Within the humanities, some of the key theorists drew inspiration from the writings published at midcentury by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who had analyzed, with stunning lucidity, the body’s influence upon even our most rarefied cogitiations.

We in the West are used to thinking of the mind and the body as separate. But a burgeoning field called “embodied cognition” is demonstrating that thinking is actually a full-body experience.