Bodies of art: the shaping of aesthetic experience

Over the course of the last two decades, a novel and innovative corporeal imagination has overtaken social theory, cultural studies, philosophy, psychology and the humanities. With sustained interdisciplinary attention being paid to human embodiment, current efforts to understand meaning-making have precipitated a reconceptualization of the lived body as a matrix of significance flourishing within the spatial, corporeal, and incarnate. This move continues to be driven by a desire to challenge the prevalent Western, and Cartesian, notion of the self as a discrete, interior consciousness constituted by brain states and processes located exclusively inside the head of the person, with priority being given to reason and language. In response, a non-Cartesian approach can take as its starting point the Spread Mind identity theory developed by Riccardo Manzotti which claims that the mind is not produced by or in the brain, but rather, the brain is formed and constantly modified by the mind,