Is There A Connection Between Body Movements And Thinking?

A study done at the University of Melbourne, Australia suggests that our bodies play an important role in our thought processes. The study is in direct contrast to the popular belief that thinking involves abstract cognitive processes which have no connection to body or space.

NewScientist has more on how the study was conducted:

The team asked 12 right-handed men to generate a string of 40 numbers, each between 1 and 30, in as random a sequence as possible. The researchers recorded the vertical and horizontal movements of the men’s eyes as they spoke the numbers out loud to the beat of a metronome.

The team found that the eye movements could be used to predict the size of the next number before it was spoken. If a volunteer looked left and downwards, he would typically chose a number that was smaller than the previous number, and if he looked up and to the right, he chose a number that was larger. What’s more, the extent to which he looked in a particular direction correlated with the extent to which the number was larger or smaller than the last. The result strongly suggests that abstract thought is tied to the physical movements of our bodies, says Tobias Loetscher of the research team.

A similar experiment was done at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands which found out that physical movement has the power to change the speed at which people talk, what they choose to talk and even think about.

NewScientist: “Mind over matter? How your body does your thinking”

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