The EMBODY Research Group facilitates and promotes interdisciplinary research in, and inspired by, embodied cognitive science. We are situated at the Technical University of Berlin, in Germany.

As our name suggests, we are interested in exploring mind and behavior through the lens of organism-environment dynamics:

• following Gibsonian ecological psychology, we see the organism-environment system as the relevant unit of analysis for understanding mind and behavior, and as the starting point from which to make sense of subsystems such as the brain. (keywords: affordances; ecological information; perception-action coupling; perceptual learning; the blue-collar brain)

• we draw from dynamical systems theory and nonlinear analytic methods to shed light on the complex nature of mind and behavior (keywords: time-series analysis; fractal scaling; phase transition; symmetry breaking; self-organization; synergies and interaction-dominant dynamics)

Besides exploring mind and behavior through these perspectives, another reading of our name is possible which highlights our reflexive orientation: we’re also interested in the “exploring mind” itself as an object of investigation. As such, we think it’s important to use the tools from embodied cognitive science, ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory to investigate the behaviors and practices that people engage in in order to investigate how the world works—through this we can better understand understanding, explain explanation, make sense of sense making, and so on. (keywords: metascience; cognitive science of science; second-order cybernetics; pragmatist philosophy of science; the scaling up of embodied cognitive science)

To learn more, get in touch with the research group leader (Gui Sanches de Oliveira) at embody.rg@gmail.com