Embodied experience
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C2P45
2025-11-29
43
Embodied experience
The idea that experience is embodied entails that we have a species-specific view of the world due to the unique nature of our physical bodies. In other words, our construal of reality is likely to be mediated in large measure by the nature of our bodies.
One obvious way in which our embodiment affects the nature of experience is in the realm of colour. While the human visual system has three kinds of photo receptors or colour channels, other organisms often have a different number. For instance, the visual system of squirrels, rabbits and possibly cats, makes use of two colour channels, while other organisms, like goldfish and pigeons, have four colour channels. Having a different range of colour channels affects our experience of colour in terms of the range of colours accessible to us along the colour spectrum. Some organisms can see in the infrared range, like rattlesnakes, which hunt prey at night and can visually detect the heat given off by other organisms. Humans are unable to see in this range. As this simple example demonstrates, the nature of our visual apparatus – one aspect of our physical embodiment determines the nature and range of our visual experience.
Similarly, the nature of our biological morphology (the kinds of body parts we have), together with the nature of the physical environment with which we interact, determines other aspects of our experience. For instance, while gravity is an objective feature of the world, our experience of gravity is determined by our bodies and by the ecological niche we inhabit. For instance, hummingbirds – which can flap their wings up to a remarkable fifty times per second – respond to gravity in a very different way from humans. In order to overcome gravity, hummingbirds are able to rise directly into the air without pushing off from the ground, due to the rapid movement of their wings. Moreover, due to their small size, their experience of motion is rather different from ours: hummingbirds can stop almost instantaneously, experiencing little momentum. Compare this with the experience of a sprinter at the end of a 100m race: a human cannot stop instantaneously but must take a few paces to come to a standstill.
Now consider organisms that experience gravity in an even more different way. Fish, for example, experience very little gravity, because water reduces its effect. This explains their morphology, which is adapted to the ecological niche they inhabit and enables motion through a reduced-gravity environment. The neuroscientist Ernst Pöppel (1994) has even suggested that different organisms might have different kinds of neural ‘timing mechanisms’ which underpin abilities such as event perception (see Chapter 3). This is likely to affect their experience of time. The idea that different organisms have different kinds of experiences due to the nature of their embodiment is known as variable embodiment.
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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