Christian Kronsted

History is full of references to dancing plague, dance mania, ecstatic dance, collective effervescence, choreo mania, collective psychosis, and Tarantism. In each of these cases, groups of people come together in joint activity (typically dance) and reach a prolonged ecstatic state in which they cannot stop the movement. To this day, academic literature in medicine, psychology, history, and cognitive science has not been able to answer the question; why does ecstatic dance lead to a loss of executive control? I here focus on the case of group dance and provide an enactive embodied account of the loss of executive control. I argue that dancing crowds are scaffolded, self-organizing, self-perpetuating, dynamical systems. Within such systems, the majority of affordances provided to the individual agent lead to the perpetuation of the system, leading to more dancing. The embodied impact of the crowd, as an emergent entity, on the individual also leads to change in the sense of agency. Dancers experience being “unable to stop” because the sense of “who” is initiating the movements changes within crowd dance interaction. If it is unclear who is moving, then the interaction is experienced as outside individual control.

Critical thinking and inquiry are considered cornerstones of 21st-century skills that must be taught via our education systems. Two growing approaches to teaching these skills are activity-based learning and inquiry-based learning. Simultaneously, with the advent of embodied cognition across the mind sciences, embodied learning is also beginning to take hold as a substantial theory and practice. However, some recent critiques claim that activity-based learning can easily suffer from increased cognitive load so that students only learn the rules of the activity and not the underlying educational points. I here recast the cognitive load problem in embodied, ecological, and dynamic terms to demonstrate that complexity in educational activities is not necessarily an impediment to learning as long as the activities create emergent complexity of the right kind. Activity rules and instructions can facilitate critical thinking and inquiry when they create; an open-ended problem space, student agency, emergent student interactions, and playful absorption. In short, complexity is not the problem per se; rather, from rules and instructions, an immersive behavior setting must emerge in which students can playfully experiment with affordances. The cognitive load problem on this reading is that some (often linear) learning activities only generate a narrow field of affordances. In recasting the cognitive load problem in embodied, dynamic, and ecological terms, I also demonstrate how affordances and sensorimotor group interaction can “scale-up” and constitute higher-order learning including abstract and critical thinking without any commitments to mental representations or cognitivist notions of information processing.

Collective effervescence is a group experience of intense collective affect. It includes feelings of being “swept away” and “becoming one with the crowd” and often a sensation of “awe” or being in touch with the sacred. Empirical research demonstrates that collective effervescence is connected to several short- and long-term psychological and physical benefits. The growing field of 4E cognition (enactive, embodied, embedded, and extended) takes cognition to be inherently social and affective. Yet surprisingly, despite the social, embodied, dynamic, and affective nature of collective effervescence, there is currently no 4E account of collective effervescence. I integrate the empirical literature on collective effervescence into 4E cognition. I argue, that whenever there are high degrees of self-organizing bodily activity in a human crowd under the proper boundary conditions, there is collective effervescence. Collective effervescence is the experience of undergoing high degrees of self-organization in a crowd. Taking a 4E dynamic systems approach to collective effervescence demystifies the phenomenon and opens it up for potential use in public policy and therapy.

Memphis, Tennessee is the Blackest city with a Philosophy for/with Children (P4/WC) program in the United States, making it a unique site of engagement for practitioners. The city faces deeply historically rooted structural problems that continue to manifest themselves, in housing, food security, hate crimes, police brutality, workplace inequality, and segregation; all of which are present in our classrooms where we practice P4C. In this chapter, we illustrate some of the challenges we have faced while practicing P4/WC in Memphis, and the ways in which these obstacles have transformed the practice and mission of the Philosophical Horizons (PH) outreach program. We have found that many of the methods and assumptions of traditional P4C can sometimes be harmful or alienating to some of our students if not properly reformed. We here outline the history of our program Philosophical Horizons (PH) and discuss some of the obstacles we have faced teaching in our specific context. We further provide a discussion of why the typical methods and assumptions of P4C do not serve us well in the context of Memphis. Additionally, we describe our own approach to philosophy for/with children and our primary mission within the city as an anti-racist practice. Finally, we discuss two case studies that exemplify some of the dynamics that we outline in this chapter.

History is full of references to dancing plague, dance mania, ecstatic dance, collective effervescence, choreo mania, collective psychosis, and Tarantism. In each of these cases, groups of people come together in joint activity (typically dance) and reach a prolonged ecstatic state in which they cannot stop the movement. To this day, academic literature in medicine, psychology, history, and cognitive science has not been able to answer the question; why does ecstatic dance lead to a loss of executive control? I here focus on the case of group dance and provide an enactive embodied account of the loss of executive control. I argue that dancing crowds are scaffolded, self-organizing, self-perpetuating, dynamical systems. Within such systems, the majority of affordances provided to the individual agent lead to the perpetuation of the system, leading to more dancing. The embodied impact of the crowd, as an emergent entity, on the individual also leads to change in the sense of agency. Dancers experience being “unable to stop” because the sense of “who” is initiating the movements changes within crowd dance interaction. If it is unclear who is moving, then the interaction is experienced as outside individual control.

Much of our everyday, embodied action comes in the form of smooth coping. Smooth coping is skillful action that has become habituated and ingrained, generally placing less stress on cognitive load than considered and deliberative thought and action. When performed with skill and expertise, walking, driving, skiing, musical performances, and short-order cooking are all examples of the phenomenon. Smooth coping is characterized by its rapidity and relative lack of reflection, both being hallmarks of automatization. Deliberative and reflective actions provide the contrast case. In Dreyfus’ classic view, smooth coping is “mindless” absorption into action, being in the flow, and any reflective thought will only interrupt this flow. Building on the pragmatist account of Dewey, others, such as Sutton, Montero, and Gallagher, insist on the intelligent flexibility built into smooth coping, suggesting that it is not equivalent to automatization. We seek to answer two complementary challenges in this article. First, how might we model smooth coping in autonomous agents at fine granularity? Second, we use this model of smooth coping to show how we might implement smooth coping in artificial intelligent agents. We develop a conceptual model of smooth coping in LIDA. LIDA is an embodied cognitive architecture implementing the global workspace theory of consciousness, among other psychological theories. LIDA’s implementation of consciousness enables us to account for the phenomenology of smooth coping, something that few cognitive architectures would be able to do. Through the fine granular analysis of LIDA, we argue that smooth coping is a sequence of automatized actions intermittently interspersed with consciously mediated action selection, supplemented by dorsal stream processes. In other words, non-conscious, automatized actions often require occasional bursts of conscious cognition to achieve the skillful and flexible adjustments of smooth coping. In addition, never-conscious dorsal stream information and associated sensorimotor processes provide further online adjustments during smooth coping. To achieve smooth coping in LIDA we introduce a new module to the LIDA cognitive architecture the Automatized Action Selection sub-module. Our complex model of smooth coping borrows notions of “embodied intelligence” from enactivism and augments these by allowing representations and more detailed mechanisms of conscious control. We explore several extended examples of smooth coping, starting from basic activities like walking and scaling up to more complex tasks like driving and short-order cooking.

Across various fields it is argued that the self in part consists of an autobiographical self-narrative and that the self-narrative has an impact on agential behavior. Similarly, within action theory, it is claimed that the intentional structure of coherent long-term action is divided into a hierarchy of distal, proximal, and motor intentions. However, the concrete mechanisms for how narratives and distal intentions are generated and impact action is rarely fleshed out concretely. We here demonstrate how narratives and distal intentions can be generated within cognitive agents and how they can impact agential behavior over long time scales. We integrate narratives and distal intentions into the LIDA model,and demonstrate how they can guide agential action in a manner that is consistent with the Global Workspace Theory of consciousness. This paper serves both as an addition to the LIDA cognitive architecture and an elucidation of how narratives and distal intention emerge and play their role in cognition and action.

A body schema is an agent's model of its own body that enables it to act on affordances in the environment. This paper presents a body schema system for the Learning Intelligent Decision Agent (LIDA) cognitive architecture. LIDA is a conceptual and computational implementation of Global Workspace Theory, also integrating other theories from neuroscience and psychology. This paper contends that the ‘body schema' should be split into three separate functions based on the functional role of consciousness in Global Workspace Theory. There is (1) an online model of the agent's effectors and effector variables (Current Body Schema), (2) a long-term, recognitional storage of embodied capacities for action and affordances (Habitual Body Schema), and (3) "dorsal" stream information feeding directly from early perception to sensorimotor processes (Online Body Schema). This paper then discusses how the LIDA model of the body schema explains several experiments in psychology and ethology.

It is often argued by educators and researchers that access to the arts leads to increased academic performance. However, it is not clear why such access does so. We here use autopoietic enactive embodied cognition and ecological psychology to explain the relationship between dance training and conceptual problem-solving. We investigate four features of dance training that are beneficial for conceptual problem-solving and critical thinking: empathy, affordance exploration, attention change, and habit breaking. In each case, we will see that the embodied sensorimotor skills developed through dance practice are a form of affordance exploration that can carry over into the realm of conceptual problem-solving. Hence, since some of the skills needed in conceptual problem-solving are the same ones developed and trained through dancing, when we train dance, we also train some of the relevant skills for conceptual problem-solving and critical thinking.

Within the last fifty years as philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science have moved towards increasingly more embodied theoretical frameworks, there has been growing interest in Dance Movement Therapy. DMT has been shown to be effective in mitigating negative symptoms in several psychopathologies including PTSD, autism, and schizophrenia. Further, DMT generally helps participants gain a stronger sense of agency and connection with their body. However, it has been argued that it is not always clear what constitutes these changes in DMT participants. I argue that we can better understand the empirical and phenomenological results of DMT across psychopathologies if we adapt an enactive embodied approach to cognition. I use the framework of embodied enactive cognition and narrative theories of the self to develop an account of DMT as a form of narrative change. I claim that through the acquisition of new bodily skill and bodily awareness, DMT can cause changes to the participant’s narrative self-understanding.