Different Bodies, Different Minds

TLDR

The body‑specificity hypothesis proposes that bodily differences, such as handedness, shape cognitive representations, including both concrete actions and abstract concepts like goodness or honesty. The article reviews evidence that right‑ and left‑handers recruit distinct brain regions when imagining actions and representing action‑verb meanings. The review examines neuroimaging data showing that right‑ and left‑handers engage different cortical areas during action imagination and verb representation. The review concludes that motoric differences between right‑ and left‑handers causally influence cognition, emotion, communication, and decision‑making.

Abstract

Do people with different kinds of bodies think differently? According to the body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2009), they should. In this article, I review evidence that right- and left-handers, who perform actions in systematically different ways, use correspondingly different areas of the brain for imagining actions and representing the meanings of action verbs. Beyond concrete actions, the way people use their hands also influences the way they represent abstract ideas with positive and negative emotional valence like “goodness,” “honesty,” and “intelligence” and how they communicate about these ideas in spontaneous speech and gesture. Changing how people use their right and left hands can cause them to think differently, suggesting that motoric differences between right- and left-handers are not merely correlated with cognitive differences. Body-specific patterns of motor experience shape the way we think, feel, communicate, and make decisions.