60
4 The Animal Sensorium
thought has the form of a precisely articulated feeling, and searching for a
thought consists of seeking contact with the feeling. So long as that sensation
persists in awareness, you continue to be aware of the thought. When you’re
searching for a particular idea in memory, you feel what it is you’re searching for,
and with the feeling to guide your inner process, the brain leads you straight
to it.
This belief is not as radical as it may appear to be: All it claims is that
sensation comes in many varieties. We have the sense of touch, we experience
sounds—for instance when we listen to music—in a particular way; vision too
is one of the senses, for what we see comes to us through a sensory channel.
Like these, thoughts too are sculpted out of the matter of sensation.
Ultimately, then, all meaning is rooted in the Sensorium—for it is the Sensorium that holds the sensitive matter felt by every living body. Every thought
and mental content has a way that it feels to us. The meaning of the thought—
that is, the way we understand the thought—is a mental structure constructed
out of feeling-matter. A conscious thought is the thought that it is, in virtue
of the distinctive way it feels to us. This is no longer a speculative idea but is
upheld by supporting evidence from experimental research in psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and developmental studies of children. 4
The movement toward recognizing that mental life is built on a foundation
of bodily feeling has been recognized for over three decades. Building on the
observations discussed in the previous paragraphs, the discipline known as
cognitive linguistics aims to show exactly how meaning is built out of elementary sensations. It appears that a great deal of what we think and say draws its
meaningfulness from structured feeling-images which develop early in life.
The psychologist Jean Mandler has shown that infants learn very fast in their
first weeks. Mandler’s experiments and observations have shown that childrens’
early cognitive abilities are far more sophisticated than formerly believed. Right
at the beginning, she has found, human infants generalize about what they
have observed, and “theorize” about it. According to Mandler, a mechanism
of perceptual meaning analysis operates in infants: This mechanism extracts the
essential aspects of events and organizes them as structured experiences. These
structured experiences are called image-schemas, or sometimes feeling-images.
When a baby begins carrying out volitional actions—for example playing
with toys—the action sequences it carries out are associated with the goals they
aim to achieve. These associations coalesce into formal schemas which record
the structure of simple events in the child’s experience. Such schemas, once
formed, serve to give meaning to similar events in the future.
Children are not born with specific knowledge, but with propensities to
interpret early experience in certain ways rather than others. It is known,
4 The Animal Sensorium
thought has the form of a precisely articulated feeling, and searching for a
thought consists of seeking contact with the feeling. So long as that sensation
persists in awareness, you continue to be aware of the thought. When you’re
searching for a particular idea in memory, you feel what it is you’re searching for,
and with the feeling to guide your inner process, the brain leads you straight
to it.
This belief is not as radical as it may appear to be: All it claims is that
sensation comes in many varieties. We have the sense of touch, we experience
sounds—for instance when we listen to music—in a particular way; vision too
is one of the senses, for what we see comes to us through a sensory channel.
Like these, thoughts too are sculpted out of the matter of sensation.
Ultimately, then, all meaning is rooted in the Sensorium—for it is the Sensorium that holds the sensitive matter felt by every living body. Every thought
and mental content has a way that it feels to us. The meaning of the thought—
that is, the way we understand the thought—is a mental structure constructed
out of feeling-matter. A conscious thought is the thought that it is, in virtue
of the distinctive way it feels to us. This is no longer a speculative idea but is
upheld by supporting evidence from experimental research in psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and developmental studies of children. 4
The movement toward recognizing that mental life is built on a foundation
of bodily feeling has been recognized for over three decades. Building on the
observations discussed in the previous paragraphs, the discipline known as
cognitive linguistics aims to show exactly how meaning is built out of elementary sensations. It appears that a great deal of what we think and say draws its
meaningfulness from structured feeling-images which develop early in life.
The psychologist Jean Mandler has shown that infants learn very fast in their
first weeks. Mandler’s experiments and observations have shown that childrens’
early cognitive abilities are far more sophisticated than formerly believed. Right
at the beginning, she has found, human infants generalize about what they
have observed, and “theorize” about it. According to Mandler, a mechanism
of perceptual meaning analysis operates in infants: This mechanism extracts the
essential aspects of events and organizes them as structured experiences. These
structured experiences are called image-schemas, or sometimes feeling-images.
When a baby begins carrying out volitional actions—for example playing
with toys—the action sequences it carries out are associated with the goals they
aim to achieve. These associations coalesce into formal schemas which record
the structure of simple events in the child’s experience. Such schemas, once
formed, serve to give meaning to similar events in the future.
Children are not born with specific knowledge, but with propensities to
interpret early experience in certain ways rather than others. It is known,