Enactivism: Embodied cognition, sense-making, and nursing.

Enactivism, a branch of embodied cognition theory, portrays cognition as a sense-making process distributed across brain, body, environment, and subjective experience. This theoretical paper introduces enactivism's background and main tenets and argues for its relevance to nursing, particularly mental health nursing. The authors contend that enactivism offers nursing an integrated framework for understanding human sense-making that includes physiological, psychological, and subjective perceptual factors, potentially enriching nursing knowledge.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Enactivism is a branch of embodied cognition theory that argues for a highly distributed model of cognition as a sense-making process involving brain, body, environment, and subjective experience. It is a theoretical framework with potential value for nursing since it offers an integrated framework for human sense-making that includes physiological and psychological factors as well as the primary experience of subjective perceptions. This paper presents an introduction to the background and main tenets of enactivist theory. These are discussed in relation to nursing, and mental health nursing to argue for the relevance of enactivism in nursing knowledge.