in the psychology of learning. So There's no— the relation between perception-action and learning is actually very intricate in the ecological approach. So they think that learning involves like fine-tuning perception-action and learning involves being able to detect informational variables that were not previously detected and then can be used for that. So there's a whole research program that also relates to developmental psychology, to how principles of development need to be combined with principles of ecological psychology, the work of Karen Avels, for example, is a, she's another leading figure in the, in the field in developmental psychology with ecological principles. There's also like the work of people who are not strictly ecological psychologists, but they work within the embodied cognition paradigm. And you see, if you read their papers, that they very often like bring concepts from ecological psychology. For example, Dora Bramson, he investigates some learning and teaching of STEM Yeah, he's been on the podcast before to talk about, yeah, embodied learning of maths.

It's completely fascinating.

Amazing. Yeah. Also, there's a book recently by, well, a couple of years ago from Christina McGrine and Jennifer Pughate. I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing. It's called Movement Matters: How Embodied Cognition Informs Teaching and Learning. So it's actually like a group of people interested in the practice of teaching and learning and the psychology of teaching and learning who are now importing principles from ecologopsychology to improve teaching practices and to improve performance in the classroom. There's a rich tradition there that tries to apply principles of ecologopsychology to this.

That's great. And what you said about fine-tuning, could you say that again? Because I find that that sounded like a really important phrase, like somehow fine-tuning the, your action perception.

So the idea is that if you have, if your hypothesis is that there is information in the ambient energy array, be the the ambient optic array or the ambient sound array that informs about specific properties of the environment, like position of objects or affordances, or you name it. Well, if you want to carry out a task, the best way to do it is to find the best informational variable. It doesn't mean that you can't achieve the task using other variables, but you get more proficient or you get more efficient or you get better at doing that if you are able to find the variable that best the task you are trying to solve. And there's a lot of empirical evidence, for example, with sports players, like that they improve as they are able to detect. And then also there's, there are comparisons between professional sport players and novices or amateurs. And you see that novices or amateurs improve as they come to detect and they come to rely on the same information as the professionals. So you see that there's a convergence in that, that actually correlates very strongly with the learning of the skill. So that's what I mean by fine-tuning is that being able to detect and find and use the right informational variables or the right information for the task you are trying to complete.

Yeah. That's interesting. Cause it also then speaks to me about experience. Like it's, it's hard then to just think in the abstract about what that would be like, or just talk about something other than actually live it and experience it as a young person, as a learner. Because it's hard to do the fine-tuning in theory, right? It just— by moving concepts around a conceptual kind of, you know, in your textbook, into your head, whatever. But at the— something about the experiential learning seems quite important.

Yeah, I think a way to put it, and there's a concept in ecological psychology called education of attention, is that if your starting point, as Miguel has said, is that there's information out there enough that you don't need to build it up inside. A way to learn is to know where to attend to find the right information, right? Like, if you are a goalkeeper and you want to predict how the kicker is going to, to kick a, a penalty kick, maybe you need to attend to the body posture or to the posture of the other leg. You know, there, if you know where to look at, you will fine-tune your attention and your perception to the right variable of information, right? That's it, right? If you know where to— first, if you are allowed to explore and to move around and to look around, then you can refine where to look as to get exactly what you need for the task you have at hand.

Yeah.

Okay.

So instead of taking experience to be something that happens inside, so you have stored memory and more stored memory with experience and then reapply to the new input. Experience means that you are moving around and exploring and you will eventually know where to attend, where to look to find the right information to do the whatever you want.

Yeah. Yeah. That seems like also a key phrase that is very alien in a very formal education setting. The idea that you are allowed to move around and explore. I mean, you know, you sit in the row, You, you do the thing, you do the, what the teachers told you to do. There is not a lot of freedom to move around and explore the, you know, your organism environment system in action because it, because of the, the spaces that we have set up as learning spaces, classrooms, et cetera. So I don't know, I just wanted to make that point. Cause I think that again, calls for a bit more of a, of a shift in the way we think about educational spaces. But Miguel, sorry, you wanted to come in?

Exactly the point you were making, right? So I mean, because the, the point of Ecológica Psicológica is that, well, the environment is resourceful enough. So you just need to find the resources there. And then the interesting questions that people are interested in learning and teaching should ask themselves is that, are classroom environments resourceful enough? So, or are they just artificially impoverished environments, right? So maybe the task, I'm not an expert in education, so I don't want to, but maybe the idea is, okay, well, let's give the students more resources. And let's give them the opportunity to explore, to see if they can find— I mean, there's another research program within the Collega psychology that is very similar. It's motor rehabilitation, you know, rehabilitation practice in people after like knee injury, things like that. And basically what rehabilitators do is to try to create the conditions for patients that are recovering to learn new movements so that they decrease the chance of getting injured again. The idea is creating the environment that is resourceful enough so that these people can find the way to readjust their body so that they don't get injured. No. So the, the work of, of Paula Silva is in this line, and this is the same idea, is to create an environment resourceful enough and give people the possibility to explore it and to find solutions.

That's also fascinating to me because one of the implications of more of the cognitive load theory, you know, work, John Sweller, has been to create more artificially impoverished environments. Like take the things off the walls because it distracts and it overloads your cognitive load from the thing that you want the young person to be thinking about. I mean, like, it kills me when I think about it. It's like we're just creating more and more artificially impoverished environments on the basis of such a narrow, superficial version of what learning, I think, actually is.

This, this actually speaks to one of the main reasons James and Eleanor Gibson started developing ecological psychology in the mid-'50s, which is that they kind of figured out— actually, it started because James was a part of the psychologists that were recruited for World War II, and he was asked to actually develop new methods to teach pilots how to land outside the plane, right? Like what kind of methods you can do. And he ended up doing some videos and whatnot. But what he discovered is that all the experiments on these kind of things that had been done in artificial environments and impoverished environments within labs were of no use to teach people. Right. And that he needed a different approach in which One more time, you regain at least part of the complexity of the real environment. So you can let people to learn in those kind of situations. So it was the dissatisfaction about impoverished environment and especially the impoverished lab setting in terms of how to teach people to land, what started with the ecological approach.

Amazing. Yeah, interesting. And you talk about that in the book, right? So I'll put the link to the book in the book a really, I think a really useful introduction to ecological psychology for people like as a follow-up from this conversation, people listening, I'd really recommend it. But can I just ask one, just a quick question about the emphasis on visual? 'Cause you've, you've talked about sensing, like seeing quite a lot, and obviously there was a visual bias in the research of both of the Gibsons, I think maybe definitely James Gibson, but we are talking, am I right to say we're not just talking about visual, but there's there's a sensing somehow of the world, of the environment, which is very much multisensory. I don't know.

Yeah, I think there's a historical reason there, right? Like, James Gibson was a vision psychologist, and in general perceptual psychology is very focused on vision because we human beings are very visual systems, right? So it's kind of a matter of history. Actually, the, the most famous Gibson's book, 1979, is The Ecological Approach to visual perception, right? Very explicitly that. It's true that ecological psychologists afterwards have studied other systems, especially the haptic one, right? The system that has to do with touch and with dynamic touch, which is how we feel things as we move them around, right? But there's a historical bias towards vision because of human experimentation. For instance, we don't rely a lot on olfaction, and actually we struggle a lot to understand how how olfaction really works. There's this philosopher in Indiana, Anselm Feibarg-Witsch, that has this very cool book called "Smellosophy," which is kind of the philosophy of smell. How do we understand a smell? Because we don't really— we use smell, right? It's not that we are disconnected, but if we lost smell, likely our life would change less than if we lost sight, right?

Yeah. Yeah. No, I appreciate that just because I I think it feels partly related to the embodied idea as well, that, you know, we are sensing the world in through our bodies in ways that is very much more multidimensional than just through sight. And the, you know, the proximity of our eyes to our brain, somehow sometimes there's a kind of, it goes in through your eyes and into the brain and that's, that's the only thing that's going on, right? But very definitely not as we can see. But the other thing I would love to ask you about if I can, is then agency. Agency, because that's a word that has been coming up a lot more in education to say we want to, we want to provide opportunities for young people to have more agency over their learning. And so this word kind of gets thrown around and people are not always in agreement or not always clear about what exactly does that mean. Maybe voice and choice, right? More opportunity to express their opinion, more choice about what they learn. There's lots of different ways that it shows up, but I know you I mean, this is like really, I think, a core part of your research that you've been doing about what this means, what this word agency means. And you've talked about it. I watched your fascinating talk that you gave about it being a mode of being. Yeah. I don't know where this would take us, but I, I'd be, I'm just really curious about how would you explain that to a perhaps a less of a kind of specialist audience?

We are trying actually, Miguel and I are working on that right now. First, agree among us on what agency is.

That's the first step.

But yeah, I think our general idea is that we shouldn't understand agency in the cognitivist way or in the cognitive psychology way, which again, it's the same structure, right? Like you have reasons to do things and those reasons have to do with you have some parts of your brain, your mind that evaluates the outcomes, whatever, and blah, blah, blah. You know, it's whatever agency is, is a process that happens inside. And again, we want to regain the body and regain the environment. And our idea is that we should understand agency as, we say, a multiscale event that has both neural and bodily and environmental contributions. Sometimes the agential behavior is triggered by the nervous system, maybe, some other times by your body, some other times by an environmental event, right? But it's one more time you need to take into account the system to really explain what agency is. And instead of being some kind of internal ineffable state of intention, which is kind of what agency seems to be, it's more a mode of being. It's a mode of brain-body-environment organization that actually develops as if it were an agent. It's more like There are particular ways in which living systems organize that we call an agential way, but living systems organizing is not only a mental event, it's a brain-body-environment system event kind of thing.

I mean, that feels really, again, really profound, right? To decenter— it feels very anthropocentric to be, you know, it has to be an intentional mental event that propels my action in the world. Somehow I've decided that this is the thing I want to do now. Like, you know, even as small as pick something up or as big as, you know, your life purpose, somehow there's this propulsion of the, as you say, inside the human, inside the head. And therefore that excludes the possibility of agency in other non-human, more-than-human aspects of the world. So my daughter was going off to do a test about the Renaissance this morning at school. And, you know, just this like very significant obsession with, Humans being the only things that can be the agents going out into the world to make choices and exert their power on the world, over the world as a separate space. It feels, it just feels really significant. Again, it's like reconnecting with the environment, but Miguel, did you want to?

I think the, the, probably the first step to, towards an ecolegal story or ecolegal theory of agency would be to try to break down the concept of agency into something that we can observe more easily. For example, the capacity to initiate actions, right? So we say something or someone is an agent when it's not just very reactive to the environment, but when it's able to initiate by themselves or also like not initiate or resist the invitation or the invitation from the environment. But also like we speak of agency when we speak about control, right? You are able to be in charge of your own actions, so to speak. And now the next step is, okay, now that we have, we broke down agency into more like, uh, workable characteristics. The question is, can we decentralize those? Are we, can we just not saying that is the person or is the individual organism who is in control? This idea that behavior is regular without being regulated. And that is one of the most profound quotes there, but I have to say, I'm not really understand what he means there. But probably if we are able to make sense of these quotes, maybe we actually are closer to make sense of an ecological or non-centralized theory of agency.

I found it quite useful, the Tomasello differentiations between goal-directed in your talk, because I think sometimes we go down to the other end of like rational agents and normative agents and define agency as only the ability to do those things. But maybe, I mean, you know, like a tree, does a tree have agency, right? Like, does it have control over its, its growth? And I mean, there, I don't know, there's some pretty important profound questions there. I'm seeing more and more people asking about, again, to decenter in conversations about climate change or wherever it might be, but to decenter the, it's only a capacity of humans. So we might take more seriously the natural world, for example, as a source of some kind of agency. So yeah, it, I don't know, it's a highly complex, but it seems really quite core to our human action in the world and then taking seriously our, our really embedded environment system. So thank you so much. I mean, maybe just if, if we can just wrap up, I mean, what would your hope be by the book? I would love to just share the book with as many educators as I can. That's why I wanted you to come on the podcast so we can just share some of the ideas to kind of challenge these more historically dominant notions in psychology. But I mean, what would be your hope now for this work?

That's a good question. And I don't know if we have a specific hope in mind really. I mean, what we wanted to do when we wrote this book was to provide a short, informed introduction to the topic so that anyone interested in ecological psychology could go and read a very short, like 70 or 80 pages long, right? Introduction to the topic. And then this person could find all the relevant references there. And all the relevant references include also Eleanor Gibson, who, as I mentioned, is sadly forgotten or ignored. For example, in the, in most of the current philosophical and cognitive science discussions. So we're trying to also do make justice to the work of Eleanor, to make justice to the paradigm of ecological learning that is not that discussed. And again, she was alive until early 2000s. She was able to see the developments of cognitive science and she kept writing papers until the very last day, so to speak. I mean, yeah, until the end of the '90s. And then she wrote this book published in early 2000 and then the her memories in 2002, I think, is written.

I love that, and I'm really happy to hopefully help with that for more people to access the book to do exactly that. Yeah, honor Elena's work and get the, get the word out.

Yeah, I mean, it would be cool to be able to show that ecological psychology can also be like a proper research paradigm in psychology and in coxi, and then keep getting more and more people interested in the field and more and more people doing cool cool research work. That would be, that would be my, my desire for the future, that the community grows. And then we keep like making and testing hypotheses and we keep discussing and that is easier and easier to publish papers in journals or at least to get the papers reviewed in journals.

You got rid of the handicap finally. You got rid of it. Exactly.

I think that, that to finish with kind of the same joke or remark is that we wrote this book so we don't have the ecological handicap anymore. Or we can tell people read it and then come to the talk.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's the, it's the homework before they arrive at your talk. Yeah. Oh, amazing. Well, thank you so much. No, I so appreciate your work and just being able to share it. And I would, yeah, I'd love to continue the conversations and see how we can, yeah, bring more of a lay audience into this. Cause I just, it feels really profound to me. It feels really significant as a paradigm and yeah. No, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for inviting us.

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.