Purchase
The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning
Basic Books
November 2012
On Sale: October 30, 2012
312 pages
ISBN: 0465028292
EAN: 9780465028290
Kindle: B00918JOBI
Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
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 all
sorts of things—from your new labradoodle puppy to the
expansive gardens at Versailles, from Roger Federer’s
backhand to things that don’t exist at all, like flying
pigs. And when you talk, your listener fills in lots of
details you didn’t mention—the curliness of the dog’s fur or
the vast statuary on the grounds of the French palace.
What’s the trick behind this magic? How does meaning
work? In Louder than
Words, cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen draws
together a decade’s worth of research in psychology,
linguistics, and neuroscience to offer a new theory of how
our minds make meaning. When we hear words and sentences,
Bergen contends, we engage the parts of our brain that we
use for perception and action, repurposing these
evolutionarily older networks to create simulations in our
minds. These embodied simulations, as they're called, are
what makes it possible for us to become better baseball
players by merely visualizing a well-executed swing; what
allows us to remember which cupboard the diapers are in
without looking, and what makes it so hard to talk on a cell
phone while we’re driving on the highway. Meaning is more
than just knowing definitions of words, as others have
previously argued. In understanding language, our brains
engage in a creative process of constructing rich mental
worlds in which we see, hear, feel, and
act. Through whimsical examples and
ingenious experiments, Bergen leads us on a virtual tour of
the new science of embodied cognition. A brilliant account
of our human capacity to understand language, Louder than
Words will profoundly change how you read, speak, and
listen.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy