Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought Audiobook (Free)

An eminent psychologist offers a major fresh theory of human cognition: motion, not language, may be the foundation of thought

When we make an effort to consider how we think, we can’t help but think of words. Indeed, some have called vocabulary the stuff of thought. But photos are remembered greater than terms, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies phrases. Anytime you have a shortcut or play chess or golf ball or rearrange your home furniture in your thoughts, you’ve performed something impressive: about Mind in Movement: How Action Shapes Idea abstract thinking without terms.

In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky demonstrates spatial cognition isn’t just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its extremely foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our anatomies and their actions in the world. Our actions in actual space get converted into mental actions on thought, frequently spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising soccer strategies, designing international airports, understanding the movement of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking also underlies the structure and signifying of vocabulary: why we say we push concepts forward or tear them aside, why we’re sense up or have grown far apart.

Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Brain in Movement gives us a new way to think about how–and where–thinking takes place.