I was reading in the blog Neurophilosopy and came across an article that relates to embodied cognition. Here is the bulk of the concluding paragraph:

…experiments show that touch sensations have a strong influence on our impressions of people and the decisions we make about them, even when the people and events are completely unrelated to the objects being touched. Thus, hardness is associated with rigidity, roughness with difficulty, and heavy objects with seriousness. Our metaphors reflect these associations: we sometimes describe people as having a “hard hearted”, “rough day”, and serious matters are often said to be “weighty”. The weight, texture and hardness of touched objects evidently has a strong priming effect on the thought processes that immediately follow, and can trigger the associated concepts.

From the blog Neurophilosophy

I posted it here for three reasons. First, it is an interesting bit of research. Second, it relates to that sentence I am thinking my way through (in the phenomenology series of posts). Third, there is this sentence in the article which caught me attention – and sparked a short snort of laughter.

…embodied cognition hypothesis, which states that bodily perceptions can exert a strong influence on the way we think.

Funny. It’s sort of like saying evolution, the theory that states that the environment can exert a strong influence on the way we develop as a species.