" This is an unusual book. It's largely boring but with many gold nuggets tucked inside. Cognition, value and body are tied together. "Meaning," the authors say, is rooted in agency (acting and choosing) and agency "depends on embodiment." Feedback from bodily movements provide meaning that become "maps" within. We talk about muscle memory but memory is lodged in the brain as motor maps. Perception is active. It is predictive and we fill in the gaps with what we have learned before. People do have auras in the sense of a space that is an extension of themselves. When we point our finger, our self extends itself to the object. About 5% of the population are affected by a condition (synesthesia) whereby separate senses are joined. Numbers have colors; red smells; voices have flavors. That striking statistic helps to explain the paranormal, and makes the weird not abnormal. It's further evidence of our biologically based variability. Above our biological differnces, culture promotes fundamental variations as well. The Chinese can't understand the part without understanding the whole. Those in the West focus on straight lines and salient objects on those lines.
As opposed to the fixed, behavioral structures favored by the evolutionary biologists, the authors note that mirror neurons allow us to experience others as extensions of ourselves, but this capacity produces negative as well as positive social interactions. The authors suggest that homophobia may be deeply ingrained because straight men can't help but to experience "in the mind's body" two gay men in a sexual act. They also say that sadists are able to experience pleasure in the pain of others because of these neurons. The authors go on to say that Von Economo neurons are fundamental to social intuitions. We make quick judgments involving "approach or retreat". Regarding William James' theory of emotions, our body reacts (and acts?) and we become aware of our body's reaction (and action?) as feeling. Here the body's mind is primary and our mind's awareness follows. The mind is infused with the body's energy and there is no such thing as "pure reason." They also say that the right frontal insula is active when one feels literal physical pain and when one experiences psychic pain such as social rejection.
All in all, the mental maps we form are integrally tied to action, and action begins with our hands. The authors casually remark that permanent two-legged walking coincided with the appearance of the very first stone tools. Our hands become free, and free hands enabled us to extend our body's domain through what the authors say became an innate drive to augment our bodies with artifacts. That augmentation was "bred into us" and this, perhaps, enhanced our power and, with power, our freedom. "
— Bob, 2/2/2014