Because the ideas that have dominated discussion and research for the last fifty or more years are pervasive, it takes a tremendous effort to continually drag myself out of the prevailing cosmology within I was raised, and view the world differently.

Earlier this year I agreed to give a presentation to the NLPtCA Annual Conference. The conference marked the 20th anniversary of the founding of the first official body in the UK dedicated to Neuro-Linguistic psychotherapy and counselling.³ It was extra special for Penny and me since we were not only present at the organisation’s birth, we were part of the midwifery team.

To mark the occasion I decided to do something unusual. My talk, ‘Neuroscience: Myth, Metaphor and Marketing’ was a polemic against the accelerating trend of over-stretching of contemporary neuroscience findings beyond justifiable limits. While researching the topic I discovered I was not alone in being exasperated by many of the claims being made by people who think that attaching ‘neuro’ to the front of something and showing a pretty picture of an fMRI scan justifies wild speculation dressed up as science.

For a second time I was delighted to find that Raymond Tallis was way ahead of me.³ The subtitle of his book Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity summed up my concerns nicely. I was particularly delighted because not only had I found a catchy label for my concerns – “Neuromania” – Tallis also introduced me to a new acronym, DEEDS, being adopted by a growing number of scientists, philosophers and researchers for an alternative way to conceive of ‘mind’. It was comforting to know others shared views alined with those Penny and I had been groping towards when we wrote Metaphors in Mind.

DEEDS is a collection of overlapping theories that see cognition as dynamical, embodied, extended, distributed and situated. As Tallis puts it:

They seek to develop a cognitive science in which brain, body and world intertwine, and “beyond-the-skin” factors are accorded fully paid-up cognitive status.⁵

The five aspects of DEEDS are mutually supporting. They are not to be taken as separate entities. The whole points of a DEEDS approach is to put back together that which has been taken apart by a reductionist approach to human cognition. Philosopher Joel Walmsley sums up DEEDS:

Central to this development is the idea that the mind is essentially ‘‘situated’’. Embodied, embedded and distributed approaches try to understand cognitive systems with reference to the bodies, environments and social structures in which they are physically situated. Dynamical cognitive science tries to do justice to the temporal situatedness of cognition, by emphasising the importance of time and timing. Both aspects of this theoretical reorientation have gone hand in hand with a novel and intriguing set of example phenomena that advocates of the DEEDS approach regard as paradigmatically cognitive. Whereas classical cognitive science was concerned with abilities such as chess-playing and logic-crunching, many now see abilities such as sensorimotor co-ordination and obstacle avoidance as central.⁶

Gregory Bateson must be dancing on a head of a pin singing “I told you so, I told you so”.