The free online workshops run on 8, 15, 22, 29 September 9am Canberra time and you can register here: admin@spor.com.au

What is enactive cognition?

Enactive cognition is all the thinking and decision-making humans do without our brain. This is approximately 95% of all human decision making.

It is a myth that the brain is a directing organ that works like a computer/machine.

Indeed, such thinking inhibits the way we perceive people and how we think people learn. Such thinking inhibits how we think risk and safety work.

It’s very much defining the problem as a nail and finding a solution with a hammer.

In the risk and safety world, the common paradigm is that:

The brain is held accountable for what the body does.

If we look at the semiotics, Poetics, metaphors and propositions of Safety, the worldview is the same, regardless of the rhetoric or slogans that are used to market a particular view.

The dominant paradigm in risk and safety is that the brain directs behaviour.

So much of what is presented in risk and safety is about ‘brain-work’.

This is NOT the approach of Enactive Cognition.

Enactivism is an approach that looks at the way humans are embodied in the world and how everything resonates and interacts on the body to create action. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enactivism)

In Enactive Cognition the Mind (not mind), is not understood as the brain but rather as the whole person (https://www.mindandlife.org/insight/what-is-mind/).

In Enactive cognition the body is understood through its many inter-affected and inter-corporeal systems. These are: nervous, endocrine, respiratory, integumentary (skin), muscular, digestive, cardiovascular, reproductive, cellular, urinary, feeling/emotional and skeletal systems.

All of these embodied systems make decisions that later inform the brain once the decision is made. In this way, humans make decisions in automatic and heuristic ways that are fast and efficient.

Such thinking takes a massive shift in worldview from the common approach which is that: the brain is a computer that directs the actions of the body.

Let’s just think of the following examples of human enactivity:

• Common dress for people at funerals is sunglasses because people know they can’t control crying. The brain can’t over-ride the body’s compulsion to cry.
• Sexual arousal is automatic and triggered well before the brain connects. Indeed, when aroused, no amount of brain-thinking can over-ride the sexual urge.
• The mouth yawns and tells your brain you are tired. The yawn came automatically and you feel sleepy. Indeed, you can’t command your body to keep awake when fatigued just as you can’t tell your body to sleep when you need sleep.
• You stub your toes and let out a yell for pain, then your toe tells your brain it has been injured. The mouth cells ‘ouch’ is a reflex, your brain doesn’t tell your mouth to yell
• You hear some music and your eyes fill with tears. Your brain doesn’t command your eyes to weep and can’t tell your ears to stop hearing.
• You know you are anxious about something and it’s changing your body and your brain can’t command that anxiety to stop. Indeed, on most occasions it is only through aa chemical drug that such anxiety can be arrested.
• Similarly, when. Stressed. Your brain can’t over-ride stress, either the environment or your body has to change. It is well known that excessive stress can scar the heart tissue and be absorbed for that later heart attack.
• The famous experiment of biting on a pencil and taking the pencil away (https://shaniarlee.com/blog/2022/5/11/the-smile-experiment) trains the muscles to smile. The smile effect lingers for the next moment.
• The famous ‘still face’ experiment (https://youtu.be/FaiXi8KyzOQ?si=rwZ8KqxfbRx1p50t) show just how much emotions are ‘felt’ through resonance with others. The brain doesn’t command distress, distress arrives automatically.
• Every time we see a chair or a knife, we know how to hold it. Our brain doesn’t tell us how to hold a cup, we just hold it by heuristics and drink by heuristics.
• When our body jumps in a dream or we day-dream while driving, how is the brain involved? Indeed, aren’t we unconscious?
• When we meet with someone who has been traumatised, try telling their brain to over-ride their experience. See if that works.

These are but a few examples of enactive thinking. The reality is, 95% of all that we do is enactive.

So, the worker who has been on a task for some time is not thinking with the brain of what to do. Their actions and behaviours are both intuitive, habitual and heuristical. The brain is not commanding them what to do, they feel into being and feel into action. Then, if something goes wrong, how is the response of brainwork going to tackle the real issue?

Similarly, when something goes wrong, most often the brain has nothing to do with why something went wrong.

The brain doesn’t issue commands, it hosts conversations.

Once we think differently about decision making we approach how people learn with a different worldview: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372948176_Gallagher_S_2023_Embodied_and_Enactive_Approaches_to_Cognition_Cambridge_University_of_Cambridge_Press

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I was not surprised recently to see on Linkedin, all of the iterations of S2 neatly aligned in a linear map (of paper-based images) showing that all S2 iterations lead to the five HOP slogans.

What is fascinating with this graphic is the reinforcement by repetition, of the language of ‘theories’, ‘principles’ and ‘leading’, when most are anchored to the same worldview where there is no clear methodology or methods. Indeed, most often what follows are traditional safety systems with a dose of kindness and civility, still anchored to the behaviourist positivist paradigm.

Whilst the idea of respecting people in safety is admirable, there is no new worldview with any of these approaches that addresses the whole person.

Part of the appeal of all these ideas in S2 is that nothing has to change. There is no challenge to the traditional systems worldview of safety. People remain as computers on bodies that direct decisions.

Indeed, if you look at the semiotics of these approaches, they all focus on brain-work.

This is NOT how we think about thinking in SPoR.

When we assume an enactive approach to thinking, we adopt a person-centric and holistic approach to what we do. This then leads to a new approach to the ethics of work and understanding what it is to be professional.

If we want to improve the way people work, a far more holistic approach is needed and this is offered in enactive thinking.

If you want to learn more about enactive thinking than join us in the free online workshops series: 8, 15, 22, 29 September 9am Canberra time and you can register here: admin@spor.com.au