What birds taught me about embodied cognition and experiential learning. 1

Una chica de ciudad. I once was a city girl. Coming from a small Spanish city, I grew up seeing only pigeons and storks around. The Plaza Mayor was infested by temerarious, dirty pigeons fed by the old men who would sit in the benches throwing crumbs absentmindedly to those aviary pests. I don’t remember seeing many storks flying around though, but their huge nests on top of San Lesmes bell tower were a reminder of their existence.

The names of birds in Spanish were empty words, devoid of real meaning to me. I knew names of birds that I identified as birds but had no idea of what kind bird they were because I’d never seen them in real life. Vencejos, tordos, chochines, herrerillos… (Note: at the end of the post there is a list and translation of all the bird’s names that appear in this article) were words I knew belonged to the category of birds, although I don’t even remember where I learned that information. Ciencias naturales (natural sciences) subject in school, maybe? In any case, those words had no meaning. Had I been ambling around in a forest and saw a “vencejo” perched on a branch in front of me, I’d had no idea what that bird’s name would have been. There was no connection between the word and the reality of it.

Of course, I had some images in my mind, I knew what a loro was because I had seen funny videos of parrots cursing, or I intellectually knew what a cuervo or a búho were. But they were like the concept of “peace” or “angels”, notions that are either abstract or something I can understand but I don’t really grasp because I’ve never experienced through my senses.

Names like garza o herrerillo were just that. Names. I had not the faintest idea of what they looked like, how they lived, their habits…

Other names like urraca, gorrión or golondrina were more familiar, not because I had seen any of their specimens in real life, but because I had read poems about them, so I knew that people normally like “gorriones” and “golondrinas”.

Volverán las oscuras golondrinas
en tu balcón sus nidos a colgar,
y otra vez con el ala a sus cristales,
jugando llamarán

– Bécquer

Or the opposite, the bad image “urracas” ge as thieves that steal any type of shiny things. Had I ever seen any urraca? Nope. Did I dislike them just because of that passed on idea? Yep.

But at least, urracas had a deeper meaning. They meant something beyond the word itself because I had experienced them through someone else’s artistic expression or through folklore.