Louder Than Words The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning pdf

Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning by Benjamin K. Bergen (Author). Whether it’s brusque, convincing, fraught with emotion, or dripping with innuendo, language is essentially a device for conveying that means-a uniquely human magic trick through which you vibrate your vocal cords to make your innermost ideas pop up in someone else’s mind. You can use it to speak about all sorts of things-out of 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 if you talk, your listener fills in a number of details you didn’t mention-the curliness of the dog’s fur or the huge statuary on the grounds of the French palace. What’s the trick behind this magic? How does which means work?

In Louder than Phrases, cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen attracts together a decade’s worth of research in psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience to offer a brand new idea of how our minds make meaning. Once we hear phrases and sentences, Bergen contends, we interact the elements of our mind that we use for notion and motion, repurposing these evolutionarily older networks to create simulations in our minds. These embodied simulations, as they're referred to as, are what makes it potential for us to grow to be better baseball gamers by merely visualizing a properly-executed swing; what permits us to remember which cabinet the diapers are in without trying, and what makes it so laborious to speak on a cell phone whereas we’re driving on the highway. Which means is more than simply knowing definitions of phrases, as others have previously argued. With understanding language, our brains interact in an artistic technique of establishing wealthy mental worlds wherein we see, hear, feel, and act.

By means of whimsical examples and ingenious experiments, Bergen leads us on a virtual tour of the brand new science of embodied cognition. A superb account of our human capacity to know the language, Louder than Phrases will profoundly change how you read, communicate, and listen.

This e-book is actually great. It is cleverly written, very readable, and filled with wonderful information. I'm a Neuropsychology scholar and I read on the topics of psychology and neuroscience voraciously. I had earlier been convinced of the computational concept of thoughts, however this e-book together with lots of different issues I have learned have made me abandon that paradigm and explore the embodied cognition and connectionist models of cognition.

Basically, the premise of the e book is that we re-acceptable brain modules used for the senses and motor functions (hence embodied) to make simulations about the meanings of words. The ebook is loaded with psychological and neurological evidence for this. This seems very consistent with the somatic marker speculation and different ideas Antonio Damasio discusses in his books. I like to recommend reading this around the similar time as you learn the Damasio's books.

The author is VERY honest in regards to the shortcomings of the theory and what sort of analysis needs to be executed on the topic to answer those questions. That could be a mark of very sincere science writing, and for people like me who wish to do research, that is helpful as a result of it allows us to get experiment or research ideas. Science can not progress under the phantasm of knowledge so figuring out the shortcomings of an idea really may also help velocity alongside the pursuit of knowledge. 

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

Benjamin K. Bergen (Author)

312 pages

Basic Books (October 30, 2012)

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