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Episode 40: Embodied Cognition
74 Plays2 years ago
Our guests, Dr. Sheila Macrine and Dr. Jennifer Fugate, discuss the concept of "embodied cognition" and its implications for the classroom. They argue that traditional cognitive psychology has ignored the fact that the brain is situated in the body, and that learning happens most effectively if it is connected with our body and our environment, rather than learned abstractly.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guests
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to Cognation. I'm your host, Ralph Nelson. And I'm Joe Hardy.
00:00:13
Speaker
And on today's episode, we're gonna talk about embodied cognition. Our guests have just come out with an edited volume called Movement Matters, how embodied cognition informs teaching and learning, which just came out earlier in April this year, I think. And our guests today are Dr. Sheila McCreen from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and her colleague, Jennifer Fugate.
Exploring Embodied Cognition and Related Concepts
00:00:40
Speaker
So both of you, thank you so much for being here today.
00:00:43
Speaker
Thank you for having a pleasure. So the topic today is is on embodied cognition.
00:00:51
Speaker
And I'll relate this to a recent episode that we had on this podcast with Annie Murphy Paul, who had a book out called The Extended Mind. And I think there are a lot of similarities between the way that she was talking about how cognition can be thought of as extending to certain things out there in the environment.
00:01:13
Speaker
Just like to start out by asking asking you, you know how you think of embodied cognition and how you how you arrived at really wanting to look into this idea of embodied cognition and then apply it towards all these things in education and elsewhere.
00:01:30
Speaker
So my name is Sheila McCrain and I'm a full professor at UMass Dartmouth and I'm a cognitive psychologist and I was a practicing school psychologist for many years. I started as a special education teacher and realized that the kids had problems reading. I went back and got a reading specialist certification then I realized that there's much more to the kids than
00:01:53
Speaker
curriculum and I started looking at social, emotional and cognitive aspects of the child and the student and the learner. Then I decided to go all the way and get my PhD and I completed two PhDs at Temple University. During that time, I studied learning, cognitive psychology, but I also got exposed to a lot of philosophy. I had really cool professors
00:02:20
Speaker
I started reading about Merleau-Ponty's work, looking at the idea of being in the world. Merleau-Ponty talked about the notion that we're not these mind body separated beings that were beings in a world. And that he talked about the notion of thinking, learning,
00:02:45
Speaker
as an enfleshment, that it is part of the body in the world altogether.
Educational Implications of Embodied Cognition
00:02:50
Speaker
So it was really theoretical at the time when he started writing. And then that kind of got picked up by feminist scholars in the 1990s talking about this duality and the dichotomy of male-female mind-body, the separation of mind-body. And then, lo and behold, Clark and Chalmers came out with their book, Extended Mind,
00:03:15
Speaker
Either article extended mine. So we'll talk a little bit more about those four E's of embodied cognition, but embodied cognition really talks about the fact that we
00:03:30
Speaker
learn with our mind and our body and the environment. So we're embedded in an environment where in a situated position to learn. And so my whole area is really about teaching and learning and how this Cartesian model of mind-body separation has really impacted learning and in the classroom. So I teach a lot of teachers who are going to be special ed teachers. The idea is that
00:03:58
Speaker
We still teach the way we taught 100 years ago. We still have the kids sitting and being consumers, where the teachers are talking head, the kids are recipients of the information, and the teachers really this talking head, preparing kids for skills and drills ready for standardization and testing. And we know now
00:04:22
Speaker
We know now with neuroscience and with the MRIs and everything, that embodied cognition is a real thing, that we do work, we do learn with our motor cortex, with our sensory motors, with all our senses, that everything's involved in the learning process. So our effort was to try to look at how learning can be impacted by this new information.
00:04:45
Speaker
Backing up a little bit. I've been teaching learning theory for over 20 years and none of the textbooks have really picked up on any of this. It's still a very dualistic model, you know, we had behaviorism and then we evolved to constructivism and it's still a brain bound model of teaching and learning.
00:05:06
Speaker
And then in 2015 at UMass, Jennifer was there at the time. And I heard about her work, and I had been writing about an embodied understanding of teaching, learning, and understanding.
00:05:21
Speaker
And I didn't quite have the whole piece that Jennifer talks about in terms of embodied cognition. I was talking about an embodied understanding. But it was basically the same thing. So I knocked on her door and I said, wow, you're doing some really cool stuff. And we started talking. And it was almost kismic because she said, oh, oh. And then we got really excited. So we've been collaborating ever since. And I'm really excited about it because I think this is the time for a paradigm shift.
00:05:49
Speaker
in our understanding of cognitive psychology, cognitive science and learning and teaching and how it can really make a revolution in education if people buy it, you know, buy the idea, you know, and now we have the neuroscience to back it up.
Personal Journeys into Embodied Cognition
00:06:04
Speaker
But Jennifer, go ahead.
00:06:07
Speaker
Well, thank you so much, Hila. That's an awesome introduction. So I'm Jennifer Fugate. I'm an associate professor at Kansas City University in the Department of Health Psychology. I am actually a cognitive, comparative cognitive psychologist by training. So I did my graduate work exploring the evolution of the brain and what language brings to the brain over evolutionary time. I worked with non-human primates, specifically with chimpanzees and studying
00:06:36
Speaker
vocalizations and emotional expressions and non-human primates. As I was doing that though, I had the pleasure at Emory University to TA for Larry Barcelo, who's one of the founders of Embodied Cognition. So through his work, it really opened my eyes to this whole view of embodiment and how it was very different from traditional cognition and how we thought about the brain as reacting to stimuli as opposed to
00:07:02
Speaker
predicting stimuli and using our environment and our body to make these predictions. So just to say a little bit more about embodied cognition, you know, traditional models of cognition really emphasize this Cartesian dualism that Sheila mentioned, this separation of our perception and motor states from our body and our bodily action. And the idea through the cognitive revolution was that the brain is really seen as a computer,
00:07:28
Speaker
that it's used for processing brain-based, a-modal and abstracted information. And body cognition, on the other hand, you know, really kind of flips this on its head. And we start to see this idea that thinking is inseparably linked with the body and the environment.
00:07:47
Speaker
And so when we're thinking about something, we're creating these rich nuance experiences through our sensory motor systems, all of our systems, sensory systems, and these rich embodied instances are then collected by our brain or represented in our brain. And depending on the theory of embodied cognition, people will dither whether that's actually there's an abstraction at some point or not. But then when we use that information and think about it, recall that information,
00:08:16
Speaker
we're performing these mini simulations. And so we're actually re-experiencing those sensory motor states. You know, this is really the beauty of embodied cognition and why I always like to thank Mary Barcelo in this case for opening my eyes to this and leading me to think about cognition so very differently.
00:08:34
Speaker
Full disclosure, I then went on to do a postdoc with humans and studying emotion perception and expression and regulation. And I've been doing that work and still do that work for the last 20
Practical Applications in Education
00:08:47
Speaker
years. But I always had this interest in cognition that's done back from grad school. And then as Sheila mentioned, in 2015, we met each other and she was telling me about all this ideas in education and
00:09:01
Speaker
of listening and as she paused, I said to myself, well, we have a name for that in psychology. It's called embodied cognition. And, you know, she just really, her face just lit up and we're like, we're talking about the same things just in different ways. And we thought, you know, what a great thing to try to bring together an umbrella type framework, a really deductive translational model that can be used to translate science into education
00:09:29
Speaker
and to teach teachers about this idea of embodied cognition. Are there some examples that you could give of specific ways in which we think with our bodies or we have an embodied cognition that are illustrative that really kind of point this up in a way that would not be as well explained by the old model? The study that blew it out of the water for me was some of the neuroimaging work
00:09:58
Speaker
Paul Myers, a great example in his study, you know, he had people read motion words while being scanned.
00:10:04
Speaker
in the MRI scanner. And so here people are reading words about body parts moving, but they're not actually moving anything. And what you see is activation in the motor cortex specific to that region discussed in the word. So if the word is cake, you see motor activation within the brain in parts of the motor cortex that represent the feet. And that can be dissociated from punch where you'd see motor cortical activation, but in the hand region.
00:10:33
Speaker
So if reading and learning was really abstracted, you wouldn't expect that the motor system would be involved and clearly here it was. So that was some of the first neuroscience evidence that really said to me, this is a viable theory with real science support.
00:10:50
Speaker
Sheila, do you want to add in some others? Yeah, I was just going to kind of back up a little bit and talk about the fact that when we pitched this idea to MIT, maybe this pulls the whole thing together. We talked about embodied cognition as this theory and then being validated by empirical research and certainly neuroscience research. But what we really contribute to this model is embodied learning.
00:11:17
Speaker
We talked to MIT and talked about the idea that our idea was derivative from the NIH model of translational science research, which is a model that has been really popular to try to get the latest
00:11:34
Speaker
lab-based experiments in biomedicine to the patient. So it's considered a lab to patient bedside. And so we took that idea of this translational science research and talked about it in terms of the learning sciences. So just not one content area, but all learning sciences in a way that we would
00:11:58
Speaker
on take the latest empirical and neuroscience that was just coming out as the book was kind of evolving and to try to ask these researchers who are working in the labs and behavioral work with learning and math and history and I mean not math and physics and reading and
00:12:18
Speaker
different content areas who are working on silos. Nobody was talking to each other. And we said that we wanted to come up with this sort of umbrella model where we would develop this model of translational learning sciences research so that we could get the information out to the educators. The example from the biomedical field is that most research and medicine
00:12:43
Speaker
takes about five to 10 years to get out to the public. There was a revolution with COVID that vaccine was developed within and out to the public within five to eight months. So what we were talking to MIT was that the way we expect kids to learn has not changed in over 100 years. And this revolution is an extension of
00:13:09
Speaker
How we know kids learn, like we can go back to Montessori. We can go back to Piaget, who talks about hands-on learning. And I tell my students all the time, good teachers do this intuitively. But do they understand at a theoretical level? And is it validated by science? Is it vetted by empirical research? And now we have that. And that's what MIT was very excited about, because this is really new for educators.
00:13:35
Speaker
This is a new kind of approach. And the fact that we have so many different content areas, we did our best to curate some of the best people in the world internationally, these scholars who are working in embodied cognition. But as I said, in their own particular content areas. And we asked them to take that research. Maybe they did some work in the classroom. Maybe there is some validation in some cases. And we'll talk about that.
00:14:02
Speaker
But to make an application for the classroom so that educators, school psychologists, researchers, scholars can look at it and see what it looks like in the flesh. And so we're very proud of it with the resources and everything. And this model that is the derivative of embodied cognition, the embodied learning, we're very, very excited about it to say the least.
00:14:26
Speaker
That is exciting and this is yeah this is great. It's great to see research that has an actual application out there and which could be of potentially huge use to pedagogy in a lot of different environments, so that must feel gratifying in itself.
00:14:42
Speaker
It's a bit of a Herculean effort, but hopefully we pulled it off well. You've been thinking of looking at medical education, training doctors and nurses and books that are using some of this technology that the professors are just getting training on how to use the machines or the programs, but not really understanding on a theoretical level how their pedagogy can be applied in a virtual world. So that's kind of an exciting area that we're looking at now.
00:15:11
Speaker
So do you have maybe one favorite example of pedagogical technique that arose from either brain research or behavioral research in embodied cognition? And you feel especially exciting or interesting? Do you want to give an example, or I'm happy to? Do you mean the educational content area? Are you talking about
00:15:38
Speaker
by a behavioral or what would you like us to? I'm thinking about individual pedagogical techniques that may be effective, you know, what kinds of ways of learning in the classroom, sort of using this framework, just so people get a sense of, you know, individual kinds of things that work. I mean, I can give an example that, you know, we've shared before and
00:16:02
Speaker
I think it's a really great example of how the research has gone from psychology laboratory now has been classroom vetted, which unfortunately isn't always the case in a lot of these applications or they go right to developers and there's a lack of understanding of the science there. But just to highlight by way of example, our Glenburst work, he's done a lot in reading comprehension and has a program called Move by Reading
00:16:26
Speaker
that actually has children as they learn to read, act out the sentences with characters, first physical characters. He's done it now subsequently and effectively with virtual computer characters, moving characters on the screen in accordance with what the story is talking about. And what he and his colleagues show is that
00:16:50
Speaker
students who learn through the physical manipulation of these actions learn to read not only that study, that story better, but they have increased comprehension, increased vocabulary, increased memory. And it also extends to other genres as well. So moved by reading is freely available. It's also now in Spanish, so has some great cultural
Action Principles for Educators
00:17:17
Speaker
generalizability, and it's just a great way of how taking the science that we know about how young people read and this idea of embodiment, designing an application that then can be used effectively in the classroom. So one of the things in the book is full of examples like this, but one of the things that Sheila and I are most proud of, we feel is our really unique contribution is that we were able to then
00:17:44
Speaker
go through all of these different individualized examples, as she said, existing in silos, and then pulling out theoretical principles that then can be translated to action principles. And so it's a really, we hope, a go-to source, not just for academics and researchers, but educators alike who can look and adopt these principles as they learn more about the science behind it. So by way of example, you asked. So I'll give you one of the principles that this kind of lends itself to. So we know that reading comprehension,
00:18:14
Speaker
relies on connecting linguistic elements to sensory motor representations, that is the work of Lindberg and others. And an auction principle that we've derived from that is that teachers can encourage language comprehension through having students act out vocabulary and sentences through physical representation. They can perform iconic actions to illustrate word meaning. They can use gesture and mind to do so.
00:18:39
Speaker
Teachers can also use simple body movements to help learners understand these more advanced concepts. One of the great things is that when you understand something physically, like opposition of forces, it actually has been shown to extend to opposition arguments. So something much more symbolic. So there's kind of a general principle underlying some more abstract concepts.
00:19:04
Speaker
And then this idea, we haven't talked much about it, and perhaps we will, but this idea that students learning from one another, students learning from the teachers interacting with their gestures and these iconic and simple body movements. We know that the neuron system is activated and that an invitation is a really important source of learning, not just early in development, but throughout development. And once teachers understand the principles of why embodied cognition work, we know that there are
00:19:33
Speaker
not only more invested to work with their students, but their students also perform better as well. So my question here is, do you think there are limits to the types of things that can be taught in embodied ways or are there some subjects or
00:19:52
Speaker
areas that, and I'm seeing a shaking head there. So I think the answer is going to be, this can apply to almost everything. I guess one of the questions I had about language in specific is if you're maybe associating individual words or vocabulary with movements or something like that,
00:20:17
Speaker
I guess in cognitive psychology, we typically think of a requirement of language that there would be an arbitrary relation between the thing being represented and the linguistic representation of it. So I wonder if this... I think that that is...
00:20:36
Speaker
still a little bit narrow in terms of language. I think, you know, we're looking at language learning and machine learning now and how they've really moved away from the computational model of mapping one idea on top of another or sort of the, you know, computer input output and taking, you know, we have a new project coming out about
00:20:58
Speaker
how embodied cognition has informed embodied AI. The idea is that we have evolved as humans and how we think and learn, and our understanding of cognition has evolved. We have gone from very behaviorist model, this stimulus response, we advanced toward it to the computer model that input-output, the brain is a muscle, let's exercise it,
00:21:25
Speaker
And then we had the cognitive sort of revolution on the heels of the computer model, where we talked about constructivism and, you know, the idea that we're constructing information, it's still very brain bound and limited to the skull, you know, the whole idea, I think, the idea about the brain and the vat, you know, if we had this vat with a brain in it and just
00:21:48
Speaker
put electrodes into it, would it be able to function as a human? And we know, no, it can't exist without a body, it can't exist, it can't learn within an environment.
00:21:58
Speaker
So the idea has evolved to this constructivist model, and then we move to a social constructivist model, but the idea was still that the brain is brain bound. And then this emerging notion of an embodied cognition where everything works together has really helped us understand how gesture, how being embedded in a situation, how we enact on a particular thing,
00:22:25
Speaker
you know these four E's we talk about the extended cognition that I'm sure Annie Paul explained a lot more about. But the idea is that with this mapping, this traditional model of learning with mapping one on one is no longer the case. One of our colleagues that we spoke to who teaches Spanish said, you know,
00:22:50
Speaker
Teaching Spanish is very embodied because you can say one word in Spanish and if your body moves in a certain way, your hands move or your gesturing or your face makes, you know, you speak with your body, you know, you're in your environment. And I thought that was really a good way to help people understand what embodied cognition is all about. It's not just the one word mapping of concept and certainly the AI folks have picked this up as well when they're talking about rather than
00:23:17
Speaker
Having, you know, an artificial intelligence model totally computational but rather predictive like the human brain. So we've talked to folks at at Stanford who are doing work with virtual robots.
00:23:33
Speaker
And they're talking about how they've evolved and they're no longer just okay now you know we're programming the robot to walk up a terrain or upstairs, but rather that the deep machine learning the predictive model.
00:23:48
Speaker
of AI is now mimicking our understanding of how we learn, that we are predicting as we go through the world. We're being in the world. We're reacting in the world. And that's how we've learned. That's how we evolved. That's how now that the AI folks are picking that up, some of these virtual robots have now evolved to the point where they develop external or extra limbs to cope with the environment.
00:24:13
Speaker
It's a very exciting cross fertilization here between the two worlds.
Intersection with AI and Other Disciplines
00:24:18
Speaker
Not that we want to talk anything about computational models, but really the idea of how humans learn and how humans can inform, you know, the development of artificial intelligence. Very exciting stuff. I mean, we're just kind of cutting edge stuff here.
00:24:32
Speaker
I'd love to hear more about your thoughts about artificial intelligence. I'm thinking some of this stuff emerged out of artificial intelligence too because Rodney Brooks worked on how emergent behaviors can come out of interactions with the environment that you wouldn't necessarily expect.
00:24:53
Speaker
Yeah, we're kind of, it's sort of synergistic. You know, we're just kind of developing and opening it up and we're, we're going all the way back to sort of
00:25:04
Speaker
the idea of, you know, affordances, you know, Gibson's affordances and, you know, how, you know, Roche's categorizations and labels and vision and all these different things that now AI is kind of investigating. And, you know, as you said, they're informing us. Brooks kind of came up with the idea long, long ago. So it's pretty exciting to say the least. We're just delighted to be in this place in the world at this time.
00:25:36
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there are so many vestiges of embodied cognition throughout the literature, whether it be philosophy, which you mentioned, Sheila, but also you said robotics, anthropology, psychology, even going back to phenomenology, cognitive science. So I think part of the goal of this book was not only just to bring together different disciplines within education, but just different disciplines within research, too, and try to get on the same page with our language on these
00:25:54
Speaker
Thank you.
00:26:06
Speaker
These ideas and these terms have floated around under different names for centuries now, but I think what we needed and hopefully were able to provide is more of a unified framework that together many researchers from different disciplines can work under.
00:26:23
Speaker
That makes a lot of sense. When I think about embodied cognition, that's really what I think about is a framework. You mentioned J.J. Gibson's direct perception, thinking about predictive coding and the idea that our brain is a prediction machine. We're constantly creating the world that we're experiencing.
00:26:43
Speaker
And that's just, it pulls together so many threads, which is what I really love about this field. One of the things that I think about in this context is the sense of self. So I think there's this way in which we think about ourselves, which is a narrative talk track that we have going in our brains, which is
00:27:05
Speaker
A lot of times this is ourselves to ourselves. When we're thinking through a problem and we're using words in our brain, thinking about it, we think that that's our self. But in fact, that's only a part of ourselves. We're an embodied creature that lives in an environment, a social environment, but a physical environment as well. It's just a totally different way of thinking about things that pulls a lot of threads together, which I really like.
00:27:32
Speaker
Yeah, I totally agree. And just to go back to your earlier point, I think the more richly that you can encode your environment through your senses, but also this idea of affordances and interacting with affordances that the environment provides, it just provides a richer platform later on than for simulation. So we talk a little bit about handwriting, for example, in our book. And the reason why we're such big advocates for keeping printing and cursive and handwriting
00:27:59
Speaker
In the classroom is is simply because there's so much more nuanced motor action when you hold the pen and write and you touch the paper.
Role of Handwriting in Learning
00:28:08
Speaker
then there is when you just do this on the keyboard. I have to tell my son that he's 10 years old and it's one of the things that he struggles with the most is actually writing. And, you know, he's great with reading, but actually cursive writing or even print writing is a challenge for him. It's a struggle. My son's 11, so I hear that. And the other thing, just by way of another example, and one of the highlights of the book is the importance of finger counting.
00:28:36
Speaker
tell this story when my son was in second or third grade and he came home and he was really a bash because his teacher had told him that he needs to stop counting on his fingers and I said there's nothing further from the truth. You now actually have empirical data that shows that your knowledge of your fingers, your ability to count on your fingers as a young child is predictive of your mathematical ability all the way through college and that people who use their fingers in even complex algebraic calculations
00:29:03
Speaker
actually show increased activation in the brain. So that's great. That's interesting. That's really interesting. And also on handwriting. One of the researchers is doing empirical work on the difference. Well, we wrote an article also about the difference between handwriting and keyboarding and what we found out through
00:29:24
Speaker
you know others you know looking at other research and everything is that college even college students benefit more from taking notes with handwritten notes than keyboarding because the handwritten notes the students have to kind of clump the ideas or cluster the ideas together as they write they can't transcribe that quickly every single word so they're already processing some of the concepts
00:29:48
Speaker
And that goes to the language part of the brain, whereas keyboarding just is mindless. And if you know, when you're typing sometimes, you can just drift off and there's no real connection with the language or the real processing part of the brain. So that's really, really exciting for us as well to know that. And just for the educators out there, in 2005, the national core curriculum took
00:30:12
Speaker
cursive writing out of the national standards and parents were in an uproar and I think about five years past that you know different states, you know, they all kind of come up with their own scope and sequence of what the standards are that you know that state wants you to pass you know for their education departments.
00:30:30
Speaker
And the point was is that they were having kids with keyboards in kindergarten and teaching them keyboard in kindergarten. So the research now bears out with an embodied cognition model to say that handwriting is absolutely essential for early development, essential for understanding as opposed to
00:30:53
Speaker
as opposed to keyboarding. So there is evidence that, you know, yes, of course, keyboarding is an important skill for young children, but the handwriting piece is really important for development and understanding and learning and really have helping the brain and the body and everything to work together and
00:31:11
Speaker
Jennifer and I were talking about even the writing on paper, feeling the paper and the pen together, and even with severely learning disabled kids, we might even use sandpaper to trace with fingers because we're getting that kinesthetic tactile visual auditory, all those senses together to help the student to learn.
00:31:33
Speaker
Now here's something you might know more about too, but I know that in occupational therapy for kids, especially in teaching handwriting, a lot of the instruction involved is in motor movements.
00:31:47
Speaker
Um, I can say that I know, and this goes back to Joe's point earlier, it's really important to practice bad penmanship. And that sounds stupid, but you know, as a child learns, you know, they're trying to perfect it and inevitably it starts out and it looks like junk, you know, and every parent praises them. Oh, it looks like your name. Great job. And eventually it gets more and more refined.
00:32:07
Speaker
But what we know is that every time you practice, what you're doing again is getting a different instance, you know, of how a letter can look, of seeing how a letter can look, and that's going to then allow your concept of what a B is or D is to be more inclusive.
00:32:30
Speaker
And so all of that practice that goes into fine tuning and coming out with something that looks like our characteristic B is actually really good for the brain. It's not just motor practice, but it gives the brain all these different depictions that can later, if you will, and you believe in an abstraction process, can then be extracted into a category that represents B. And that's actually called emergent literacy. Children, even at three or four years old,
00:32:59
Speaker
imitate the writing practices of their particular culture. And they, you know, they'll write things and scribble things and they'll tell you what it means, you know, you know, it's not for us to understand, but it's really an emergent literacy model to allow kids to write.
Embodied Learning in Virtual Environments
00:33:16
Speaker
So we're really against, you know, just keyboarding in schools for kids.
00:33:21
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that thinking about incorporating movement in the context of embodiment into learning that occurs to me, and I'm curious if you all have thoughts on this, which is, it just seems like if you get up and move around and you're able to engage with the environment and other people, it's just more interesting and more fun and engaging. That might be a real benefit of itself in education.
00:33:46
Speaker
Jennifer and I were talking and I went to an all girls school and it was very regimented, really tough, but we sat in our chair, we didn't really get to be that verbal. And I think it was until sophomore year that I actually got up out of my chair and went to a bio lab. And I thought that was the greatest thing since sliced bread. So what you're saying is important because
00:34:12
Speaker
You know, if we take the COVID era, you know, we have kids that, you know, were in third grade when it started and they had two years without real good, you know, instruction.
00:34:25
Speaker
You know, I talked to teachers and they say some kids have lost two years, you know, and that's really an important time. And, you know, we get a lot of questions about what about online learning. Well, all of us know that we all were thrown into it by the seat of our pants and I'm still really struggling. Jennifer helps me all the time. My son helps me reluctantly.
00:34:46
Speaker
So the idea was like people say, well, how can it be embodied learning online? Well, it is. I mean, if you watch Jennifer's facial movements and her hand movements and everything, but these are baby steps and what we're talking about embodied learning. Now, if you think about, you know, what's the next, you know, big thing, it's really
00:35:07
Speaker
using virtual classrooms where the kids are actually up walking around maybe with oculus glasses. We had a presentation at APS last month and we had demonstrations of kids going into actually an isosceles triangle and just
00:35:29
Speaker
you know, sliding down the slope to determine the slope. I mean, it is so immersive, so physical, so embodied. And it really goes against a traditional model of learning where kids memorize, you know, the formalisms like Nathan talks about, you know, the, you know, you know, the equations or the formulas, but rather doing it and then deriving the principles from it is really kind of what we're advocating.
00:35:58
Speaker
So part of that is also the real active learning part of it. So engaging and getting feedback from the environment and sort of testing the environment rather than just pure thinking about it.
00:36:13
Speaker
So it's going to really shift, you know, we talk about flipped classrooms, but this is really like, you know, paradigm shift in what we're seeing and what we envision the future of classrooms to look like. They're not going to be these rows and columns, and it's not going to be, you know, the talking head teacher, but really, we're hoping that it's really going to be an immersive, action-based, project-based learning, which we all know works.
00:36:38
Speaker
But now that we have neuroscience behind it, we're hoping to make this revolution and what classrooms will be. And we specifically talk about the fact that we want educators, curriculum developers, educational policy folks to read the book to see what's on the cutting edge. I'm still having trouble thinking, and this is maybe just my limited imagination here, of
00:37:03
Speaker
certain topics or certain classes that I feel like, you know, maybe abstract concepts seem tougher to do, or maybe, you know, sometimes, oh, you just got to tough it out and learn the formula or memorize this bit. So. Give me an example from physics, if that helps. Yeah, please. Yeah, I mean, and, you know, as Sheila and I mentioned, we're moving to behavioral health and biomedical health as well. But in the book is a great example from the Vieira's, which is a husband and wife team.
00:37:32
Speaker
who teach physics and have actually developed a smartphone app that students can put on their smartphones, which the majority of students have now.
00:37:41
Speaker
And they walk through space and learn physics through actually interacting with space. So unbeknownst to me and maybe some of the listeners, your phone actually has all of these different accelerometers and navigation pieces already built into Google Maps and whatever. And so it capitalizes on all those internal sensors that are already built there.
00:38:03
Speaker
so that as you walk through the environment, one of the things they feature is gravitational pull. And there's other concepts that they teach them as well, acceleration, velocity. But I love the gravitational pull example because students all come in with this full psychology, and this is what the VR has highlighted, that they should be able to move this way with their phone, and that should simulate this gravitational field.
00:38:29
Speaker
They were actually really frustrated at first because they expect the lines of gravity to essentially be straight and they don't realize that there's curvature and so the field forces are going to be different as you approach different objects.
00:38:40
Speaker
But by walking through and experimenting and holding up their phone and rotating themselves through space, they come to finally understand that. And I think that's just such a great example. I mean, it's really a win-win. Here are students who are using something that is an extension of their brain anyway, their cell phones, right? You don't have that 15 minute span of attention that you get when you sit in column and rows, and they're overcoming and learning for themselves.
00:39:08
Speaker
introducing these principles from action. And I mean, I can't think of a better way to sell the whole framework.
00:39:14
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's great. So Sheila, you mentioned a couple concepts that I think will be familiar to educators, but I know many of the people who listen to the show are not educators. That might be interesting to just talk about what you mean by the flipped classroom and what you mean by project-based learning, because I think those are both quite relevant here and maybe part of what you'd like to see in the future and what I would like to see in the future as well. So I'd like to hear a little more about that.
00:39:44
Speaker
You know, like what I talked about earlier, you know, this hands on learning has been very intuitive for teachers, you know, you go back to Montessori, you know, who, you know, and even the Montessori schools of today, you know, it's really hands on that they really do the projects they, you know,
00:40:00
Speaker
do all of the activities and then they talk about it afterwards and they come up with the principles and the designs and so that's kind of like the idea of you know putting the power into the hands of the students and where the teacher is not this talking head but a facilitator a facilitator for learning and the idea that I have as a cognitive psychologist is that we're not pouring information into an empty head you know it's not like tabula rasa
00:40:25
Speaker
you know you you can you know even as professors you know we can do the same lecture every semester and you have one kid or a couple of students students a kid students in the classroom who will take the idea and just run with it and it'll make your eyes pop you know what i mean so you know we can't always count on what you know it's not that traditional input output you know type of thing but rather to kind of release some of the
00:40:51
Speaker
power in the classroom to be a facilitator rather than sort of the, you know, dictator and transfuser of information.
00:41:00
Speaker
So I mean, science has really been on the cutting edge with these project-based learning in terms of the hands-on. They've had that ahead of us. But I think that if we kind of plan this, we can do it low-tech and we can do it high-tech. We can do it XR, VR, and AR. There's all kinds of different things. We're talking with a lot of different developers.
00:41:25
Speaker
Certainly, I wanted Jennifer to talk about the simulation center at Kansas City University, we're trying to get funding to bring to have summer institutes to bring folks there for research and development to develop, you know, to have teams to come, whether content areas biomedical or, you know, basic ed or whatever.
Games and Pop Culture in Embodied Cognition
00:41:46
Speaker
and to talk about how their pedagogy can be embodied and have a meta awareness of what I'm doing. So a lot of educators already use the body in terms of the classroom, but to have a real deep understanding of why we're doing this and how this impacts the students, it'll change our meta awareness of what we're doing.
00:42:08
Speaker
this project that we're trying to get this institute would be to have teams come talk about their pedagogy, develop sort of, you know, embodied learning activities, and then bringing them back to their classrooms and sort of, you know, we're at the cutting edge stage now, I'm cutting edge, I mean, beginning stages of this. Jennifer, why don't you talk about the simulation center?
00:42:31
Speaker
We want to get on the, this sounds great. I want to be on the list for any of the new stuff that comes out because I love doing this stuff in classrooms too. Excellent. Good. Good. We can help write the grant. So yeah. We need all the help we can get. One of the big draws for me coming here to Kansas City University was this brand new, it's a 54,000 square foot building. It's called the Center for Medical Education Innovation.
00:43:01
Speaker
Also known as the simulation center. And because KCU is a graduate only university that we have one of the oldest doctors of osteopathy degrees in the country. We also have a clinical CID program for which I teach in and there is also a biosciences degrees as well. So the center is really based on simulated patient care.
00:43:26
Speaker
Everything is done with either interactive mannequins that actually respond to your vocal commands and it's actually amazing to see the questions you can ask and the accurate and diverse responses that these mannequins will give, but as well, it has this AR-VR component
00:43:44
Speaker
where patients can actually be fully simulated and you can interact with them virtually. And so the center went in, believe it or not, right before COVID and was one of the only medical schools that was really well-poised then to continue education during the pandemic because they could do it virtually. And to go back to your question about case-based learning, it's really popular within the medical fields, but also in behavioral health as well. And instead of this old, you know, teach one, do one, see one,
00:44:11
Speaker
model which has existed for hundreds of years, it's really now about going in and doing it instead of just sitting and learning about it. And then following this whole notion that, well, if there's time, we'll do an application or we'll both see a patient after we learn the principles. And I think what's really revolutionary about the center and of course about this paradigm shift more globally is that it's the application first and the principles are derived later from the application.
00:44:41
Speaker
And the simulation center is a great example of that.
00:44:45
Speaker
That's great. Yeah. Well, as a virtual reality developer myself, I really appreciate that. One of the things I was thinking about this as you were talking about VR, as a developer and as a learner myself in computer programming, I had such a profound shift in my understanding of actually software development and computer programming when I started to do VR, because there's this concept in,
00:45:14
Speaker
programming of object-oriented programming. So the idea that you have these representational units that are objects and that they have all these characteristics and they move as units. And that was hard for me to appreciate before I actually stepped into VR and just grabbed a ball. And there's a ball, that's an object.
00:45:33
Speaker
I can move that object, color, shape, position, transform. All makes sense. My whole way of understanding all of that completely shifted instantaneously as soon as I reached out my hand and grabbed it. I think that has applications across so many different domains.
00:45:51
Speaker
That brings to mind the phantom limb experiment where so the experiment was to sit somebody down in front of a computer and that there's actually an arm in the
00:46:05
Speaker
virtual reality, sorry, in the space and that the movement of the arm, you know, movement of the arm in the virtual space activated the same motor cortex that you would say if you were picking up that ball. So when you were doing that
00:46:23
Speaker
in the in the virtual space you were activating the same thing as if you actually picked up the concrete ball so just think about what that means the the next iteration of learning what that can mean it's just it's just mind-boggling absolutely mind-boggling and quite frankly young kids already know this because if you have kids that do pokemon go and walk around the streets and
00:46:46
Speaker
You know, they're identifying characters walking down the street. I mean, they understand this at a whole different level than we do as adults. So we're really excited about it. But I'm sure the kids probably expect this, just like we expected flying cars and, you know, when we were kids. So yeah. Yeah.
00:47:05
Speaker
So in your book, and I like this as one of your thoughts in your intro, which I think is completely applicable, you talk about the matrix and sort of the brain in the vat kind of idea and how that, you know, what do you, what does the movie The Matrix tell us about embodied cognition or how do you see that idea of the brain in a vat as relevant for embodied cognition?
00:47:29
Speaker
Well, that's Larry Shapiro's work. He is the contributor for that. And I mean, I just drooled over it when we got it because I just thought, wow, this is such a cool application for people, you know, and, you know, our generation or your generation to really get a grasp on how virtual reality can really make a difference and
00:47:53
Speaker
The brain and the vat experiment was just that. It's like the old robot movies where you have this big beaker and a brain in there and it's bubbling and you have all these electrodes in there. I think Brooks talked about it.
00:48:11
Speaker
But the idea is, is that, you know, this brain can't exist like this. But in matrix, I mean, you have all kinds of virtual things happening. So you could do things in virtual reality that you can't do in real life. So I'm not really, you know, the best maybe Jennifer, you know, a little bit more about matrix. I'm not. I may be asking you to speculate a little bit about this. But I think, I mean, you know, maybe one of the ideas with embodied the, you know, the philosophical notion and maybe psychological notion of embodied cognition is that
00:48:41
Speaker
an isolated brain shouldn't be able to have the same sort of cognitive processes as a brain that's hooked up to an, you know, hooked up fully to a body. Yeah. And I think this really goes back to this idea of affordances. I mean, the example I always like to give, and I give credit to Lauren Shapiro for this example,
00:49:05
Speaker
is most of human depth perception is the result of moving your head through space. If you keep your eyes and your head perfectly stationary, you lose the ability to see depth. And so the experience that we get by what you might consider just a completely brain bound view would be very different literally than the view you get as you move through space and you're able to perceive depth. So I mean, the other example, I think that maybe most of the listeners are familiar with
00:49:33
Speaker
Um, that might hit home for hit home for body cognition is this great documentary that came out two years ago and I'll call my octopus teacher. Here we have an octopus who has this amazing intelligence system, but it doesn't have a neural net. Well, it has a neural net, but it doesn't have a centralized brain. And so how does it perform its cognition? It performs its cognition, which is quite evolutionarily adaptive and rich through its tentacles.
00:49:58
Speaker
And so this idea to go back to the brain and the bat that all of our thinking and knowledge has to live within our head. I think is a very limited view. Well, it does. It's not real. It's not real. The idea of the
00:50:12
Speaker
you know, this Cartesian model of the body being in albatross around the neck of the mind, that it prevents the mind from infinite capacities. Well, that was great in Aristotle's time and Plato's time and the first rationalist Descartes who talked about, you know, this mind-body separation and that the body was really an impediment to the mind, that the mind was this, you know, infinite thing. And, you know, that's kind of getting into really, you know, phenomenology and, you know, philosophy.
00:50:42
Speaker
Clark has a really good example of the blind man in the stick. And he talks about like, you know, trying to explain embodiment and extended mind theory together. And he talks about the fact that the blind man in the stick, where does perception, you know, where is perception? Is it in the head? Is it in the hand of the person? Is it in the handle of the stick? Or is it at the point of the stick touching the cement?
Future Vision for Education and Challenges
00:51:11
Speaker
Where is the perception the perception is completely embodied in the environment situated in the environment, and this is how this person processes information and this how this person moves being in the world, and I think that was a really good example of the extended mind he also talks about how we've offloaded our cognition.
00:51:33
Speaker
you know, when he first started talking about it, he talked about it in terms of a notebook, but then later on he talks about it in terms of our, you know, Chalmers talks about it in terms of our cell phone, you know, like I talk about my husband asked me for phone numbers. I have no idea what a phone number is.
00:51:49
Speaker
you know, this is offloaded into my, my smartphone. So, you know, the idea of an extended mind, you know, while philosophical and theoretical, it really does hit home because we have, you know, offloaded a lot of our cognition into, you know, external technology.
00:52:06
Speaker
Yeah, well, I this is a fascinating conversation that it's great to get this perspective kind of wrapping up the towards the hour. Thinking about a final question, I guess what I'm curious about is
00:52:22
Speaker
When you think about the classroom of the future where the impact of a body cognition is appreciated and the learnings and the lessons of this new cutting edge research is really taken into account and used practically in the classroom, what does that look like to you?
00:52:39
Speaker
Well we've been approached by quite a few software developers who want, you know, because of the book want to know how they can get involved with developing curriculum. But for me, the future classroom is going to be students moving around.
00:52:54
Speaker
maybe with oculus glasses, with the teacher as the facilitator. Now, one of the software folks that we talked about said that they can only monitor one kid at a time. I think in the future that the teacher will be able to have a way to monitor all kids' movements or activities in those virtual worlds at a time. But it's going to take a lot of work. It's going to take people like you, Joe, who work with psychologists like us and cognitive scientists.
00:53:24
Speaker
to develop that curriculum. And that's kind of like the next step that we're trying to talk about in terms of our umbrella of embodied learning that it can be applied to all content areas. But, you know, it really is in the baby stages right now. We're a very small community. We need to develop taxonomies and assessments for determining if the classroom is really doing embodied work and then looking at
00:53:50
Speaker
You know what those outcomes are and then how do we bring it to scale and you know it's going to be a big big job but right now, in order for something to get down into education and teacher education and textbooks takes about 10 years which is horrible.
00:54:07
Speaker
We're hoping that this book will get people excited for the future of what things can be and how we can make a difference. I just want to put in one final point that I think embodied learning doesn't have to be high tech. I mean, there's a wonderful array of AR, VR stuff happening, and I don't want to minimize that at all, but I think that
00:54:33
Speaker
To focus at that at an exclusion of just simple manipulatives, which also can have have their do have their own affordances and the ability for children to learn with. I don't want to paint the right the wrong picture and I don't want to.
00:54:45
Speaker
suggest that this is only for the elite that you have to have expensive technology. So, you know, simple things. And we, again, most educators know this, especially in early development, things like geotiles and bean bags and all of these things that give a learner affordances of practice that enable body-based movements. Those can be effective to you. And I think there's a place for those as long as with the AR-VR to coexist.
00:55:15
Speaker
And I wanted to add one more thing in terms of classroom. I don't know how many teachers that you guys get involved with but you know we have these professional developers that go out to school districts every year, you know, a week before classes start and they do all these bells and whistles and
00:55:32
Speaker
infamously, they talk about brain exercises and exercising the brain and really perpetuating this, you know, Cartesian notion, or even your brain in the vat model that, you know, brain is a muscle, we need to exercise the muscle. And none of it is rooted in real, you know, empirical evidence. And I think that, you know, those neuromeths were trying to
00:55:55
Speaker
you know attack and and say that you know school districts and and you know teachers and and you know educators really need to kind of take a back step and and really kind of examine what's happening you know in the classroom and and how the teachers are being educated which is really problematic at the present time.
00:56:16
Speaker
Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. So Sheila McCreen and Jennifer Fugate, thanks so much for stopping by and talking to us. I think we'll hear lots about this topic in the future. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having us.