LOUISE BARRETT
Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds.
Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds, Princeton
University Press, 2011. 270 pages, ISBN: 978-0-691-12644-9, $28.61.
Reviewed by Mirko Farina, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD),
Institute of Human Cognition and Brain Science (IHCBS), Macquarie University – Sydney, Australia.
Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds is an eye-opening and thoughtprovoking book that sets out a much-needed contribution to the study of the relationship between
animals, cognition and the environment. The volume provides remarkable new insights into how to
understand animal (including human) behavior, raises interesting questions about the role of
environmental affordances in the emergence of complex cognitive processes and provides the reader
with a refreshing break from the wearisome excess of brain-centric literature that still pervades much of
the debate surrounding evolutionary psychology. In embracing the theoretical framework endorsed by
proponents of embodied cognition, Barrett adopts an ecological approach to psychology that aims at
challenging any attempt to describe complex thinking and flexible behavior as mere by-products of
internal cognitive activity. Ecological approaches in psychology typically provide a powerful and
coherent alternative to standard information-processing paradigms [see Marr (1982); Poggio (1981) just
to name a few], that postulate the existence of distinct and hierarchical theoretical levels to understand
complex information-processing tasks such as visual perception. [Rowlands (2006), p.8]. Ecological
approaches resist these computational understandings of visual perception and rather explain
perceiving as “an achievement of the individual, not an appearance in the theater of his consciousness; as a keeping-intouch- with the world and experiencing of things rather than a having of experiences; as an awareness-of instead of just
awareness”. Perceiving, they continue, may be awareness of something in the environment or something in the observer
or both at once, but there is no content of awareness independent of that of which one is aware”. [Gibson (1979),
p.239]. On these accounts, visual perception is not therefore the mere reception of stimuli from the
environment followed by the construction of internal representations, but rather an active sampling of
the optic array, driven by environmental affordances1, that allows an animal to discover the information
present in the world. (p.106).
In endorsing this “Gibsonian” perspective, Barrett successfully merges and deeply interweaves different
disciplines (ranging from ethology and ecological psychology to artificial intelligence, robotics and
philosophy) to create an interdisciplinary space for the study of the evolution of cognition that
ultimately calls into question any orthodox, brain-bounded, purely intracranialist understanding of the
nature of the human mind. Barrett’s criticism is essentially directed at those views that deny any
possibility of body-brain integration. Such views, she notices, find both their communal ancestor and
their theoretical justification in the conceptual palette provided by Cartesianism2. Cartesianism is the
idea, affecting much of modern psychology, that the mind is separated from the corporal body and
entirely in control of it. In this book, Barrett powerfully questions Cartesianism by presenting a
compelling bulk of empirical evidence that shows how heavily animals and humans rely on their bodies
and milieus to behave intelligently. The main scope of the volume is therefore to demonstrate that: 1)
the brain isn’t the sole locus of intelligence and 2) that there isn’t, properly speaking, such a thing as a
Affordances are the terms in which perceptual information is made available.
John Sutton has written a fair bit about how Descartes did allow for this kind of body-brain integration. In Sutton’s view;
modern forms of Cartesianism must be intended as deviations from the Magister’s Dictum because they have failed to keep
abreast of the spirit of his philosophy. So, Cartesianism would interestingly be not true to the spirit of Descartes! For more
specific details see Sutton (1998) and Gaukroger, S., Schuster, J., & Sutton, J. (2000). Thanks to Julian Kiverstein for the
hint.
1
2
“naked brain”- an isolated mental substance that dominates the physical from above. A related goal of
the book is also to prove that our knowledge cannot be entirely derived, through reason and thinking,
from a set of constrained innate ideas but that it rather emerges in the interplay between brain, body
and the wider world. To the extent that the book unveils these erroneous conceptions of the mental, it
also encourages us to drop our anthropomorphic stance by revealing that intelligent behavior is always
profoundly influenced and directly governed by physical and socio-cultural circumstances in a way that
has lead both Paul Maclean (1949) and William Blessing (1997) to talk of a “visceral brain”. For this
reason, Barrett’s book can be taken as a refreshing antidote for anyone who is troubled by oldfashioned tendencies that attempt to describe the human brain as a Swiss army knife, [Cosmides &
Tooby (1992)]; a collection of highly modular, domain-specific computational tools. [Fodor (1975,
2008); Pinker (2003), Byrne & Bates (2006) ]. In line with a long-established tradition of writings in
phenomenology [see Heidegger (1927 trans. 1962) and Merleau Ponty for (1945 trans. 1962) for
instance] and in agreement with more recent works in the cognitive sciences [such as Clark (1997,
2008), Menary (2007), Rowlands(2010), Sutton (2010),Wheeler (forthcoming)] that describe the brain as
an integral and inseparable part of the complex loop that accompanies the formation of mental states;
Beyond the Brain therefore contributes to further illustrate the importance of the Umvelt – the wider
world as it is experienced by a particular organism [von Uexküll (1957)]- for the emergence of complex
cognitive strategies and successful adaptations.
The volume is organized in eleven chapters centering, as we have seen above, around one main theme:
the Gibsonian idea that environmental affordances are crucial for the emergence of our cognitive
functions. In the course of this review I have already presented standard ecological approaches and
quickly explained how they follow Gibson in taking the environment to be the richest source of
information we can directly access through perception-action cycles. In what remains of this review I
will try to provide the reader with a full sense of Barrett’s project by condensing, in a page or two, the
most important contents of the volume.
In chapters 1 and 2 Barrett mounts a sustained attack on chauvinistic forms of anthropomorphism.
Anthropomorphism is basically the attribution of human characteristic to gods, animals, weather(in this
case is called “pathetic fallacy”) or inanimate objects3.Through a series of compelling empirical
examples (involving facial recognition in babies [Kanwisher et al. (1997); Gauthier et al. (2000)] and
social intelligence in apes [Brothers et al. (1992); Perrett (1999); Barton (2006)], Barrett invites us to
renounce our anthropomorphic perspective by demonstrating how, in investigating cognition, a strictly
human-centered perspective is not only undesirable but also wrong both theoretically and empirically.
This kind of chauvinistic anthropomorphism should be abandoned, Barrett argues, because it “invites us
to ask scientific questions that simply reflect our own concerns” (p.3) and therefore encourages us to think that
“other creatures are interesting only to the extent that they resemble us” (p.5). In essence, in the first chapters of
her book, Barrett attempts to resist the idea that the whole of evolution was crafted to produce us as
the most supreme creature and rather tries to establish the claim that anthropocentrism is a hazardous
bias that considerably endangers scientific enquiry.
Chapters 3 ,4 5 are principally devoted to explore and appreciate how much a small brain can achieve.
The goal of these chapters is therefore to prevent another bias, what Barrett labels as the “big head
bias” – the idea that a big brain can allow us for an assumption of superiority over creatures that
possess vastly smaller and less developed brains than ours. Barrett calls into question this idea and
effectively demonstrates that there is no connection between the complexity of an observed behavior,
and the complexity of the mechanism that produced it. As evidence for this claim, she adduces two
interesting examples: 1) the “fertile turtles” and 2) the behavior of Portia spiders, which she discusses in
ch.3 and 4 respectively. In the early ‘50s, in order to test the idea that complexity of brain functions
doesn’t necessarily arise from the number of neurons but rather emerges from the richness of their
For a series of interesting studies see: Guthrie (1997); Datson & Mitman (2005); Horowitz (2007)]. For more popular
treatments see also: [Patten (2006) and Myers (2008)].
3
interconnections [Holland (2003)], neurophysiologist and robotics pioneer Grey Walter built two
motorized robots (Elsie and Elmer) that looked like tortoises. These tortoises had only two “brain
cells”, which could produce one reflex response each; one for the light, the other for touch. The sensor
for detecting the light was a photoelectric cell mounted on the front of the steering column of the
robot, the touch sensor was instead an electrical contact that was turned off whenever the shell of the
tortoise encountered an obstacle. (p.43). These tortoises could only work in two modalities: 1) seeking
light; 2) moving towards it. Despite their relatively simple architectures, these robots, once freed in the
environment, were able to explore the surroundings by slowly moving in a series of arches, detecting
and hurrying towards sources of light and avoiding or pushing obstacles around. They were also
reported, when placed in front of a mirror, to flicker, twitter and jig like clumsy Narcissuses [Grey
Walter (1951, 1953)], in a sort of mating dance that led many to attribute them what would have
normally been accepted, if observed in living animals, as evidence of self-awareness. Without any kind
of internal, programmed knowledge or computer-like structure, these tortoises were able to exhibit
remarkably complex behaviors and these “emerged” as a direct result of their interaction with the
environment. Barrett uses the tortoises’ example to show that sometimes the structure of the
environment and the physical shape of the animal’s body can play a highly active role in forging and
moulding adaptive strategies4. Analogous results are also observed in the animal kingdom. In chapter 4,
Barrett takes us into a fascinating journey in the world of spiders and invites us to focus on the
behavior of the Portia. Portia spiders are spiders that have brains with the size of a pin, yet this doesn’t
impede them to exhibit one of the most complex and flexible hunting behavior displayed in the animal
kingdom. Portia spiders in fact, while chasing their prey, successfully engage in a series of intricate
stalking strategies (including aggressive mimicry, detouring to break visual contact and smoked-screen
behavior), that have led many scientists to accept the idea that they behave intelligently, being capable
of learning on the fly and of deploying complex hunting tactics. [Wilcox & Jackson (2002); Ross
(2007)]. Again, Barrett uses the case of Portia spiders to further demonstrate that articulated behavior
isn’t necessarily tied to big brains but may indeed be triggered by relatively simple internal mechanisms
responding to complex environments.
Chapters 6,7,8 and 9 are probably the most crucial in the book, as they are used to introduce, critically
assess and ultimately endorse the case for the ecological approach in psychology that Barrett wants to
establish. Though crucial, this isn’t however the only key-theme that span across these four chapters.
Additional topics worth a mention are those that relate to other important aspects of embodied
approaches to cognition [such as the critique of classical computationalism conducted through the
analysis of the so-called “Watt governor metaphor” (Van Gelder 1995) and through the idea of softassembly. (Thelen & Smith (1994)]. The Watt governor metaphor is a metaphor used by Barrett to
attack the “brain as a computer analogy”- the idea that our brains work in the same way as digital
computers work by means of symbolic manipulations carried out by dedicated mechanisms or prespecified modules. The Watt-governor was introduced by the Australian philosopher Tim van Gelder
(1995) as an alternative metaphor better able to capture the dynamic interactions between animal’s and
the surrounding world. Cognition, in his view, is described as a dynamical process arising when, “inputs,
internal processes and outputs are tightly coupled like the spindle, angle arm, and throttle valve” in the centrifugal
governor (p.129-130). Barrett takes dynamical approaches to be in competition with computational
accounts of brain function but this opposition may well be more apparent than real. Clark (2008) and
Wheeler (2005) in fact both talk of dynamical computationalism. Dynamical computationalism, they
argue, is a view that merges dynamical systems theory with old-fashioned computationalism and asserts
that in order to provide with the right kinds of temporal coordination needed to trigger the temporally
This seems to provide nice empirical evidence for what Mark Rowland (1999) has called the “barking dog principle”:“If it is
necessary for an organism to be able to perform a given adaptive task T, then it is differentially selectively disadvantageous for that organism to
develop internal mechanisms sufficient for the performance of T when it is possible for the organism to perform T by way of a combination of
internal mechanisms and manipulation of the external environment” [Rowlands (1999), p.80]. This principle is very similar to the 007
principle formulated by Clark in 1989. It is important to note that the 007 principle has been consistently used, in the
literature directed at the extended mind thesis, to endorse the case of cognitive extension. For an interesting analysis of the
relationships between the two see [Shapiro (2010)].
4
rich adaptive behaviors typical of forms of higher cognition, the brain needs to span the body-world
boundaries creating crossing architectures that encompass these two realms.
The other important point that Barrett tries to make in these central chapters of her book is related
with the idea that embodied systems are preferable to classical computational systems because they can
express more variability. In order to illustrate this point Barrett introduces the idea of soft-assembly.
Softly-assembled systems are provisionally assembled units working in the service of successful
phenotypic transmission. They are made up via temporary bio-ecological operations of assemblage that
occur between neural and non-neural resources and are characterized by operations that deal with
specific problems arising in the course of one’s experience. Softly-assembled systems are richly variable
systems that act as pacemakers and rhythm-setters [Wheeler (2005)] to couple an animal with its own
world. These systems are systems in which there is no central controller and no planning and according
to Thelen and Smith(1994), they should be taken as the defining feature of a dynamical account of
development. Barrett deploys the idea of soft-assembly in the context of human babies (ch.10), to show
that 1) “our knowledge is tailored to the specific environment we encounter” (p.176), and 2) to demonstrate that the
environment is an “equal partner” in producing cognitive behavior. [Clark (1997)]. The book ends
(ch.11) with a final chapter in which Barrett discusses the idea of the body schema and the
incorporation of tools. In recalling a series of studies involving the plasticity of the body schema (Iriki
et al. (1996), Maravita & Iriki (2004)], Barrett focuses on the negotiability of our own bodies and tries
to demonstrate that organism are “always mutually entangled with their environments and do not stand apart from
them as some kind of hermetically sealed, disembodied cognisers”. (p.200). Although I am very sympathetic with
this line of argument [see Kiverstein and Farina (in preparation)], in this book Barrett fails to address
and rule out alternative and competing approaches (such as the embedded view), that invites us to
distinguish the “fairly acceptable” claim that incorporation yields new agent-world circuits, entangled
and re-engineered bio-mechanical architectures; from the more radical assumption that buys the
inference to extended cognition and therefore envisages literal cognitive extension. In particular, Rupert
(2009, ch.8) grants the existence of the former but gives an embedded account of cases of
incorporation on the grounds of his notion of brain-centred realisers of the body schema. Barrett
surprisingly doesn’t discuss this objection.
To conclude. The impressive sheer of wealth and breadth of information presented in this book
combined with a charming and engaging prose, makes this volume very enjoyable reading. Beyond the
Brain is indeed an amusing and entertaining read, but one with an extraordinary analytical rigor and
eloquence of argument. Very accessible, enticing and lucidly written it can be enjoyed both by
professional academics and laypeople. Readers—be they novice or seasoned—will certainly find the
volume uplifting and inspirational, Barrett’s style brisk and delightful and her intellectual playfulness
quite solacing. An intriguing, illuminating, very ambitious and stylish book that will zealously and
passionately set the stage for the next round of academic speculations by becoming an essential source
of discussion for some time to come. A must read for the next generations of cognitive scientists and
for all those who are interested in the study of comparative cognition.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to Julian Kiverstein and John Sutton for their continuous guidance and invaluable
support throughout my doctoral studies. My warmest gratitude also goes to Andy Clark and Richard
Menary for their stimulating feedback on earlier drafts of this review. Thanks also to Joel Krueger for
the precious assistance through the editorial process. Last but not least, I would like to express my
appreciation to the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD) and to Macquarie
University for generously financing my research. Needless to say, any remaining errors are mine and
mine alone.
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