\u00e2\u20ac\u0153[L]iterature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February\u00e2\u20ac? \u00e2\u20ac\u201c-Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill<\/i><\/p>\n
Living in my body is a daily challenge. Bright lights, loud noises, large crowds, etc., assault my senses and leave me feeling disoriented and exhausted. A couple months ago, I was so startled by a loud noise from the stereo that my body’s immediate reaction (with no thought on my part) was to start crying. When my stress levels get too high (or when I don’t get quite enough sleep, or when I’m not eating properly), my bipolar disorder rears its head, and my emotions go careening out of control. Most days I feel like I’m in a fight with my environment and my body’s reaction to it, and it’s often the environment that wins.<\/p>\n
Though my experiences are perhaps more extreme than others’, Woolf’s observation that our body “colours” how we see the world is broadly applicable. Our perceptions and sensations and embodied experiences shape our thoughts and understanding. In their book Philosophy in the Flesh<\/i>, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that <\/p>\n our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6.Our sense of what is real begins with and depends crucially upon our bodies, especially our sensorimotor apparatus, which enables us to perceive, move, and manipulate, and the detailed structures of our brains, which have been shaped by both evolution and experience. (17) <\/p><\/blockquote>\n Lakoff and Johnson note that our understanding of our environment and what is “real” depends on our embodied nature, especially how we interact with the world through our “sensorimotor apparatus.”<\/p>\n Jack Katz, a sociologist interested in the embodied nature of emotion, builds on the ideas of Lakoff and Johnson. He writes, <\/p>\n emotions, which have so often been treated as opposed to thinking, are paradoxically self-reflective actions and experiences. But the self-reflection in emotions is corporeal rather than a matter of discursive reasoning. Through our emotions, we reach back sensually to grasp the tacit, embodied foundations of our selves. We are artful in producing our emotions because through them we seek to articulate the corporeal metaphors that operate implicitly at the foundations of all of our conduct. (7)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Katz builds on Lakoff and Johnson by arguing that our emotions are connected on a very deep level with our embodied understanding of the world. Every day we interact with people and our environment in ways that fuel a variety of emotions (example: Katz does research on things like road rage and how we understand our cars to be extended representations of our bodies).<\/p>\n