Louise Barrett, beyond the brain: how body and environment shape animal and human minds

Abstract

Beyond the brain: how body and environment shape animal and human minds is an eye-opening and thought-provoking book that sets out a much-needed contribution to the study of the relationship between animals, cognition, and the environment. The volume provides remarkable new insights into how to understand animal (including human) behavior, raises interesting questions about the role of environmental affordances in the emergence of complex cognitive processes and provides the reader with a refreshing break from the wearisome excess of braincentric literature that still pervades much of the debate surrounding evolutionary psychology. In embracing the theoretical framework endorsed by proponents of embodied cognition, Barrett adopts an ecological approach to psychology that aims at challenging any attempt to describe complex thinking and flexible behavior as mere by-products of internal cognitive activity. Ecological approaches in psychology typically provide a powerful and coherent alternative to standard informationprocessing paradigms [see Marr 1982 and Poggio 1981 just to name a few] that postulate the existence of distinct and hierarchical theoretical levels to understand complex information-processing tasks such as visual perception (Rowlands 2006, p.8). Ecological approaches resist these computational understandings of visual perception and rather explain perceiving as “an achievement of the individual, not an appearance in the theater of his consciousness; as a keeping-in-touchwith the world and experiencing of things rather than a having of experiences; as an awareness of instead of just awareness. Perceiving, they continue, may be awareness of something in the environment or something in the observer or both at once, but there is no content of awareness independent of that of which one is aware” (Gibson 1979, p.239). On these accounts, visual perception is not therefore the mere reception of Phenom Cogn Sci (2012) 11:415–421 DOI 10.1007/s11097-011-9247-6