Moving the mind, thinking the body: new insights on the mind-body connection from the neuroscience of movement, sports, arts, yoga, and meditation

Humans have long pondered the connection between mind and body, both inside and outside the scientific community. Cartesian dualism, so ingrained in Western culture, has for years prevented any attempt to set the question differently. In the last 50 years, this boundary begun to blur as integrative approaches, occasionally drawing inspiration from older traditions from the Eastern world (Varela et al., 2017), arose in cognitive science. Through them, the fundamental role of the body in learning processes was emphasized, as well as that of psychological factors in movement. Although widespread at the theoretical level, this approach still struggles to gain a foothold from the scientific point of view. In fact, the methodologies to investigate the manifestations of body and mind seem to be not always compatible, but probably only apparently so. On these assumptions, the idea of the present Research Topic was born. “Moving the Mind, Thinking the Body” brings together the most recent contributions addressing the mind-body problem.