Review: Music and Embodied Cognition: Listening, Moving, Feeling, and Thinking, by Arnie Cox

Abstract

Music and Embodied Cognition: Listening, Moving, Feeling, and Thinking , by Arnie Cox. Musical Meaning and Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. viii, 288 pp. Embodied Cognition (EC) is a fertile research area at the intersection of disciplines including cognitive science, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and psychology.1 Broadly speaking, advocates of EC assume that cognition depends directly on the brain-body system as a functional whole, and cannot be reduced to the sole activity of the brain. In other words, our mental life is co-constituted by brain and body2—no cognitive process can occur without being deeply integrated with the living organism's body-in-action.3 This view promotes a primacy of sensorimotor experience over more complex (i.e., propositional) mental operations: in light of their biological (bodily, phenomenological, etc.) complexity, cognitive systems can immediately develop meaningful understandings of their world through active participation, without relying on representational recovery. Indeed, if our cognitive resources are distributed across body and environment via continuous loops of action and perception, then many of the standard explanatory tools adopted in psychology (representations, concepts, etc.) could be replaced by components and processes central to such brain-body-world dynamical coupling. Accordingly, the explanatory unit required to capture what cognition entails goes beyond brains, neural activations, mental representations, or computations. It rather emerges from the circular patterns of activity continuously enacted by the organism—within a given niche—at various levels and timescales.4 Such a perspective stands in open contrast to more traditional views, which instead base mental life on an amodal information-processing schema decoupled …