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The Curriculum of Embodied Perception

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Reconstructing 'Education' through Mindful Attention

Abstract

This chapter explores the inner curriculum from the perspective of the brain-mind-body and its process of moment-to-moment embodied perception, most of which occurs beneath our awareness. In every moment this brain-mind-body faces the ultimate curricular question: ‘what ought I attend out of all that is possible?’ Based on cognitive theory, this chapter examines what is my brain-mind-body’s curricular agenda, and how are we ‘educated’ by it? This entails both an exploration of the selective nature of attention, and an analysis of the process of perception. Perception is a recursive process. It is based on an embodied mind, which is grounded in a past and defined by a present state of being. Both affect what and how we attend and yield this moment’s teaching.

The brain is not just a tool for grappling with the world. It’s what brings the world about. McGilchrist 2009, p. 19

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See also McGilchrist: “[T]hings change according to the stance we adopt towards them, the type of attention we give to them, the disposition we hold in relation to them” (2009, p. 4).

  2. 2.

    This is what Kahneman (2011) describes as our automatic and primary ‘system 1’ that ‘thinks fast’.

  3. 3.

    This is a very fundamental basis of perception to which neuroscientists refer as the dual-processing that combines bottom-up sensual data, with top-down representations (Hochstein and Ahissar 2002). Basically, to make our perception far more efficient and quicker, once we’ve learned to read or to identify an object, our brains constantly anticipate what’s coming next. One can think of it as a scientist-in-the-mind that makes a conjecture and changes it only if it doesn’t work. The brain is thus an “anticipation machine” (Siegel 2012, p. 128).

  4. 4.

    “There is general agreement that emotion states bear two important phenomenal features, one mental and the other bodily…we will refer to these two components of emotion as valence (a subjective feeling of pleasantness or unpleasantness) and arousal (extent of bodily excitation), respectively” (Berkovich-Ohana and Glikshon 2014, pp. 11–12).

  5. 5.

    The term state of being parallels the term ‘mental state’ as applied in Siegel (2012).

  6. 6.

    See also Ellsworth and Scherer (2003) and Davidson et al. (2003).

  7. 7.

    There’s no coincidence in the induction of fear as a way to get students’ attention. It certainly gets students’ attention for that moment though unfortunately, evidence shows that stress has a damaging effect on memory encoding (Elzinga et al. 2005).

  8. 8.

    This is especially the case in conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (Davidson 2012; Elzinga et al. 2005)

  9. 9.

    What Siegel refers to as “the first phase of emotional response” seems to be what some have analyzed as the “feeling tone” when discussing cognition from a Buddhist perspective (Grabovac et al. 2011; Varela et al. 1991, p. 67).

  10. 10.

    By the way, running is exactly the wrong thing to do in such case…

  11. 11.

    I use this “shout”-pedagogy when I teach philosophy of education, curriculum theory, social-emotional learning, and other courses.

  12. 12.

    See Nummenmaa et al. (2014) for an illuminating research in the domain of emotional body maps.

  13. 13.

    There is growing evidence from neuroscience that associates this self-other relationship with the functioning of the insula; especially in the research of compassion (Singer et al. 2009; Zaki et al. 2012).

  14. 14.

    There are some interesting parallels here with Kahneman’s (2011) ‘system 1’ vs. ‘system 2’ though I believe the theory proposed here accredits the mind with more potential.

  15. 15.

    “arousal leads to enhanced encoding via increased neuronal plasticity and the creation of new synaptic connections and therefore increased likelihood of future retrieval” (Siegel 2012, p. 163). See also Phelps and Sharot (2008).

  16. 16.

    “emotionally arousing experiences become better remembered by a combination of direct physiological effects (perhaps on the genetic activation leading to synapses formation…) and complex cognitive effects on the encoding of memory via the retrieval, rehearsal, and reencoding process” (Siegel 2012, p. 76).

  17. 17.

    Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow (2011) is a book that applies various cognitive experiments, which effectively bring embodied perception into the reader’s experience. It constitutes a ‘colder’ intellectual approach, nevertheless it can significantly contribute to any development of this domain of the inner curriculum.

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  1. Beit Berl Academic College and Hebrew University, Modi’in, Israel

    Oren Ergas

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Ergas, O. (2017). The Curriculum of Embodied Perception . In: Reconstructing 'Education' through Mindful Attention. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58782-4_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58782-4_7

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