E-cognition, ecog by Andrea Hiott
Today’s diary is about E-cognitions. 4E cognition first stood for Embodied, Embedded, Extended and Enactive. Then Ecological was added (or took the place of Embedded) and then Emotional and then…
Four E Cognition: Embodied Mindset Diary
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Andrea: hey everyone, it's Andrea Hiott. This is my diary for October 10th, 2025. It's going to be about four E cognition. So here I am walking down the street or someone's walking down the street is not always me. These are different clips, but where is the thinking happening right now as we are walking? Is it in the brain? Is it in the body? Is it in my phone? That's guiding me? Is it in the video camera? Is it in the.
Streets themselves. Is it in the environment? Can we separate all of these things? For most of the 20th century, cognitive science told us that thinking happens inside our heads in brains that are something like computers processing information. But we actually sort of had it turned around because what we've made of computers are actually just the tip of the iceberg about what cognition really is.
We're hardly even able to handle what's really possible and what's really going on in the world.
A nested world of so many different layers that we can look at from many different angles and many different positions as we do. Uh, wherever you [00:01:00] are right now, you're experiencing all of this in a different way than me, even though we are in this shared world together, and that's incredible. There's a revolutionary shift happening and it changes everything really about how we understand mind memory, meaning. And one term that has been placed on this shift is called four E, like the number four in E. You've probably heard me talk about it in other episodes and interviews.
I even did a little intro to it in any case, four e cognition, points at this, what I've been getting at here that the brain and the body are part of whatever cognition is, which we're only just beginning to understand which computers and things like LLMs and even the internet help us understand, but.
so those things are tips of the iceberg of what these four ees are, or these mini ees and those ees stand for. Embodied, of course, which I've already mentioned. Embedded, extended and enactive, and also ecological, also exaptive, also emotional. Also, there's, you know, [00:02:00] find your e and we could discuss it.
But in this video, which is. We'll just go through the main E, the ones that sort of go with the four E or that originally went with the four E. so we're gonna explore five of them here today, and here's the beautiful part. We can understand them all. Through something you do every day, which is make your way through life, which is encounter life, which is be whoever you are. There's no stop or start to that. It's what you're doing and this is what cognition is.
It's you making your way through the world. As an embodied being that has many, many different layers and parts and dimensions and possibilities. If you try to understand it, it's all one ongoing process, one movement, but you can't understand all of that at once because first of all, you are it. You're part of it, you're inside of it.
You're also outside of it if you wanna use those kind of terms. But really it's more of a fractal thing where you're. Many different ways at once. So embodied is a good way to start because it helps us get a handle on [00:03:00] that. So watch what happens. As I approach this corner, for example, I'm leaning into the turn before I consciously decide to turn.
So I kind of noticed that as I was walking, that my body knows before my mind knows that we're gonna turn But you know, even that way that I worded it isn't really right, because body and mind aren't two different things. But mind is my awareness of my own body's movement. I'm moving, that's already cognitive.
I'm already making decisions. But when I realize that I'm doing that, when I notice that when I start to exert some kind of agency over it that has memory attached to it, or imagination or awareness in this way where I know what I'm doing, then that's mind. So thinking isn't something that happens. in your body, it's as your body, your body is your thinking.
And then also because of these wonderful brains that we have, we can become aware of that. We can like turn our own body, to understand that body as its own subject, which is just remarkable. So.
A lot of times people use their hands when they're talking as this person is doing here, and when you're trying to solve a problem, maybe you also [00:04:00] gesture with your hands. I've noticed just watching myself on video, that I do move around a lot and use my hands at times, and I'm not really thinking about that.
It's just illustrating something. that's the body. Moving as thought. So sometimes you feel nervous. You have these like butterflies in your stomach before a decision. That's not something different from your cognition. When you become aware of it, that's your mind becoming aware of it so that mind, which is part of the body, becomes aware of that body.
So when you see someone like this person navigating a crowded space, um. We can look at different parts of the body of how it moves. One part that I particularly like is in the brain. It's called the hippocampus. It's the seahorse shaped structure. And there's a lot of amazing neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, computational neuroscientists, all sorts of wonderful scientists working to understand what this little part of the brain does.
There's two of them. One in each side of your brain, sort of in the middle. It's in the temporal lobe. and for decades, scientists thought [00:05:00] it was crucial for memory and it. Maybe you've heard of special cases where this area of the brain was removed because someone had seizures or epilepsy, and then, uh, they could no longer create new memories.
They couldn't, you know, they, they would meet you if you walk outta the room and come back, you know, in 15 minutes. They don't remember you anymore. So obviously this area had a lot to do with memory, but then in the seventies. People you've heard me talk about and who've been on the show, like Linda Nadel discovered that there was something else going on here.
So John O'Keefe, um, was the first to come upon and name this idea of the play cell, for example. But, and there's a whole lot of other cells that have since been named, which sometimes gets referred to as the GPS of the brain, although. Recent, more recent work shows, it's not really a GPS because again, it's happening in all sorts of dimensions at once.
But the point is the same area of the brain that was found to be essential for memory, which we would think of as, you know, mind is also essential [00:06:00] for how we just literally move through space. So for what? For? For all these images you've been seeing of us walking of different people walking, that's all.
someone finding their way, making their way with the help of the hippocampus, obviously, I mean, not only the hippocampus, but it has a very, very important role to play in that. when you're moving you're remembering something, moving through memory if you wanna put it like that.
you can kind of see how we're starting to think of space in a really different way. all this to say, your body doesn't have, have a mind. Your body is minded. It's embodied mind. Uh, I talked to Tim Ingold and he made a good point about embodied can sometimes sound like you're stuck in your body, and it's really not like that at all.
It's more of this ongoing process that is your body, which is in constant communication with the world. I mean, you're breathing, you're eating, you're. Sensory body is looping with the world in a way. navigation isn't just a metaphor for thinking, it's literally a form of navigation. Or you could think of it the other way around before you develop what you probably think of as [00:07:00] mind or cognition, which as I said, is that being aware of all of the stuff that's happening and maybe even, attaching it to certain representations linguistically and so on.
you're already cognitive just by being alive because you're making your way, you're finding your way, you're moving through the world, and this is already co a cognitive act, which, as we go, becomes something we can notice and become aware of, and then we then call mind. that's a little just tip of the iceberg of embodied mind, but if you even want a more simple definition, just understand that.
Your thinking is not only in your head, it's in your whole body, and that is actually a really beautiful revelation to have when you're moving through the world, because when you're sitting doing yoga, when you're dancing, when you're walking, when you're making love, whatever, you're involved in a really multidimensional, beautiful expression with those around you, with the world and with yourself.
So the next word is embedded and.
And this is how I think a good [00:08:00] way to think about this.
Andrea: I would, I would listen back to the episode I had with David Seaman when we talked about Christopher Alexander and pattern language. I really think of pattern language, as a kind of wonderful example of what being embedded is because. If you think about it in terms of space in place, when you walk into certain houses or rooms or cities or mountain scapes or whatever you might be in the, that space, you're embedded in it.
And it's also creating, an emotional and cognitive 'cause. Emotional is cognitive experience for you, so you, you're embedded in everything, and as you move and as the regularities around you change, so too, do the parameters of your cognition. Think about reading a map at home. On your couch versus reading it when you're lost in an unfamiliar city at night.
So the map might be the same. Your brain is, you know, more or less the same, but it's in a completely different context when you're sitting at home reading that map. You're embedded in a different context and if you're actually, you've just arrived in a city, maybe the train stops somewhere you didn't expect and you had to get out and you're trying to read your phone and [00:09:00] figure out where you are.
And it's a very different experience. even though if you just describe it, you could say, yeah, I'm looking at my phone and reading. Off a map. so wherever you are, the context in which you're embedded makes a huge difference for the parameters of what you're thinking of as co your cognition of literally what you're thinking of, of literally what you are as a thinking being.
So content isn't just where you think it shapes what you think. So you can't pull cognition out of the environ. That's what this embedded is. It's like you're meshed in your cognition and you and your body are all this beautiful dynamic weaving with the world, and you can't pull those things apart.
So different environments will have different effect. so of course I'm being very general here, but of just an easy way to understand this is that the, the environment that you're in. It kind of weaves what's possible. It gives you the threads for what's possible for your cognition on some level. Of course, many other things do too.
Like your body itself, what you ate that day, and so on and so forth. But you get the point. that's embeddedness that. Now extended [00:10:00] is, well, the GPS itself you might think of as almost like an extension of my mind or our mind. So when we're looking at the map on our phone, we can almost imagine that that is an extension of our own body in a sense, because it's literally connected to us in our hand.
It's interacting with us in a certain way. Andy Clark and Dave Chalmers wrote a great paper about this, which I'll link to with this GPS, for example, I don't need to hold the whole city's layout in my mind. I don't need to imagine it all with a paper map.
I might have to translate between the abstraction in the territory. When I just ask someone on the street, like, where do you know how to get to the, to, the museum? Then I'm navigating through a social interaction and a narrative, and maybe they're gesturing. each of these are, is extending my cognition in a different way, this is a really interesting subject to think of when you think about, Writing things down and making lists and how that becomes part of your memory. Or when we think about any form of technology, one of the classic examples, which actually comes from Gregory [00:11:00] Bateson, which you've heard me talk about, is this extension of the, of the cane. If we're. Having trouble seeing, or we're a blind person and we need a cane that can help us.
And after enough time, the cane's feedback, uh, is like our body's feedback. We fill the sidewalk through the cane, so you can think of that cane as an extension. So that's another e that's another part of this different way of thinking about cognition. It's not just in your brain. It's like even in the, the, it's even in.
The things that you're using, that you're touching, that you're help, that are helping you sense the world and all those things, literally change the parameters of your possibility as well. Just think about what happens to your thinking now that you have a smartphone, how much that changes it. I was just in Iceland and I.
I didn't, look at my phone very much and I was just in, in the world, you know, hiking around and it's so different. The kind of affordances what, what, what's possible for your cognitive, emotional being. [00:12:00] But you know, the same is true when it comes to technology that also opens up many worlds. The point is just they're different worlds.
So, uh, that's extended. And then inactive is a word you've probably heard when, um, miracle talked with Ezekiel DePalo when I talked with Hani de Jager. Evan Thompson was on, actually, there's a lot of inactive. Um, Julian Stein works with that a lot, and that's, that's sort of taking all these things we've been talking about and really understanding that what we think of as of cognition is this ongoing participatory sense making that's happening between or as our bodies and everything we're.
Encountering, including our own self in the way that we were talking about, in the way that we become aware of our own thoughts, of our own movements, of our own possibilities. So here's the thing, I don't plan my entire route and then execute it. When I go walk, I find my way. I make my way. I see what's ahead, I respond, I adjust.
The route emerges through the act of walking. [00:13:00] Even when I'm in a new place and when I'm in an old place, it could depend on my awareness, what I see. We've probably all had that experience where you, if you're in a certain state of attention, the environment, you can suddenly see things you hadn't seen before.
And this is isn't just true of navigation. You don't understand a book, for example, by passively receiving the information you're making your way through that book. So there's a similar, coupling is a word people use, but there's a sense making that's going on between you and whatever you're in, countering, whatever you're in dialogue with, whatever you're.
Part of and noticing that you're part of and putting your focus on. That can be a conversation. It's the people around us. It's the animals, it's the creatures, it can be the plants. Uh, all of that is this inactive cognition that's participatory. And it's not something we have or own. It's something we do.
It's, it's not a state, it's an activity. we're making sense. We're making way. There's this active dynamic [00:14:00] systems approach, uh, tied up in all of this. And again, this is just a tip of the iceberg, also, I think here you can really get to this idea of loving and knowing and how they're connected.
Because we start to understand this as relational, that's an important word. Relational comes really to the forefront. Once you start thinking of inaction, of cognition, mind, all these things that we think of as emotion as ourselves, really as memory. Um, as being ways we move through and navigate the world.
And that relationality is what connects us, what holds us, and that connects to many themes of love and loving that we've discussed on love and philosophy. So you don't have love or have knowledge. You make these things, you make love, you make knowledge, and you're not doing it by yourself. So even if you think you are, even if you're alone, you're actually coming out of and embedded in.
An embodied, [00:15:00] extended, ongoing life world encounter. With everything that you're taking in with the books you read, the authors who wrote them everything on social media and so forth, or just the person at the grocery store or just yourself so enactive. There would be much more to say about that.
But just as a summary, it's this ongoing relational sense making that's happening as your cognition as your. Alive as you're encountering the world. And then another E, which we're already at five now, but it's ecological. And that's another word we've talked about here with Harry Hef, for example, and through the work of JJ Gibson and, and others.
and when we say cognition is ecological, we mean that thinking doesn't belong to us in isolation. And also that it's not always something that's, Taking a lot of time. It can, it's, it's an immediate and it's also nested. It's also a lot of what we've been talking about. This is a way of getting a hold on it, of thinking of, depending on [00:16:00] where we're gonna put our focus, we can understand mind as part of all this, of, of our bodies, of ourselves, of our conversations, of our social groups, of all of these online communities of.
You know, everyone in our city, our school, our work, our family, it's this nested system. So your body's in a room, in a building, in a neighborhood. In a city, in a planet, or on a planet, part of a planet. so we can think of ecological in a lot of different ways. The usual way that that word is used is connected to ecological psychology and JJ Gibson.
But I extend it because I think Rachel Carson, for example, and Gregory Bateson and many others that have used the word ecological, open us up into a really important way also of understanding cognition as almost like a. When I, when we say it's ecological, it's, it's saying that it's ongoing at many different positions at the same time and many different dimensions as everything that is.
what's wonderful about that is when we start thinking [00:17:00] about kaleidoscopic or constellation thinking, we start to realize how at many different positions within that ongoing planetary, process that what what mind is can be very different, just as we've discussed because. Everybody will be in a different place.
Having come from a different set of regularities, a different past, you've read different books, seen different movies. So when we think of it, when we zoom out and realize like how many wonderful crazy layers there are to. The kinds of cognition that are happening, then ecological is a good word for us to understand that because it's not located in any one body and yet it's being co-created by all those bodies at the same time, much like an ecosystem.
And the health of it really, uh, depends on a lot of its parts. So I often talk about this ecological orientation, which is sort of understanding ourselves not as just isolated. You know, meat machines or something, but as living multiplicities constellations of relationships. So every thought [00:18:00] you have is of course, in some way shaped by every other thought you've ever had, and everything everyone's ever said to you.
Also, of course, your body, your biology, your language, your cultures, the technologies you use, the rhythms of the natural world that you're in. So you, again, you're not inside of an ecology, but you are that ecology and you're co-creating it. And that is a thinking process. That is a cognitive process. when we orient ecologically, we start to see that mental and environmental, which is interesting, that mental is part of environmental.
So when we see that mental and environmental health aren't separate issues, they're patterns that connect and that goes from the neuron all the way to whatever, atoms or planetary constellations in the universe, we might be looking at. I'm not saying that all of that is thinking like a human thinks or that it's cognitive like a human, definitely there would be much nuance in that.
But what I am saying is all of that, as taken as a whole, is creating what we're experiencing [00:19:00] right now as cognition. And when we think about navigability, we start to think about, okay, so if I think of that map again, you know, it depends on who I am, where I am, what I'm moving through, how all that ecological, all of those ecological relations are setting the parameters of whatever my cognition might be.
where is this thinking happening again? It's, it, it's not in my body, it's not in the phone, it's not in the street, it's not in the people. It's not in my dog. It's not in the sky. And it's in all those places. It's everywhere. And, and no one particular place. So that's this, new way of thinking, which is an old way of thinking, that we're still trying to figure out of, of how to let all of that be at once.
in the moving body, in the moving planet, in the moving everything, contact shaping tools, extending, doing the enacting ecology, ecological, relational, turning the kaleidoscope, kaleidoscopic, thinking. All of these are. Almost like poems that kind of spring out of this way of thinking that I've been describing [00:20:00] here with the ease.
It's, it's part of how we can learn to hold all these perspectives at once and not have to choose between them. You know, we don't choose between being embodied, embedded, and active or ecological. It's just different ways that we're understanding one ongoing process and we can't collapse those into each other and we don't want to, and we can't solve it.
We don't need to make one into the other. But instead we think of it as many different ways to understand this process. So each e gives us a different view of this ongoing process, and we can sort of rotate between them and, uh, notice their contradictions and, and let those contradictions be portals into new ways of understanding and sensing them.
We start to experience ourselves not as either or, but as constellations as. Many sensual possibilities, many ways of being, and we're not separate minds, but we are unique minds that have something to share with everyone we meet and connect with. [00:21:00] And each connection we make, even when they're really hard, can be understood as.
A way to increase or expand what's possible for us as cognitive beings and to even change these shared patterns that we have, that that guide us and that hold us. And that's sort of the heart of love and philosophy is starting to understand that, that whatever that is, that's holding us when we listen to it and put our attention on it, we're engaging in an act of loving, which is also a.
A particular sort of knowing, maybe the only real knowing and all, both of those are ways we make together through this infinite complexity, uh, of existence. And I don't know about you, but I find it just incredible that we can be aware that we're here, that we're part of this, and I. It's hard. It's challenging, it's overwhelming.
It's [00:22:00] wonderful. So that's my diary for today. Thank you for listening. Hope you're doing well wherever you are. And I send you another E, which is exuberance. I like that word today. Alright, bye.