Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning Audiobook (Free)

Whether it’s brusque, convincing, fraught with emotion, or dripping with innuendo, language is fundamentally a tool for conveying meaning-a uniquely human magic trick in which you vibrate your vocal cords to make your innermost thoughts pop up in someone else’s mind. You can use it to talk about a variety of things-from your brand-new labradoodle puppy to the expansive backyards at Versailles, from Roger Federer’s backhand to things that don’t exist at all, like traveling pigs. And when you talk, your about Louder Than Terms: The New Science of How the Brain Makes Meaning listener fills in a large amount details you didn’t mention-the curliness of the dog’s hair or the huge statuary due to the French palace. What’s the secret behind this magic? How does meaning work?

In Louder than Words, cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen draws collectively a decade’s worthy of of research in psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience to offer a new theory of how our thoughts make meaning. When we hear words and phrases, Bergen contends, we indulge the elements of our human brain that we use for belief and action, repurposing these evolutionarily old networks to generate simulations inside our thoughts. These embodied simulations, as they’re called, are why is it easy for us to be better football players by merely visualizing a well-executed golf swing; what allows us to remember which cupboard the diapers are in without searching, and what makes it so hard to talk on a cell phone while we’re driving on the road. Meaning is more than just knowing definitions of words, as others possess previously argued. In understanding vocabulary, our brains engage in a creative process of making wealthy mental worlds in which we see, hear, experience, and act.

Through whimsical examples and clever experiments, Bergen leads all of us on a digital tour of the brand new science of embodied cognition. An excellent account of our human being capacity to comprehend language, Louder than Terms will profoundly change how you examine, speak, and pay attention.