Bergen Benjamin K. Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning

Basic Books, 2012. — 187 p. — ISBN: 978-0-465-03333-1.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.The Polar Bear’s Nose
The Meaning Makers
The Traditional Theory of Meaning
Embodied Simulation
Flying Pigs
The New Science of Meaning
Keep Your Mind on the Ball
The Perky Effect
The Mind Spins
Stimulating Sounds
Imagery Is Handy
Memory
Embodied Simulation
Do Gorillas Have Noses?
Mental Practice Revisited
Meaning and the Mind’s Eye
We Talk Simple
Vision 101
Don’t Think of an Elephant
The Elephant in the Room
Almost Like Being There
Over the Top
Monkey Do, Monkey See
The Give and Take of Motor Simulation
The Graspasaurus and Other Magnificent Toys
The Rest of the Body
More Than Words
Sentences as Plants
Sentences as Plants, Revisited
How Grammar Modulates Our Perspective
Grammatical Aspect Modulates Simulation Focus
What Grammar Tells Us
Early and Often
Time Flies
Incremental Simulation
In a Word
And Then?
Say It Ain’t So
Meaning on the Run
What Do Hockey Players Know?
Experience Matters
Different Strokes
Failures to Communicate
Lost in Translation
It Means Squat
The Skin of a Cat
Language as a Cultural Factor
Thinking for Speaking
Thinking in a Language
Meaning in Your Grasp
Understanding, Metaphorically
Metaphor in the Brain
What Are Metaphorical Simulations Like?
Speaking Abstractly
Metaphor Without Language?
Language on the Move
Lots of Open Windows
What Is Simulation Good For?
Interfering with Simulation
Physical Interference
Simulation Is Functional, But Is It Necessary or Sufficient?
Functional, Sure. But What Function?
The Repurposed Mind
The Age of Meaning
How We Got to Be This Way
Beyond Language
What Is It to Communicate?