We grow up thinking there are five senses, but we forget about the ten neglected senses of the body that both enable and limit our experience. Embodied explores the psychology of physical sensation in ten chapters: balance, movement, pressure (acting in gravity), breathing, fatigue, pain, itch, temperature, appetite, and expulsion (the senses of physical matter leaving the body). For each sense, two people are interviewed who live with extreme experiences of the sense being investigated; their stories bring to life how far physical sensations matter to us and how much they define what is possible in our life. How physical sensation shapes behavior and how behavior is shaped by sensation are examined. A final chapter presents a theory of what is common across the ten senses: of how we deal with being urged to act, and what happens when extreme sensation is inescapable.
For the most part bodies have been neglected and ignored in psychology, thought of merely as a taxi for the mind, dwarfed by the study of observable behaviour, of action and agency, motivation and performance, or of cognition and emotion. 'Embodied' is a fascinating guide to how we experience our bodies and how our bodies experience the world
