![]() ![]() When we can’t gesture, we have trouble speaking we simply “can’t find the words,” she writes. Then explain out loud how to get from your house to the supermarket, train station, your office or school.” Turns out, it’s hard. She invites us to try this experiment: “Sit on your hands. But Tversky argues that gesturing is more than just a by-product of speech: it literally helps us think. Tversky devotes a lengthy section to gesture, and for good reason: We do it incessantly. ![]() ![]() She draws on many different lines of evidence, including the way we talk about movement and space, the way we use maps, the way we talk about and use numbers, and the way we gesture. Her new book, “Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought,” is an extended argument for the interplay of mind and body in enabling cognition. The latest version of this proposition comes from Barbara Tversky, a professor emerita of psychology at Stanford University who also teaches at Columbia. And it’s not just that the brain needs a body to keep it alive (that much is obvious), but rather, that the brain and the body somehow work together: it’s the combination of brain-plus-body that creates the mental world. Or is it? No one would argue that the brain isn’t vital for thinking - but quite a few 21st-century psychologists and cognitive scientists believe that the body, as well as the brain, is needed for thinking to actually happen. BOOK REVIEW - “Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought,” by Barbara Tversky (Basic Books, 384 pages). ![]()
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