4E Cognitive Science

= "4E cognitive science .. argues that as human beings our cognition is embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended". [1]

Characteristics

Alexander Beiner:

"4E cognitive science .. argues that as human beings our cognition is embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. We’re in a constant process of flow with the world, adapting and changing in response to our environment and one another.

Cognition is embodied because it is inseparable from our experience as a physical body. Researcher Barbara Tversky has shown how the way we physically move through space changes how we think and how we solve problems. Our concepts and ideas are inseparable from our gestures, feelings, and sensations. We can see hints of this in our own language when we talk about ‘moving on’ from a difficult period, or ‘taking a step back’ to reevaluate a situation. When we admire someone, we ‘look up to them,’ and when we’re feeling excited about an idea, we talk about ‘leaning into it.’

Our cognition is also embedded in the world, inseparable from the environment to which we’ve adapted. A whale is embedded in the ocean, and it doesn’t make sense to conceptualize it as an animal outside of that environment. When we are communicating online, we have to recognise that our cognition is in that moment embedded in a new environment and adapt accordingly.

Cognition is also enacted: everything you do impacts the world around you and creates new realities that in turn constrain or open up possibilities for you. If you save money, you are opening up possibilities that wouldn’t have been there if you hadn’t. Our cognition is also extended; it moves through and responds to other people, technology, and the environment. Studies have shown that, as human beings, we perceive our tools as an extension of our bodies. For example, we don’t have to think about how wide our car is getting through a narrow street; we just know. In a sense, the car and our body meld together. Communicating through a phone is, in some sense, putting us into a different state of consciousness than having a face to face conversation.

In case four E’s aren’t enough, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has argued for two more. The first is emotion. In a course I ran with him, he explained that ‘we have to understand that cognition is not cold calculation. It's always got an affective, motivational, emotional aspect. All cognition is about caring or not caring about taking a risk which has affective consequences.’

His sixth E, exaptation, is the one that may be most relevant to how we can bring back useful information from various states of consciousness and apply them to our sensemaking. Exaptation is a term from evolutionary biology, describing the process whereby features of an organism acquire functions they weren’t originally adapted for. One good example is the tongue, which allows us to manipulate food but was exapted to allow us to speak. A bird already has feathers to fly, so nature helped it use those same feathers for showing off to potential mates. Vervaeke argues that when we’re talking about concepts, ‘You're basically taking the same machinery you use for moving around physical space and you’re exapting it.’ "

(https://beiner.substack.com/p/non-ordinary-sensemaking-how-to-navigate?)