Being Maximum Embodied Is a Healthy Choice

The Growing Mind

Every human perspective arises from senses in a living body. The senses of a human body are the result of a very long evolutionary process. Our senses consist of many types of specialized cells. The richness of our current senses is extraordinary.

Being Maximum Embodied

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Currently, we know of more than a dozen types of primary tactile neurons distributed in different densities across our skin. Taste is constructed by five types of taste buds, corresponding to sweet, salt, bitter, sour and umami (triggered by amino acids). Our smell has around 400 types of receptor cells. And our eyes are the culmination of the highest sensory refinement. (Masland, 2020).

All our senses translate the forces and fields of the world around our body into electrochemical signals. Our body is a complex of interacting networks of sensory neurons that create our mental world by detecting an event in the world and transmitting signals about it. The world we perceive is a world brought into our mind by multiple exchanging senses. Our perspective on the world is completely dependent upon our senses: no embodied senses, no perspective.

The Images of Our Mind

The sensory signals converse and transform into what we experience as images. As Antonio Damasio beautifully says:

“Turn a mind inside out and spill its contents. What do you find? Images and more images, the sorts of images that complicated creatures, such as we are, manage to generate and combine in a forward-flowing stream.” (Damasio, 2021, p 45)

However, the sensory input from outside is not the only way our mind grows. The senses of the so called external world are permanently mixed with an abundance of sensory input coming from within our body.

Again a long list of many types of sensory neurons bring their signals to the brain from within the body: from endocrine, respiratory, digestive, immune, and reproductive systems… There is no way to keep both streams of signals separated. The feelings of our body accompany the images of our world and guide our actions and emotions toward it: our perception is deeply embodied.

At the same time this combined sensory world we perceive is permanently mixed with images and interpretations from our memory. Anil Seth, a leading British researcher in the field of consciousness science, puts this very sharp:

“We never experience sensory signals themselves; we only ever experience interpretations of them.” (Seth, 2021, p 83)

This mixture of images from in and outside our bodies together with our personal history of memories about them is what presents the stream of our mind. Only selected and filtered fractions of this mindstream we come to feel and know.

Robert Lanza states as the second principle of his Grand Biocentric Design theory:

“Our external and internal perception are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.” (Lanza & Pavsic, 2020, p 196 )

When the “I” Becomes the Center of This Ongoing Stream

The inseparably interconnected mixture of images needs a reference point. This reference point is naturally offered by what we can call the embodied self. The embodied self is a special content of consciousness. Important neuroscientific work done by Antonio Damasio shows how our protoself—our embodied self—becomes our core self, the feeling and knowing of what happens.

This embodied self-complex slowly grows into our narrative self, our autobiographical self, whose center becomes what we call the "I." This "I" becomes the main player of the human mind; the axis around which its world revolves. A small fraction of the wide and fluctuating stream of images of all sorts that is passing by as our mental world is felt and known.

The abundant flow of images in our mind absorbs our consciousness. There is almost no way for the “I” to step out of this flow. Our embodied self, as the ground for our narrative I, is always rooted in an interoceptive and exteroceptive entanglement. Nobody can ever feel or know “my” entanglement directly, except “myself”. Only “our” self/I has a private view on the stream of embodied sensory images in our mind.

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The pain of traumas can be so intense that people sometimes find ways to disconnect from their living body, to no longer want to feel the pain. But the story of the "I" can also become so disconnected from life that all choices and emotions become disorienting.

Disconnecting from life by ignoring or denying the felt life, or by constructing narratives that become dogmas in which the connection with life becomes irrelevant, has serious psychological implications. A self that tries to disconnect itself from its living roots is deeply sabotaging itself. A self that does not value and care for its embodiment is a deeply self-sabotaging self.

When self-care becomes out of balance, our emotional health and well-being is seriously at risk. We simply can never step out of our body. A culture that neglects its embodiment is what currently causes so many mental problems: stress, burnout, anxiety and sleep disorders…

The choices we make that are disconnected from life, disconnected from nature, deeply affect our embedded bodies. Disregarding our embodied and embedded roots is a deeply self-sabotaging act: because there can never be a self that steps out of its body.

Life confirmation on all levels is therefore the psychologically most healthy choice.