Lichaamstaal spreekt in Tilburg

Nieuws | de redactie

6 februari 2008 | Lichaamstaal is de taal van bewuste, maar ook onbewuste communicatie. Om het onderzoek naar de verschillende functies van lichaamstaal te belichten en te verdiepen, organiseert de UvT op 13 en 14 maart het internationale congres The Magic of Body Language. Het handelt onder meer over de rol van lichaamstaal in godsdienstige tradities, rituelen en in de gezondheidszorg in de vorm van nabije, fysieke interactie.

Tijdens het congres worden door middel van masterclasses en discussiepanels drie aspecten belicht. Allereerst gezichtsuitdrukkingen, die bijvoorbeeld informatie over emoties weergeven. Ten tweede de rol van lichaamstaal in godsdienstige tradities, rituelen en in de gezondheidszorg in de vorm van nabije, fysieke interactie.

Als derde onderwerp komt ‘belichaamde cognitie’ aan de orde, waarbij kennisverwerking door middel van het lichaam wordt besproken. Dat mensen informatie halen uit het lichaam, is te illustreren aan het onvermogen van autistische kinderen om anderen te begrijpen vanwege hun gebrek aan sensomotorisch vermogen.

Sprekers op het congres zijn onder meer de hoogleraren Jeffrey Cohn (University of Pittsburgh), Beatrice De Gelder (Universiteit van Tilburg), Mark Rowlands (University of Hertfordshire), Shaun Gallagher (University of Central Florida), Elochukwu Uzukwu (Milltown Institute Dublin) en Carrol Clarkson (University of Cape Town). Het congres wordt opgeluisterd door een bijdrage van de Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunsten onder de titel Expression unlimited. De Faculteit Geesteswetenschappen organiseert dit congres in het kader van het 80-jarig bestaan van de universiteit.

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Emotions, gestures and facial expressions are linked up in the brain. What do we learn from experiments in audio-visual integration if we combine cognitive psychology, neuro- psychology and brain-imaging methods? This type of research has been rapidly expanding in the last decade as ‘cognitive neuroscience’. It is directly linked to problems in language studies, in particular the use of prosody, i.e., specific auditory cues (intonation, tempo, voice quality and pausing) for marking dialogue phenomena. Recent research has shown, for example, that the resolution of ambiguously definite descriptions in spoken dialogue depends strongly on the visual information that is available to the participants. Ambiguity largely vanishes when interlocutors take this non-linguistic knowledge source into account.

Body and Belief
Body language plays a key role in many religious traditions. Firstly, both the contents and the practices of religious belief are often shaped through the body and become manifest in bodily discipline , symbolic expression and ritual gesture. Rituals, in turn, develop out of gestures which find their source in the human body. The embodied intertwinement of sensory perception and symbolic signification is basic in any anthropological account of rituals. Secondly, the core of care requires ‘treatment beyond treatment’: forms of interaction addressing people as fellow human beings rather than as mere objects of (medical) science and (bio-) technology. Notwithstanding the importance of the latter, they should be rooted in physical nearness and bodily expression if illness, suffering and pain are to be cured.

Embodied cognition
The idea of an embodied mind sheds new light on various pathological cases. Autism, for instance, is not simply the lack of a “theory of mind”. The incapacity for understanding others is more likely caused by problems with one’s own body system, i.e. the child’s own sensory-motor inability to interact with the environment. This example illustrates the concept of embodied cognition research: Assuming that, prior to any verbal account, humans acquire, structure, check and pass on knowledge through their bodies, it theorizes the ways in which the body shapes and constrains thought. Rather than reducing the mind to physiological or information-processing functions, it attempts to differentiate the concept of a body as an embedded, habitual or situated body. By doing so, it revisits older notions in philosophy and psychology alike (“corps-sujet”, “corporal scheme”, “know how” and even “Zuhandensein”).