# Out of Our Heads > This book takes the embodied, environmentally situated mind perspective: studying consciousness requires examining not only the brain but also the body, the particular situation/environment in which it is placed, and interactions among brain, body, and environment. It criticizes existing perspectives and research methods. This book takes the [embodied, environmentally situated mind](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Embodied%20cognition.txt) perspective: studying requires examining not only the [brain](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Brain.txt) but also the body, the particular situation/environment in which it is placed, and interactions among brain, body, and environment. It criticizes existing perspectives and research methods. ## Notes The full title is *Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness*. It was translated into Korean as "[The Trap of Neuroscience](https://www.yes24.com/Product/goods/3502903)," and the translation is relatively good. I personally wanted to read it because 1) I have recently (2009) been studying visual perception and , and wanted a broader, more detailed understanding of the emphasized by ; and 2) I wanted to encounter a perspective on the mind different from conventional or [evolutionary psychology](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Evolutionary%20psychology.txt). How did it feel after reading? The author's perspective differed, slightly or greatly, from those of various scholars I knew a little about: the Cosmides couple, , , , , , and others. He even seems to differ from [Andy Clark](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Andy%20Clark.txt), whom I expected to hold a similar position. I gained a great deal, and feel my thinking about consciousness and brain research has expanded. (Surprisingly, the Amazon reviews are not particularly good.) ## Preface, chapters 1 and 8, and epilogue The preface, chapters 1 and 8, and the epilogue repeatedly summarize the book's overall argument, so I will discuss them together (perhaps this repetition is one reason for the bad reviews). To pinpoint the field the author most vigorously attacks: . He argues that other related fields in cognitive science, such as robotics, are gradually embracing embodied cognition and achieving various results, while neuroscience alone clings to its traditional perspective and stands still. He claims that modern is little different from historical [phrenology](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Phrenology.txt) (most neuroscientists would regard this as practically an insult), has made no progress in consciousness research compared with a century ago, and rests on an entirely unverified superstition: that consciousness is a phenomenon occurring inside the brain. According to the author, the only astonishing thing about 's is "how utterly ordinary and unastonishing it is." Modern neuroscientists, he says, are hopelessly absorbed in new toys such as , , and . Chapter 1 in particular criticizes various problems in research based on brain imaging. His view of consciousness is as follows: - Consciousness does not reside in a particular organ inside our bodies (such as the brain). Trying to locate a locus of consciousness within the body is therefore misguided. - Consciousness does not *happen* in the brain as digestion happens in the gut. It is something we *do, actively*, through interacting with the world around us. He offers two analogies: money and musical instruments. Money's value does not lie solely in its material composition. It acquires meaning only through social participants, agreements, and so forth together. Similarly, consciousness should be approached as extending across brain + personal history + present situation + interaction with the world, rather than by studying the brain alone. I prefer the musical-instrument analogy. The brain is like an instrument: to study how music is performed, we must examine not only the instrument but the player and, in ensemble performances, other players, instruments, the conductor, and so on. Misunderstanding the claim that consciousness is not inside the brain could lead toward something like a "blank slate" view; the instrument analogy helps prevent this. A , for example, must have its particular structure to produce its characteristic sound. Not just any instrument can sound like a guitar. Yet a guitar alone does not produce a piece of music: a player must perform it according to the score. The guitar and its particular structure correspond to the brain and its specific functions, and the player can be compared to the body and environment. We could extend this analogy. One concept the author criticizes is the conventional , which holds that the brain constructs of the external world: visual information arrives through the retina, V1 processes it to detect basic visual features, V2–V4 build patterns, and IT produces meaningful mental representations. Studying brain activation patterns through fMRI and similar methods does indeed reveal something corresponding to the world before our eyes being constructed inside the brain (particularly at low levels, such as V1). But the instrument analogy reveals a problem with this view. Suppose we fitted anemometers at various points inside a wind instrument such as a recorder and observed what happened inside. We would see airspeed change in patterns corresponding to the player's breath. Yet we could hardly say that the recorder's job is to produce internal representations of the player's exhalations. The formation of such counterparts to the breath is merely a byproduct of producing sound. ## Chapter 2. Conscious Life From here, I will summarize briefly. Chapter 2 argues that the lower threshold for consciousness is a living being with a body, rather than a "brain in a Petri dish." The author does not reject itself, and says artificial consciousness may be possible. But he believes it would necessarily take the form of with an artificial body. An interesting aside is his new interpretation of the . The conventional explanation for young children's failure is that "minds are hidden and private, inaccessible to direct observation, so beliefs and desires must be inferred from outward behavior; this is the role of , which has not yet developed in young children." The author instead argues that, in the child's consciousness, the parent is not an independent entity: parent and child constitute a single subject, a system, and the parent forms part of the child's natural psychological landscape. Young children simply do not yet understand that "another's private, unobservable mind" can exist. ## Chapter 3. The Dynamics of Consciousness The core claim is that consciousness emerges from interactions among brain, body, and environment. To support it, the chapter examines seeing. Drawing particularly on 's , the author argues that the key to the conscious experience of "seeing" is interaction between body and environment, rather than the "eyes" or "visual cortex." For example, fitting a blind person with a camera and translating its signals into tactile signals delivered through a patch attached to the body can produce an experience deserving the name "seeing," despite no involvement of the eyes. Seeing, as a sensory modality, should be understood as a particular style of interaction between body and environment: only surfaces can be sampled, only one side is visible at a time, things get larger when approached and smaller when receding, disappear when one turns away, and so on. [Andy Clark](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Andy%20Clark.txt) also discusses this in [Supersizing the mind](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Supersizing%20the%20mind.txt). See [Perceptual experience and sensorymotor dependencies](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Perceptual%20experience%20and%20sensorymotor%20dependencies.txt). ## Chapter 4. Wide Minds Chapter 4 extends the previous chapter's theme, discussing extensions of the body through , the , and so forth. To experience the rubber hand illusion, sit at a table, place one hand on your lap out of sight, and put a convincing artificial hand on the table where your hand should be. If the real hand below the table and the fake hand above it are stimulated in exact synchrony (tickling, rubbing, pinching, etc.), you strongly feel sensations coming **from the fake hand**. This supports the claim that what we experience as our body need not be connected as a single physical body. When a blind person "feels" the texture of the ground through a cane, that cane can be regarded as an extended body. ## Chapter 5. Habits The first part emphasizes the importance of habits in daily life. Through various examples, it argues that we develop many habits throughout our lives, and without them almost all everyday activities would be disrupted. After stressing their importance, the latter part argues (perhaps unsurprisingly) that habits, too, do not exist independently but are related to the world. The criticism of here was also interesting. The author thinks it ignores language's concreteness and close connections to the real world, approaching it too much as an abstract symbolic system. As I understand it, researchers in the tradition deliberately narrow their scope rather than neglecting those aspects out of ignorance (for example, deliberately setting aside psychological reality; I do not know how this has changed with the or movements since the <2000s>). But the author would obviously find this excuse(?) unsatisfactory, since it does not escape the criticism he levels against the information-processing perspective in vision research in chapter 7. ## Chapter 6. The Grand Illusion The "grand illusion" encompasses two kinds of claim the author criticizes. The first is relatively traditional: we feel that we experience more than actually enters through our eyes because the brain supplements the information through various corrections. The second is more extreme: rather than the brain supplementing information, the very feeling of having a "rich experience" is itself an illusion (). Naturally, he criticizes both. Both rest on what he considers an unsupported assumption: that mental representations are created inside the brain, or that sensory experience is something happening there. His view is that sensory experience extends across the world: rather than the brain creating mental representations, the world before our eyes is itself the representation ("The world is its own model"). Our visual experience is rich because we have rich access to the world. We can move our heads or eyes whenever we want to obtain information from the desired place. (This part fits well with [Visual Thinking for Design](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Visual%20thinking%20for%20design.txt); the mental-representation part does not.) ## Chapter 7. Voyages of Discovery Chapter 7 criticizes almost all modern vision research. By "almost all," I mean 's decades of research (which won a ) and 's , among others. More precisely, it criticizes the underlying assumption—the brain is an information-processing machine—rather than condemning the research itself. The author says the central problem with the is its assumption that the mind arises from events inside the brain. He agrees with that computation inside the head alone cannot produce consciousness, while agreeing with that computers or robots could possess consciousness. (Given the claims in chapters 2 and 3, he would differ from Dennett again in believing that even if artificial consciousness is possible, it necessarily requires an artificial environment and an artificial body interacting with it.) Viewed this way, D. Hubel's research leads to a rather pessimistic conclusion: according to the author, decades of work have offered no answer about "the experience of seeing." Studying whether information processing (computation) occurs in the brain when visual stimuli are presented to cats or monkeys with their bodies, heads, and eyes immobilized ([aperture vision](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Aperture%20vision.txt)) is, in the instrument analogy, merely studying how air moves in a guitar's sound box when a particular string is plucked. It tells us little about performance. Performance does not reside in the guitar's sound box (just as consciousness does not reside in the brain); it arises through interaction between guitar and player (brain, body, and environment). Studying it this way amounts to studying performance without the performer (consciousness without body or environment). ## Further explanation Ending here might invite the reaction, "After attacking every great study, his only alternative is 'we are out of our heads'? Isn't that a bit much?" So I want to add my own interpretation. I think his criticism is best understood as "we need new interpretations," rather than "burn all existing research." Suppose magic happened one day and every consciousness researcher in the world adopted his view. Existing studies would not become useless. They would regain meaning through being revisited one by one and given new interpretations. Seen this way, his argument is not so empty. At least for me, the book offered new interpretations of existing research and helped broaden my thinking and make it more flexible in various ways.