Embodied Cognition Theory

When you think normally, you most likely experience yourself talking in a monologue and with words. Or at least that is what it feels like. There are actual many ways that you can think; you can actually think visually or with symbolized thought. The monologues that you think of are in English and your brain does not understand English, so there has to be a way for your brain to translate the English in way that it can understand it. There has to be a way for your brain to interpret the English into reason. When you program a computer, you program it in computer language like C++. That language then gets interpreted into computer code which then gets converted into binary code. The binary code represents on and off switches, 0 being off and
This theory says that your brain actually uses your body to understand the world around you. It says that everything you think and everything you learn is related back to your physical experience. So if someone were to tell you that they were walking at night in a dark alley and it was super cold, the way you understand this is that you experience and visualize what the person is telling you. You remember what it is like to feel cold, you remember what it is like to be afraid in a dark place. You visualize yourself walking alone in this dark alley. Your brain is simulating what is happening. We rely on our physical experience to help us interpret and understand the world around
This traditional theory explained that the way we generate our behavior was all in our brain. It was thought that our perceptions turned into motor commands through a mental representational system which transformed the input. For example, take a volleyball player spiking a ball. How does the player know at what time to hit the ball? How does the player know what part of their hand should come in contact with what part of the volleyball? The disembodied theory believes that in order to predict where to hit the ball, the player needs some initial information about the speed, direction and other initial conditions about the ball. The player perceives these initial conditions and provides these as inputs for the mental representation system which will transform the input. The brain takes the input provided by the brain and uses it to tell the body where to position the hand and palm to hit the ball. This requires the player to predict where the ball will land which is a problem because a player cannot predict where the ball is going to land all the time. It seems like the player must be doing more than this to spike the ball. While this approach to explain the behavior of the volleyball player seems reasonable, the embodied model does a better job at explaining behavior.
The embodied theory argues that the player looks at the way the volley ball is moving towards