Some of this touches on the eye movement article Adriana posted in the Blurbs & Tidbits tread. - DG

Mind over matter? How your body does your thinking

"I THINK therefore I am," said Descartes. Perhaps he should have added: "I act, therefore I think."

Our ability to think has long been considered central to what makes us human. Now research suggests that our bodies and their relationship with the environment govern even our most abstract thoughts. This includes thinking up random numbers or deciding whether to recount positive or negative experiences.

"Advocates of traditional accounts of cognition would be surprised," says Tobias Loetscher at the University of Melbourne in Parkville, Australia. "They generally consider human reasoning to involve abstract cognitive processes devoid of any connection to body or space."

Until recently, the assumption has been that our bodies contribute only to our most basic interactions with the environment, namely sensory and motor processes. The new results suggest that our bodies are also exploited to produce abstract thought, and that even seemingly inconsequential activities have the power to influence our thinking.

Read the rest here.