Embodiment is the idea that the brain does not need a detailed representation of the world, since the world is always present to organisms via an intact sensorimotor apparatus (Clark 1998). An extreme example of embodiment is the way in which the late Stephen Hawking (who suffered from the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS) delivered his university lectures at Cambridge. Although he could communicate at only 0.1 bits per second [corrected for information redundancy, Reed and Durlach 1998] using a synthetic device (that was responsive to his cheek muscles, De Lange 2011) his lecture could be delivered at a normal rate of ~ 40 bits per second. Like most professors, his lecture would need to be prepared in advance. But in addition, the interface used by Hawking for communication was programmed with a word-prediction algorithm that had access to the entire lecture (Denman et al. 1997). Based on the characters initially uttered by Hawking, complete paragraphs could be summoned and delivered automatically through his voice synthesizer. Thus, there was no need for Hawking to memorize his lecture (which is also true for many of us who prepare slides in advance). In the absence of the algorithm, however, I am sure he would have had no problem communicating the contents of his lecture—but at a rate of 0.1 bits per second, which is far too slow for anyone to understand his speech. It is noteworthy that many people with Hawking’s condition pass away within several years of being overcome by ALS. For Hawking, it was his love of physics that kept him alive for his many decades of productive existence.