The body and abstract thoughts

As they thought about years gone by,participants leaned slightly backward,while in fantasising about the future,they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings,amounting to some two or three millimeters’ shift one way or the other. Nevertheless,the directionality was clear and consistent.

“When we talk about time,we often use spatial metaphors like ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you’ or ‘I’m reflecting back on the past,’” said Lynden K. Miles,who conducted the study with his colleagues Louise K. Nind and C. Neil Macrae. “It was pleasing to us that we could take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.”

The new study,published in January in the journal Psychological Science,is part of the immensely popular field called embodied cognition,the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own.

“How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body,” said Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam. “We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.”

Research in embodied cognition has revealed that the body takes language to heart and can be awfully literal-minded.

You say you’re looking forward to the future? Here,Ma,watch me pitch forward! You say a person is warm and likable,as opposed to cold and standoffish? In one recent study at Yale,researchers divided 41 college students into two groups and casually asked the members of Group A to hold a cup of hot coffee,those in Group B to hold iced coffee. The students were then ushered into a testing room and asked to evaluate the personality of an imaginary individual based on a packet of information.

Students who had recently been cradling the warm beverage were far likelier to judge the fictitious character as warm and friendly than were those who had held the iced coffee.

In a report published last August in Psychological Science,Jostmann and his colleagues Daniel Lakens and Thomas W. Schubert explored the degree to which the body conflates weight and importance. They learned,for example,that when students were told that a particular book was vital to the curriculum,they judged the book to be physically heavier than those told the book was ancillary to their studies.

As Jostmann sees it,the readiness of the body to factor physical cues into its deliberations over seemingly unrelated and highly abstract concerns often makes sense. Our specific clipboard savvy notwithstanding,“the issue of how humans view gravity is evolutionarily useful,” he said.

Yesterday is regrettable,tomorrow still hypothetical. But you can always listen to your body,and seize today with both hands.