Ecology of the Body: Styles of Behavior in Human Life

Ecology of the Body presents an argument for describing our behavior in accordance with the ways we experience our bodies. Increasingly, psychologists are recognizing that human beings show great diversity in the ways they perform the vast repertoire of human behaviors-such as perceiving, reasoning, remembering, forgetting-that we may well possess not simply different levels of intelligence but also different forms of it in varying combinations, just as we show differing degrees of emotion, goal-directed activity, and creativity. Lyons puts forward a hypothesis in which he argues for the utility of understanding these differences as stylistic variations that are inseparable from our physical experience of ourselves.