This is the first post in a series leading up to the 16th annual International Forum on Consciousness, taking place in Madison this May, hosted by the BTC Institute, Promega and Usona Institute. The Forum gathers scientists, philosophers, and practitioners from dozens of different fields to investigate the nature of the mind. This year’s theme, “Unspoken Intelligence,” explores forms of perception and knowing that fall outside conventional cognition.
There’s a quote that travels well in some intellectual circles:
You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.
There’s something genuinely relieving about that idea. It locates the real you somewhere above the fray, untouched by the body’s demands and indignities, the consciousness that thinks and persists while the body handles the inconvenient work of being hungry and tired and sick. The thinking part is what counts.
Plato thought something similar. So did Augustine. As did Descartes. Kant, too. The idea that the thinking self is separate from and superior to the body is Western civilization’s default setting.
It sounds like wisdom. It is also, I’ve come to think, exactly the wrong way to understand what we are.
Here’s a different text, one most millennials can recite from memory. In the opening verse of “Lose Yourself,” Eminem rattles off a visceral catalog of physical symptoms: sweaty palms, weak knees, heavy arms, vomiting. The body staging a complete revolt while the mind tries to execute a plan, until the moment on stage when the mouth opens and nothing comes out. The mind wanted to perform, but the body said no.
Nobody who has memorized those lyrics thinks of them as a description of embodied cognition. They file it under music, or nostalgia, or just a song they played too loud in a car they didn’t own. But the nervous system doesn’t care what you call it, because the body doesn’t catalogue in words.
This is the thing the soul-body quote gets wrong: the body isn’t a vehicle the self rides around in. It’s already thinking, already keeping score, already running a process the mind is only partially aware of. The question is what to do about that.
The Other Half
In the 1990s, neurologist Antonio Damasio started working with patients who had damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in processing emotion. These patients were, by conventional measures, cognitively intact. Their IQs were unaffected. They could construct arguments and weigh options with apparent competence.
They could not, however, make good decisions. Given choices that most people navigate intuitively, they floundered: financial decisions, social decisions, basic life management. They would deliberate endlessly, consider every angle, and then make choices that were bafflingly self-destructive (or they simply couldn’t choose at all).
What they had lost, Damasio argued, was access to what he called somatic markers: body-based emotional signals that, in healthy cognition, flag options as promising or dangerous before conscious reasoning even gets involved. The body, it turned out, was doing a significant portion of the evaluative work on its own, and without those signals, the whole system broke down. Pure reason, it turns out, isn’t enough.
Damasio showed what happens when the mind loses access to what the body is processing in the present, but the body also stores the past, which is where it gets more complicated. Other animals seem to handle this naturally. A gazelle that escapes a lion will literally shake, trembling and shuddering, until the survival energy discharges, then walk back to grazing as if nothing happened. Humans, for the most part, short-circuit the process before it can finish. We suppress the shake. We tell ourselves to calm down, hold still, keep it together. The energy must go somewhere, and without an outward discharge, it goes inward.
Trauma researcher Peter Levine, who studied this pattern for decades, argues in Waking the Tiger that the body holds on to these incomplete survival responses: the fight or flight reaction that started but never finished. When an overwhelming experience doesn’t resolve cleanly, it gets locked in tissue and the nervous system rather than being discharged. The body carries the past in a form that the thinking mind cannot fully access or resolve through reasoning alone. You can understand intellectually that a threat has passed, but your nervous system may not have received the memo.
Turned Down Low
The dramatic version is loud. Stage fright. Grief. Even the “Sunday scaries.” Most of us only tune in for the alarms, but the subtle version is different. It doesn’t arrive the same way because it was never actually gone.
Like any dutiful student of consciousness, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately trying to pay attention to the part of me that doesn’t speak in words: the nervous system, the gut, the felt sense of the world. I’ve started to notice a particular sensation. Something will happen that I don’t like. My mind acknowledges it, decides it’s handled, moves on, and files it away. Later, I can feel some unspecified disquiet weighing me down, and I have to actually stop and ask myself: what is it I’m supposed to be feeling bad about? I can then often recall what my mind had already deemed resolved. My mind let it go, but my body didn’t.
These types of feelings have been happening my whole life, but they never registered as anything in particular because they were part of my personal normal. Growing up, people would ask what it was like to have my dad as a teacher. I never knew how to answer because I didn’t have another version to compare it to. The body’s signals are like that. Not invisible, just the only frame of reference you’ve ever had. Like the hum of a refrigerator you stop hearing until the power goes out.
I noticed recently that I hold my breath while I crochet, my body quietly doing its thing while the mind is somewhere else entirely. I don’t know what it means, but maybe I don’t need to. Noticing is its own thing, not a step toward something, just the moment of contact.
There is a local folk band I used to see regularly, and at their shows, I’d find myself tracking how my body responded before I knew what I thought. A song would start, and sometimes the music would raise goosebumps before I’d heard enough to form an opinion. The earlier they came, the more my mind would eventually agree. Not a conclusion I reached. Just the body registering something as true before the mind had a chance to weigh in. No translation required.
Whether you pay attention to these signals makes a difference. Damasio showed what happens at the extreme end of that disconnection. The quiet version operates on the same principle. Miss enough of it and you’re left with a general wrongness (or rightness) you can’t quite name or act on. These signals are running whether you’re paying attention or not. If you’re not, they’re still shaping you: your decisions, your mood, your sense that something is right or off. You’re already in the conversation. You just can’t hear your own side of it.
The Gap
We read the books. We learn the concepts. We understand, cerebrally, that the body is a cognitive organ. We can explain the vagus nerve at a dinner party. We attend vinyasa and kundalini classes. We subscribe to apps that guide us through body scans. We add somatic practice to our list of things we do to optimize ourselves. These are real frameworks, grounded in real science, and they have genuinely helped a lot of people. They have also, in many cases, become another thing the mind manages from a distance.
The society we live in doesn’t make this any easier. We do all of this inside an economy that rewards cognitive output and has no real use for embodied presence, one that has also, not coincidentally, commodified the tools for reconnecting with the body it helped us leave. All of it traces back to Western civilization’s default setting: the assumption that the thinking self stands apart from and above the body.
We keep trying to close the gap using the same thing that opened it. The body, meanwhile, hasn’t stopped taking notes.
None of which tells you what to actually do. It would be simpler if the answer were just “listen to your body” or “trust your mind.” The actual work is messier than that. Knowing the body thinks is not the same as living inside that knowledge. What it requires is practice that bypasses the mind’s management, and enough tolerance for what the body is saying rather than what you’d prefer it to say.
The signal you’re trying to read has already been filtered and revised before you experience it, because the brain is always making its best guess about what the body is saying, not just passing the message along. It’s more like learning to decipher a conversation between two systems that don’t speak the same language, neither of which is automatically right, both of which have been known to lie.
The body isn’t always correct. The stage fright that feels like danger is sometimes just adrenaline before something good. The gut clench that feels like a warning is sometimes old fear wearing new clothes. Sometimes we seek the signal out entirely, the heart-dropping rush of a roller coaster, a cliff jump, a first date, because the body’s aliveness is exactly the point. The mind’s ability to override the body isn’t always problematic; sometimes it’s a gift. You go on stage anyway. You do the hard thing anyway.
The skill isn’t learning to always obey the signal but learning to tell the difference between the body’s wisdom and its noise. Nobody has fully worked that out.
In Progress
Eminem didn’t need a research grant to catalog what the nervous system does under pressure, or to put it in a form that millions of people recognized immediately in their own bodies. That’s a different kind of knowing, not better or worse than Damasio, just arrived at differently, from the inside out rather than the outside in. The question I keep circling is whether any of it, the research, the song, the essay, the practice, actually closes the gap, or whether the gap is just the condition we’re working in.
I don’t know if I’m doing it right. I don’t know if the practices are working or if I’m just doing a more elaborate version of the same thing, processing my way through somatic exercises the way I’d annotate a challenging text. I catch myself evaluating my progress, grading my own presence, which is a very mind thing to do. The body doesn’t grade itself. Neither does it write essays about itself. Maybe this is one more attempt to close the gap from the wrong side.
Levine makes one observation that keeps stopping me: you don’t decide you’ve gotten there, which means the question “am I doing this right” may be the surest sign that you’re still doing it wrong.
That body-soul quote from earlier, by the way, is almost always attributed to C.S. Lewis. It was actually written by George MacDonald, a 19th century Scottish minister. The words survived, but the origin didn’t. The soul made it, but the body got left behind.
The Consciousness Forum exists, in part, because some questions can’t be answered from a desk. Your mind has had a taste. Consider bringing the rest of you. The 16th annual International Forum on Consciousness takes place May 21-22, 2026 in Madison. Register here.
Sources and Further Reading
- Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994)
- The book that made the scientific case for the body’s role in decision-making. Damasio’s somatic marker research is the foundation for much of what this piece argues.
- Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)
- Barrett’s constructionist theory of emotion reframes how the brain interprets body signals. A useful companion to Damasio for understanding why emotional granularity matters.
- Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (2021)
- Accessible and rigorous, Seth’s “controlled hallucination” model of consciousness is one of the cleaner explanations of how the brain constructs experience from the inside out.
- Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)
- Where the gazelle argument comes from. Levine’s somatic approach to trauma is the most direct treatment of what happens when the body’s survival responses don’t complete.
- Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)
- The most widely read book on what the body holds onto and why talk therapy alone often isn’t enough. If you’ve read one book on this territory, it’s probably this one.
- Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It (2024)
- Koch’s most recent and personal book, covering integrated information theory, psychedelic experience, and what it means to expand consciousness. Koch will be presenting at the Forum.
- Cassandra Vieten, Imagine That: Transform How You Think, Feel, and Live with the Science of Imagination (forthcoming 2026)
- Vieten’s research on imagination, mindfulness, and transformative experience sits directly in the territory the Forum explores. Vieten will be presenting at the Forum.
- George MacDonald, Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1867)
- Source of the misattributed soul-body quote. Worth knowing who actually wrote it.
Elise Johnson
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