Jim Gee and embodiment

To answer the question "What does Jim Gee think about embodiment?" I turned to ch4 "Simulations and the Body" in his Situated Learning book. What I gleaned from it, is that he feels that simulated experiences are darn close to "real" experiences (which are basically just mentally constructed anyway, so why wouldn't they be as "real"?). He says, "School learning is often about diembodied minds learning outside of any context of decisions and actions. When people learn something as a cultural process their bodies are involved becasue cultural learning always involves having specific experiences that facilitate learning, not just memorizing words" (p. 39). He doesn't mention bodies again until he talks about "comprehension" and situated cognition studies (e.g. Baralou 1999a, b; Brown et al. 1989; Clark 1997, 2003; Engestrom et al. 1999; Gee 1992; Glenberg 1997; Glenberg and Robertson 1999; Hutchins 1995; Latour 1999; Lave 1996; Lave and Wenger 1991; Wertsch 1998; Wenger 1998) -- "they share the viewpoint that language is tied to people's experiences of situated action in the material and social world Furthermore, these experiences are stored in the mind/brain, not in terms of language but in something like dynamic images tied to perception both of the world and of out own bodies, internal states and feelings: 'Increasing evidence suggests that perceptual simulation is indeed central to comprehension' (Barsalou 1999a: p. 74)" (p.49).

Perceptual simulation. This is my interpretation: we make models of experience based on our perceptions of the experience. If our perceptions are "rich" (multi-sensory simulation, actual first-hand experience), the models will be rich. If our perceptions of the experience are not rich (lecture, boring book, typical drills), the models we build will not be as robust. It's a matter of perceptual proximity. This is why small personally seminars are more effective than large lectures; why engaging in an activity is more effective than hearing about it; why it's harder to fire a person face to face than over the phone, or in a letter; why Milgram's "teachers" less likely to shock their "students" when in the same room. There's a quality to the models of experience we make that intensifies as we inch closer to the actual experiences we model.

But, as the colleague I discussed in a previous blog argued, all of these things are embodied. So perhaps, as with so many other things, embodiment is not an "on" or "off" binary of "embodied" or not "embodied" (is there anything we know that is totally disembodied?) but rather a matter of volume, or "richness" of embodiment.