Trendiness in the brain sciences often has an obscure, esoteric quality that belies the prominence accorded neuro in both academia and popular culture. Toward the top of the list of arcana resides the ponderously titled “ embodied cognition .” This is the idea that cognitive processes–thought, emotion–arise from our interactions with the physical world around us. Reduced to its simplest level: holding a warm tea cup might make you feel well disposed toward your lunch guest.

Some of the proponents of embodied cognition take all this much further, postulating that the way we reason about how others think–essential to social interactions–musters the same mental processes brought to bear when we perceive the world around us. So when we imagine a child seeing a clown at the circus, we use the same visual pathways that we would if we were ourselves seeing the big red nose and the oversize floppy shoes. Taken to its logical extreme, this idea would imply that a visually impaired person might somehow be unable to fully develop a mental picture of the child’s trip to the circus.