I Move, Therefore I Am: A Conversation With Neuroscientist and Philosopher Dr. Michael Mannino
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Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” is probably one of the most famous lines in the history of Western ideas.
Convinced of the need to “doubt everything”, he wanted to find one thing we could be absolutely sure of. It couldn’t be anything relayed by the senses: they were unreliable, full of bias, subjective. The one thing we could know for sure was that we were thinking beings. Thinking, then, was the “realest” thing about the human experience.
The dictum rested on the separation between the brain and the body. The body was messy and inconvenient, dumb machinery. It gave us some data, but never the full picture. Truth was like mathematics: pure, clean, absolute. Human reason, then, was best employed to develop the most accurate maps of the terrain.
Many ancient thinkers had been intuitively skeptical of such a split. Theucydides wrote that “the society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” Aristotle put it succinctly: “the purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge.” The map, therefore, should not overshadow the terrain. It’s just a tool. What ultimately mattered to them were the human ends we use it toward.
Our culture is still largely under the influence of Descartian thinking. One of the ways this shows up is in our bias for specialization in matters of human development: our athletes will focus on physical performance and leave their minds drastically underdeveloped, while potbellied knowledge workers spend hours on end sitting in front of screens while their bodies atrophy. The demands of modern careers make this particular trap ever easier to fall into.
Starting in the 1980’s, however, neuroscientists started exploring a new understanding of the mind-body connection. The idea they started exploring is that of “embodied cognition” – the notion that our bodily experiences are a key part of how we perform cognitively. They started unearthing new evidence that the way we move directly impacts the way we think, and that the way we think can measurably impact our biology. Doing and moving aren’t dumb execution – they are particular ways of knowing.
The connections these scientists are finding are more and more surprising, and have the benefit of usually being quite practical – for example, a large Swedish study found that cardiovascular fitness predicted cognitive performance. Another found that physically gesturing helps people complete difficult puzzles more effectively than repeated action. Changing the way we think about stress directly alters hormone levels.
We’re just scratching the surface of this exciting new mind-body paradigm – it’s very clear that it’s not I think therefore I am, it’s I am, therefore I move and think … or, as my guest in this episode of the podcast, neuroscientist and philosopher Dr. Michael Mannino more bluntly puts it: I move therefore I am.
Dr. Mannino bridges cutting edge work in data-driven fields like neuroscience and advanced statistics, with intuitive concepts we developed in religion, mythology and various social sciences.
He is also Chief Science Officer at the Flow Research Collective, and has contributed original new research in the field of group flow – or how teams can get into flow states together to reach new levels of performance and enjoyment.
This conversation explores the ever-expanding rabbit hole of embodied cognition science where, in his words, even the craziest religious theories “don’t even come close to the craziness that science is unveiling.” You can check out the full episode here, and on all the podcast platforms.
P.S. Two years into this wild podcast journey, I’ve put a little sizzle reel together … you can check it out here:
P.P.S.: In connection last month’s episode with Steven Kotler on Purpose and Flow, I’m doing my first giveaway – if you refer a friend to sign up to this Substack, I’ll mail each of you a Steven Kotler book … just reach out, confirm your friend’s e-mail address, and my team will reach out separately to get your mailing addresses so we can mail those over (we’ll keep all your personal information in the strictest confidence … we take that seriously, we’re privacy and data lawyers during our day job :)