By Benjamin K. Bergen

Even if it’s brusque, convincing, fraught with emotion, or dripping with innuendo, language is essentially a device for conveying meaning—a uniquely human magic trick during which you vibrate your vocal cords to make your innermost strategies pop up in anyone else’s brain. you should use it to speak about every kind of things—from your new labradoodle dog to the expansive gardens at Versailles, from Roger Federer’s backhand to objects that don’t exist in any respect, like flying pigs. And in the event you speak, your listener fills in many information you didn’t mention—the curliness of the dog’s fur or the significant statuary at the grounds of the French palace. What’s the trick at the back of this magic? How does that means work? In Louder than Words, cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen attracts jointly a decade’s worthy of analysis in psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience to provide a brand new concept of the way our minds make that means. after we listen phrases and sentences, Bergen contends, we interact the elements of our mind that we use for belief and motion, repurposing those evolutionarily older networks to create simulations in our minds. those embodied simulations, as they're known as, are what allows for us to turn into greater baseball gamers by way of in basic terms visualizing a well-executed swing; what permits us to recollect which cabinet the diapers are in with no having a look, and what makes it so demanding to speak on a cellphone whereas we’re riding at the road. which means is greater than simply understanding definitions of phrases, as others have formerly argued. In realizing language, our brains interact in an artistic means of developing wealthy psychological worlds during which we see, listen, suppose, and act. Through whimsical examples and inventive experiments, Bergen leads us on a digital journey of the recent technology of embodied cognition. a super account of our human potential to appreciate language, Louder than Words will profoundly swap the way you learn, communicate, and listen.

Show description

Read Online or Download Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning PDF

Similar cognitive psychology books

The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology)

The Cambridge instruction manual of Creativity is a accomplished scholarly guide on creativity from the main revered psychologists, researchers, and educators. This instruction manual serves either as a radical advent to the sector of creativity and as a useful reference and present resource of vital details.

Foundations of Cognitive Psychology: Core Readings

Scientists from many disciplines, together with physics, chemistry, biology, and neuroscience, give a contribution to the examine of cognition. Cognitive psychology, the technology of the human brain and of the way humans strategy details, is on the middle of empirical investigations into the character of brain and thought.

This anthology relies at the assumption that cognitive psychology is at center empirical philosophy. a number of the center questions on suggestion, language, conception, reminiscence, and data of different people's minds have been for hundreds of years the area of philosophy. The booklet starts off with the philosophical foundations of inquiry into the character of brain and suggestion, specifically the writings of Descartes, after which covers the important issues of cognitive psychology together with reminiscence, awareness, and selection making.

The booklet organizes a frightening volume of data, underlining the necessities, whereas additionally introducing readers to the ambiguities and controversies of study. it truly is prepared thematically and comprises many issues now not mostly taught in cognition classes, together with human components and ergonomics, evolutionary psychology, track cognition, and experimental design.

The members contain Daniel Dennett, Daniel Kahneman, Jay McClelland, Donald Norman, Michael Posner, Stephen Palmer, Eleanor Rosch, John Searle, Roger Shepard, and Anne Treisman.

Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think (2nd Edition)

Become aware of basic but robust steps you could take to beat emotional distress--and think happier, calmer, and extra convinced. This life-changing ebook has already helped greater than a million readers use cognitive-behavioral therapy--one of today's foremost kinds of psychotherapy--to overcome melancholy, anxiousness, panic assaults, anger, guilt, disgrace, low vanity, consuming problems, substance abuse, and courting difficulties.

Principles of Visual Attention: Linking Mind and Brain

The character of recognition is without doubt one of the oldest and such a lot imperative difficulties in psychology. a massive quantity of study has been produced in this topic within the final part century, in particular on recognition within the visible modality, yet a basic clarification has remained elusive. Many nonetheless view awareness learn as a box that's essentially fragmented.

Additional resources for Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning

Sample text

The bombing was carried out by the German air force, allies of Franco’s fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. Picasso dated and numbered all the preliminary sketches – some 45 in all – that he produced while preparing Guernica. From the beginning, as can be seen in the first sketch, he had the overall structure of the painting worked out. One can see the main characters in the same layout as 26 Robert W. Weisberg they appear in the final painting. Similar characters organized in a similar manner can be seen in at least one other work produced by Picasso in the mid-1930s, so Picasso may have built the structure of Guernica on the foundation provided by the content of his own earlier work.

In the 1920s, Calder constructed a “circus,” with a cast of miniature performers made out of wire, bits of wood and cork, and pieces of cloth. Calder developed ways of having the miniature people and animals move, so the trapeze artists, for example, would swing on the trapeze and then “leap” from one trapeze to another, in a death-defying maneuver. Calder’s Circus became the hit of Parisian art circles in the late 1920s. Around 1930, Calder’s work took a radical turn, becoming abstract or nonrepresentational.

Hayes, 1989; Kozbelt, 2004, 2005; Weisberg & Sturdivant, 2005) do not support it. The answer is not clear, but, at the very least, it seems that the equal-odds rule can be called into question. If so, it provides further support – although Robert W. 4A. Productivity for major classical composers. 4B. Proportion of masterworks per 5-year block of career for the most well-known classical composers. Expertise and Reason in Creative Thinking 23 of an indirect nature – for the claim that the development of expertise is important in creativity.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.28 of 5 – based on 9 votes