Supersizing the mind

"Studies of mind, thought, and reason have tended to marginalize the role of bodily form, real-world action, and environmental backdrop. In recent years, both in philosophy and in cognitive science, this tendency has been identified and, increasingly, resisted. The result is a plethora of work on what has become known as embodied, situated, distributed, and even "extended" cognition. Work in this new, loosely knit field depicts thought and reason as in some way inextricably tied to the details of our gross bodily form, our habits of action and intervention, and the enabling web of social,…