The Sensory Basis of Knowledge
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All mental content, not just sensory feelings, but ideas and thoughts as well,
are grounded in sensation. A specific thought is more complex than a simple
sensation such as a sound or a pain, but nonetheless it has sensory content.
Otherwise you would never be aware of it, nor ever register it in consciousness. This is the rationale for the claim that structured thoughts and ideas,
no less than sensory feelings, are constructed out of sensation—that is, made
of sensory “stuff ”. Everything you’re conscious of is constituted of sensation,
because sensation was invented by nature for the specific purpose of conveying
information to the mind. If we’re aware of something, that something is a
sensation.
The Sensory Basis of Meaning
Cognitive psychologists are increasingly advocating the position that meaning is rooted in visceral feeling. The central idea behind this thinking is that
elementary sensations are combinable together to form structured sensory feelings. For example, we experience not only colors and shapes, but also things like
a ripe tomato, or a flag with vertical red, white, blue stripes. Such a sensation
is not merely a structured experience cobbled together out of separate component parts: It is a new Gestalt in which each part plays a subtle contributing
role. Just as words can be strung together creatively to yield a new meaning, the
brain joins elementary sensations together inventively to create subtle forms
of intelligible experience.
Many cognitive scientists argue that sensations underlie all our thoughts
and form the ground on which thoughts are built. What they mean is that
for any thought, there is a particular structured sensation corresponding to it,
and when we experience that sensation we are having the thought. To have
a thought is to experience its meaning, and the claim is that the meaning is
embodied in the corresponding sensation. 3
This is currently a very active area of research in neuropsychology, with
many groups and laboratories contributing to it. It has received different names
from different circles of investigators: In recent years it has been called sensuous cognition, or sometimes cognitive phenomenology, and is descended from a
slightly older trend of thought known as cognitive linguistics. The essence of
what this research has uncovered is the following:
Every thought corresponds to a particular way of feeling the thought, and
the way you retrieve a thought instantly, is by feeling it. The brain does not
have a filing system in which thoughts are indexed by subject, and you do not
recover a thought by a systematic search through mental files. Rather, every
59
All mental content, not just sensory feelings, but ideas and thoughts as well,
are grounded in sensation. A specific thought is more complex than a simple
sensation such as a sound or a pain, but nonetheless it has sensory content.
Otherwise you would never be aware of it, nor ever register it in consciousness. This is the rationale for the claim that structured thoughts and ideas,
no less than sensory feelings, are constructed out of sensation—that is, made
of sensory “stuff ”. Everything you’re conscious of is constituted of sensation,
because sensation was invented by nature for the specific purpose of conveying
information to the mind. If we’re aware of something, that something is a
sensation.
The Sensory Basis of Meaning
Cognitive psychologists are increasingly advocating the position that meaning is rooted in visceral feeling. The central idea behind this thinking is that
elementary sensations are combinable together to form structured sensory feelings. For example, we experience not only colors and shapes, but also things like
a ripe tomato, or a flag with vertical red, white, blue stripes. Such a sensation
is not merely a structured experience cobbled together out of separate component parts: It is a new Gestalt in which each part plays a subtle contributing
role. Just as words can be strung together creatively to yield a new meaning, the
brain joins elementary sensations together inventively to create subtle forms
of intelligible experience.
Many cognitive scientists argue that sensations underlie all our thoughts
and form the ground on which thoughts are built. What they mean is that
for any thought, there is a particular structured sensation corresponding to it,
and when we experience that sensation we are having the thought. To have
a thought is to experience its meaning, and the claim is that the meaning is
embodied in the corresponding sensation. 3
This is currently a very active area of research in neuropsychology, with
many groups and laboratories contributing to it. It has received different names
from different circles of investigators: In recent years it has been called sensuous cognition, or sometimes cognitive phenomenology, and is descended from a
slightly older trend of thought known as cognitive linguistics. The essence of
what this research has uncovered is the following:
Every thought corresponds to a particular way of feeling the thought, and
the way you retrieve a thought instantly, is by feeling it. The brain does not
have a filing system in which thoughts are indexed by subject, and you do not
recover a thought by a systematic search through mental files. Rather, every