Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought

by Barbara Tversky Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

Overview

An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought

When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words.

In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart.

Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"An earnest effort to describe how our physical movements and the movements of those around us shape our consciousness...A well-informed book that will appeal to psychology buffs willing to pay close attention."—Kirkus

"This beautifully written book engages you in a one-on-one conversation with a rich and fascinating mind. It will guide you on a tour of your own experience and show you a new way to think about thinking."—Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

"An intriguing exploration of the spatial thinking that is embedded in our reasoning, our language, and our culture, from one of the world's leading researchers on these topics."—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of How the Mind Works

"In this engrossing new book, Tversky shows how motion, actions, and bodies are fundamental to the way we think. The mind extends from the brain and body to the world and environment, building upon how we perceive and manipulate our bodies and the objects around us. Truly engaging. Truly important."—Don Norman, director of The Design Lab at University of California, San Diego and author of The Design of Everyday Things

"Nimbly maneuvering between data, scientific theory, and extraordinary personal insight, Tversky elegantly establishes spatial thinking as core to our very existence as humans. Ranging from physics to linguistics to design, this sophisticated new book distills the author's expertise into a compelling geometry of facts: a delight for experts and accidental readers alike."—Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture & Design at the Museum of Modern Art

Kirkus Reviews

2019-03-03

An earnest effort to describe how our physical movements and the movements of those around us shape our consciousness.

Scientists seeking to explain how we think—no one has fully succeeded yet—prefer to focus on language and perception. According to Tversky (Emerita, Psychology/Stanford Univ.; Induced Pictorial Representations, 1993), however, this is simply rephrasing the question. The author has enjoyed a distinguished career as a cognitive psychologist specializing in visual-spatial reasoning, and this is her first book for a general audience. She summarizes her life's work with an admirable absence of turgid academic prose and technical jargon, although it remains a somewhat arcane field. "From the beginning of life," she writes, "we move and act in space, interacting with our surroundings, with space itself, and with the things we encounter in space. These actions yield sensations both from within our body and outside our body. The actions and sensations of our bodies form our conceptions of our bodies. The world is never static. We are constantly acting in that world and adapting to it." Put bluntly, this means that our thoughts are intimately connected with movements—our own and those in our environment. This is reflected in the architecture of the brain, where a single nerve cell, called a mirror neuron, fires both when we observe another person do something such as pick up an object and when we perform the same action. Moving our hands—gesturing—is a form of communication older than language. When experimental subjects sit on their hands, their ability to communicate efficiently drops, and people blind from birth gesture as they talk. While mass audiences exist for popular science writing on cosmology, evolution, medicine, and technology, this often ingenious exploration of spatial thinking will command a more limited readership.

A well-informed book that will appeal to psychology buffs willing to pay close attention.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940174035195
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	09/03/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

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