ABSTRACT
On a track called 'Life is Long', David Byrne sings the line 'I can barely see cos my head's in the way'. That's the message of this chapter. We can barely see the cognitive mechanisms under pinning creativity because our heads are in the way. Once this cranial obstruction is fully removed, the path of creation is revealed to be routinely constituted by dynamic arrays of body-involving and environment-involving processing loops. In other words, the creative mind is embodied, embedded and extended. According to the embodied cognition perspective, psychological states and processes are routinely shaped, in fundamental ways, by non-neural bodily factors. One's first reaction to this proposal might be that it is unclear what it amounts to, until someone tells us what the terms 'shaped' and 'fundamental' mean. The embodied cognition perspective says that non-neural bodily factors are far more important to our psychology than that.
