The body in didactics

The neuro-scientific revolution over the past few decades has led to a series of impacts at the level of education, recognizing the body a fundamental role in the learning process. This work, starting from the overcoming of the anthropological and philosophical framework that would exalt the body-mind dichotomy, focuses on the neurobiological and neuropsycho-logical theories most accredited today to understand their didactic implications and the theoretical and methodological orientations. The scientific contribution by Antonio Damasio with his theory of the Somatic Marker offers interesting options for reflection and application in the formal and non-formal educational context. Most of the time, especially when experiencing complex problems - and the didactics of pupils is a complex experimentation of life - we tend to use a cognitive strategy that refers to the outcomes of past experiences, in which we recognize some analogy with the present situation. Such experiences have left some traces, not necessarily conscious, that Damasio calls somatic markers, and that make us recall emotions and feelings, with negative or positive connotations, as they’re related to bodily experiences. To complete this scenario, the paradigm of the Embodied Cognition comes into play, which, in addition to neuroscientifically justifying the principles of knowledge considered as embodied today, opens to horizons of phenomenological research that can be contextualized in didactics. “It’s thanks to the body that today we can better understand what are the neural mechanisms allowing us to communicate with our fellow men, convey our desires, our beliefs, our intentions to them.” From these theories, which are well-argued in the text, it clearly emerges that didactics, in all its forms, not only must not avoid that scientific revolution, but it must find a wise way to foster its epistemological evolution.