Mind in Motion, Barbara Tversky
Mind in Motion, Barbara Tversky
1 Rating(s)
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

Mind in Motion
How Action Shapes Thought

Author: Barbara Tversky

Narrator: Cassandra Campbell

Unabridged: 11 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/03/2019

Synopsis

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

About Barbara Tversky

Barbara Tversky is an emerita professor of psychology at Stanford University and a professor of psychology at Teachers College at Columbia University. She is also the President of the Association for Psychological Science. Tversky has published over 200 scholarly articles about memory, spatial thinking, design, and creativity, and regularly speaks about embodied cognition at interdisciplinary conferences and workshops around the world. She lives in New York.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Nelson on October 20, 2024

In her latest book, ‘Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought’ (2019), Barbara Tversky presents a theorisation on cognition that, although not completely new, is bold. She argues that our thinking is not constructed by language, but by action, by movement. Tversky tells us that we use words to desc......more

Goodreads review by Meg on September 24, 2019

The book was repetitive and monotonous. Watch her lectures online instead. I liked that she challenged Chomsky’s linguistic theories. She is very intelligent and she had a lot of fun studies to talk about. I also liked how she thought our environment and the things we create represent how our minds......more

Goodreads review by Dan on November 22, 2019

Barbara Tversky is a brilliant thinker and psychologist who has taught previously at Stanford and is currently on faculty of Teachers College at Columbia University. In this latest volume she makes a case for a different answer to the question: How do we think? Most would instinctively answer with w......more

Goodreads review by Tony on July 13, 2019

I found the insight that thought originates in movement very liberating. Concepts and abstractions evolve from gestures and from crawling around in the world like animals. It fits well with John Gray's The Silence of the Animals. While the book goes into great detail on how actiion shapes thought an......more

Goodreads review by Hayden on July 22, 2019

Super interesting subject material but the organization and writing was a little messy and repetitive. While the central claim is profound it doesn't come across that way.......more

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List