21 Is Your Mind Really a Computer, or Is There a Richer Story?

We often treat our intellectual thoughts and physical actions as completely separate processes, as if the mind is a detached controller operating a biological machine. This classic division, known as the sandwich view of cognition, suggests that abstract thinking is entirely isolated from how we perceive and move through our environments.

In this episode, we explore an elegant alternative where our conceptual systems are built directly from our sensory-motor mechanisms. We discuss how our brains utilize selective attention to clip out and store specific features of our experiences rather than storing holistic, unchangeable memory snapshots. This simple division into functional parts is precisely what grants the human mind its extraordinary creative productivity, allowing us to dream up new inventions, combine distant ideas, and simulate complex future scenarios.

• Amodal systems utilize arbitrary representations that do not look like or structurally correspond to the real-world objects they represent.
• The mind uses selective attention to carve up our perceptual experiences into reusable components rather than saving whole, unyielding files.
• Concepts act as simulators with generative power, allowing the mind to construct endless variations of a category such as animal movements.
• Our mental categories capture physical affordances, meaning we naturally categorize items based on how they invite our bodies to grasp, eat, or interact with them.
• Thinking is an active, top-down process where neural association networks partially run our sensory-motor channels to build a sketch of our thoughts.

This concept, published by Lawrence Barsalou in 1999 in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, challenges classical theories like Jerry Fodor's modularity of mind by showing how our higher intellect is continuous with physical action.

If our concepts are built directly from physical actions, could we ever truly master an abstract topic without physically interacting with the world around us