In the past mind and body were seen as separate: the brain like a distant general sending orders to corporeal troops. However, it is virtually impossible to describe one without the other. We sense ourselves as well as the outside world, so that posture and facial expression affects feelings as well as being caused by them. We see that simple activities, such as lifting a cup, are the result of a closed-loop control cycle of action and sensing. Fitts’ Law is well know in HCI as a ‘law’ of human motor system, but it is in fact a cybernetic law of the extended human body – indeed, from the first stone tools to the modern computer, humans we have always been cyborgs. Apparently internal plans and intentions turn out to be intermixed with physical sensing and action, so that some regard our very mind as embodied in the world.
Keywords: Fitts’ Law, Extended body, Cyborg, Embodied cognition, Sensing, Embodied thinking, Proprioception