Within the depth-psychology corpus, cognition resists reduction to a single, settled meaning; it is instead a contested site where neuroscience, phenomenology, embodied philosophy, and clinical practice converge and strain against one another. Thompson’s enactive account, drawing on Maturana and Varela, defines cognition as the activity of sense-making rooted in autopoiesis — not information processing on the computational model, but skillful, embodied know-how enacted through sensorimotor coupling with a world. This stands in productive tension with the classical cognitive-science paradigm that Thompson himself critiques: the computer model of mind, which treated cognition as symbol manipulation in a disembodied, cultureless system. McGilchrist complicates matters further by insisting that perception — and therefore cognition — is grounded in motility, activity prior to and constitutive of perception itself. In the clinical register, Ogden and Shapiro treat cognition as one processing level among three (sensorimotor, emotional, cognitive), one that trauma can dysregulate, and that EMDR targets through the installation of adaptive positive and negative cognitions. Jaynes, characteristically contrarian, argues that the actual process of thought is not conscious at all, that cognition proceeds invisibly and presents only its results to awareness. Together these voices reveal a field in which cognition is variously embodied, enacted, hierarchically layered, neurobiologically grounded, and therapeutically manipulable — never simply the rational deliberation of an autonomous Cartesian mind.
cognition, in the present context, means the activity of sense-making. Cognition is behavior or conduct in relation to meaning and norms that the system itself enacts or brings forth on the basis of its autonomy.
Thompson defines cognition as enactive sense-making — the organism’s autonomous bringing-forth of meaning — rather than as information processing, grounding minimal cognition in autopoiesis plus adaptivity.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
The central idea of the embodied approach is that cognition is the exercise of skillful know-how in situated and embodied action. Cognitive structures and processes emerge from recurrent sensorimotor patterns that govern perception and action in autonomous and situated agents.
Thompson articulates the embodied-enactive thesis: cognition is not prespecified problem-solving but skillful, sensorimotor, situated activity that simultaneously poses and resolves its own problems.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
According to this classical model, cognition is information processing after the fashion of the digital computer. Behaviorism had allowed no reference to internal states of the organism.
Thompson historicizes cognition by tracing the classical cognitive-science paradigm’s equation of mind with computational symbol-manipulation, the position his enactive framework systematically challenges.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
perception is founded on motion and cognition, not motion and cognition founded on perception. He regards activity ‘as not only interwoven with perception but prior to perception, prior both in terms of evolution and in terms of initiating processes within and outside the organism.’
McGilchrist, via Buzsáki, argues that cognition is grounded in motility rather than passive reception, inverting the standard perception-first model of mind.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
perception is founded on motion and cognition, not motion and cognition founded on perception. He regards activity ‘as not only interwoven with perception but prior to perception, prior both in terms of evolution and in terms of initiating processes within and outside the organism.’
A duplicate witness to McGilchrist’s claim that active motility is the evolutionary and functional precondition of both perception and cognition, not their derivative.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Dysregulated arousal may drive a traumatized person’s emotional and cognitive processing, causing emotions to escalate, thoughts to spin, and misinterpretation of present environmental cues as those of a past trauma.
Ogden posits that trauma disrupts the hierarchical integration of cognitive, emotional, and sensorimotor processing, with dysregulated arousal distorting cognitive appraisal of present reality.
, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis
classical cognitive science has offered abstract and reified models of the mind as a disembodied and cultureless physical symbol system or connectionist neural network in the head of a solitary individual.
Thompson critiques classical cognitive science for abstracting mind from intersubjectivity and culture, leaving cognition without the social and embodied dimensions the enactive approach restores.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
the actual process of thinking, so usually thought to be the very life of consciousness, is not conscious at all and that only its preparation, its materials, and its end result are consciously perceived.
Jaynes makes the radical claim that cognitive processing — including reasoning and speech production — proceeds entirely outside consciousness, which registers only its inputs and outputs.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis
the actual process of reasoning, the dark leap into huge discovery, just as in the simple trivial judgment of weights, has no representation in consciousness. Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.
Jaynes extends his thesis to creative and scientific reasoning, arguing that the most significant cognitive leaps — including discovery — occur beyond the reach of conscious introspection.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
your body tenses up, you sense butterflies in your stomach, and you feel uneasy, even though your thoughts are telling you that everything is fine and you have no reason to feel the way you do.
Ogden illustrates the clinical reality of dissociation between cognitive and somatic processing, demonstrating that the neocortical-cognitive level may be overridden or contradicted by subcortical signals.
, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting
the visual system does not simply record a scene passively, as a camera does. Rather, perception is creative: the visual system transforms the two-dimensional patterns of light on the retina of the eye into a logically coherent and stable interpretation of a three-dimensional sensory world.
Kandel draws on Gestalt and cognitive psychology to argue that perception — foundational to cognition — is constructive and rule-governed, not passive reception of environmental data.
, In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006supporting
there are philosophers still today who are skeptical of the very idea that considerations of embodiment have much to do with cognition.
Gallagher documents the persistent philosophical resistance to embodied accounts of cognition, positioning the embodiment debate as a live and unresolved tension in the field.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
Intersubjectivity, social cognition, or the problem of other minds — these are terms in different disciplines for the same problem: how does one understand other people — how does one grasp their intentions?
Gallagher frames social cognition as the central cross-disciplinary problem of mind, critiquing theory-of-mind approaches and developing an interactive, phenomenologically grounded alternative.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
clinical observation indicates that EMDR does not lead the client to falsify history. Thus, a negative cognition that is actually true will not be changed.
Shapiro argues that EMDR’s reprocessing of negative cognitions is constrained by reality-correspondence, establishing that the clinical transformation of cognition operates within truth-preserving limits.
, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, 2001supporting
in EMDR it is very common for a more beneficial cognition to emerge as the dysfunctional older material is processed. The clinician should take special care to note a preferable cognition and, when possible, to use the client’s own words.
Shapiro describes the spontaneous emergence of superior positive cognitions during EMDR reprocessing, positioning adaptive cognition as an organic outcome of trauma resolution rather than an externally imposed reframe.
, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, 2001supporting
the word ‘not’ generally be avoided in the positive cognition. For example, statements like ‘I will not fail’ or ‘I am not incompetent’ do not offer the client a sufficiently positive evaluation.
Shapiro specifies the linguistic structure required for therapeutically effective positive cognitions, arguing that affirmative framing directly activates stored adaptive information more powerfully than negated constructions.
, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, 2001supporting
Cognition in exposure therapy, in extinction, feelings as interface between r[eason and emotion]
LeDoux’s index entry marks cognition as a node connecting exposure therapy, extinction learning, and the interface between feeling and reasoning in his fear-system framework.
, Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety, 2015aside
to say that consciousness is not necessary for thinking makes us immediately bristle with protest. Surely thinking is the very heart and bone of consciousness! But let us go slowly here.
Jaynes opens his counter-intuitive argument by acknowledging the received equation of thinking with consciousness before systematically dismantling it.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976aside
cognition (thinking) … cognition 46, 84, 156, 162
Burnett’s index treats cognition as a distinct functional region and category alongside emotion, memory, and motivation, reflecting the modularity assumptions of popular neuroscience.
, The emotional brain lost and found in the science of, 2023aside