Photo: Jennifer Lim-Tamkican / Unsplash

For the past several months, as my kid and I walked to school, we spent every morning seeking out ice: small puddles that had lightly frozen over, or the crinkly edges of snowmelt along the sidewalk. The joy of that underfoot crack is so delightful, so visceral, that it’s amazing we don’t spend all day every winter just looking for ice to walk on.

It got me wondering about the full-body experience of ice-cracking. As my heel breaks the ice, tingles shoot all the way from toes to the top of the spine.

What is going on there? Just because I can feel the ice break under my foot doesn’t mean I should be able to feel it all over my body, or that it should bring a sense of delight and pleasure.

Yet it does. Why?

There isn’t, as far as I know, a scientific study that focuses on the specific experience of ice-walking. (Google searches keep turning up ice fishing advice and I’ve done enough of that in my life to be happily uninterested.) But there is growing research on the concept of embodiment, the idea that our body’s experience of the world shapes our mind. Researchers at the Universities of Cologne and Würzburg in Germany have defined “embodiment” and its related research as:

“an effect where the body, its sensorimotor state, its morphology, or its mental representation play an instrumental role in information processing.”

Our mind and body are entangled together. Our sense of self and our thinking and actions are the result of the mind-body’s combined experience of the world. Research on this reality is starting to intersect with knowledge of proprioception (our sense of our body’s position in space), interoception (how our mind reads and interprets our body’s internal state), and vestibular function (the sense of our body’s motion in space).

All of these concepts coalesce around something that humans have been trying to deny at least since René Descartes introduced mind-body dualism by declaring cogito, ergo sum or, “I think; therefore, I am,” giving free reign to the mistaken notion that how and what we think can be severed from the rest of the body’s experiences: the denial of the mind-body connection.

I did a lot of research on embodiment, proprioception, and vestibular function when writing a book about walking. Yet after hundreds of pages of reading, I didn’t feel like I achieved in-depth knowledge of how those senses affect our lives. Instead, the reading persuaded me that after centuries of mind-body disconnect, we’re only seeing the edges of what embodiment research will teach us. Whatever scientific research knows so far, it’s barely the beginning.

In science writer Annie Murphy Paul’s recent book The Extended Mind, she presents page after page of research on how much the outer world is involved in our thinking. From teamwork to spending time in nature, it’s how our mind-body interacts with the world — including exchanging and developing ideas with other humans — that shapes how and what we think. Take the simple act of movement:

“When we’re engaged in physical activity, our visual sense is sharpened, especially with regard to stimuli appearing in the periphery of our gaze. This shift, which is also found in non-human animals, makes evolutionary sense: the visual system becomes more sensitive when we are actively exploring our environment. . . .

Such activity-induced alterations in the way we process visual information constitute just one example of how moving our bodies changes the way we think. . . . By moving our bodies in certain ways, we’re immediately able to think more intelligently.”

Some of the cognitive effect of movement is due to increase in circulation. That’s one of the reasons everyone, especially older people, are encouraged to walk several times a week for brain health. Walking forces our bodies to resist gravity, which strengthens bone density but also improves circulation and heart health, both of which are important for cognition.

But there is a lot more going on here than just our circulatory system. When we move, our mind-body system is challenged with an enormous amount of continuously changing input. There are the visual cues, like viewing the surrounding terrain and gauging distance. There are also the ones most able-bodied people don’t think about, like stepping down from a curb to cross a road, turning our hips slightly to walk through a narrow doorway, or performing a subconscious full-body adjustment when we step from concrete or dirt to slippery ice.

The role of simple movement in improved cognition and attention is by now well documented, from numerous trials with permissive movement classrooms where children are no longer required to sit still at desks — and end up with improved learning and executive function — to the by now well-known Stanford study showing improvement in creative thinking after a walk outside.

Despite these studies and many others (several of which are discussed at length in Paul’s book), most of our world and expectations are still structured around a mind-body dualism.

In French professor Alain Berthoz’s 1997 book The Brain’s Sense of Movement, before diving into the incredible research on our brain’s ability to perceive, predict, and control movement, he wrote that:

“The American functionalist school and some of its European adherents defend a cognitive psychology that maintains in principle that the higher functions of the brain must be studied without any reference whatsoever to their neural underpinnings. These functions may be emergent or dissociated, but in the end they are viewed merely as superstructure. We have probably not heard the last of these dualist tendencies. . . .

This book is an apology for the body.”

From the connection between limb motion and our visual field, to the relation of illusion and the sense of the body in space when struggling with issues like agoraphobia, Berthoz sought to reintegrate the body and the brain.

That was over twenty-five years ago, and we’ve still barely made a start.

After thousands of miles of walking in tandem with thousands of pages of reading, I think it might be time to study embodiment from the other direction: with the rustle of air through aspen leaves, with the welcome and vulnerability in a hug, with the thrill in every crack of ice underfoot. With the sheer joy of being a body in the world.