The Spatial Mind

New Scientist published an interesting article this week about the influence of the body's positioning in space on one's thought processes.  According to recent research, space and the body are actually much more connected to the mind than has been traditionally accepted.  The article cites a study by researchers at the University of Melbourne in Parkville, Australia which found that the eye movements of 12 right handed male subjects could be used to predict the size of each in a series of numbers that the participants were asked to generate; left and downwards meant a smaller number than the previous one, while up and to the right meant a larger number.  A separate study at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, asked 24 students to move marbles from a box on a higher shelf to one on a lower shelf while answering a neutral question, such as "tell me what happened yesterday".  The resulted showed that the subjects were more likely to talk of positive events when moving marbles upwards, and negative events when moving them downwards.  

Read more about this here.  

 

The notion that our bodies' direct physical relationship to space can influence thoughts is exciting, and reopens arguments against the ontological distinction between mind and body that is most commonly identified with Descartes, as well as associated questions of physical determinism vs. indeterminism .  Going further, I suspect that less overt interactions between the body and its surrounding environment could be also included in this discussion, such as the psychological perceptions of temperature, humidity, and other similarly invisible environmental characteristics.  The New Scientist article also references a 2008 study from the Rotman School of Management in Toronto that shows that social exclusion has the effect of making people feel colder.  The issue of causality abounds here: if social exclusion or inclusion affects a person's temperature perception, would variant temperatures also be able to yield varying types of associated social behavior?  Could we extend this discussion to the somewhat perverse notion that a carefully controlled interior environment is actually a form of mind control? ...