Mind in Motion

How Action Shapes Thought

By: Barbara Tversky

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins

Publisher's Summary

An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought

When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. 

In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart. 

Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how - and where - thinking takes place.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 Barbara Tversky (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Physically difficult to listen to

I was so excited for this book, but I couldn’t even make it through the prologue due to the narrator doing an extremely loud and distracting sharp intake of breath before every phrase. I’m giving 3 stars to the story, only because audible requires me to rate the story before I post this review, but I truly couldn’t listen to any of it.

too many obvious examples of obvious things.

Not well written. Too many sports analogies and WAY too many examples of obvious things. There are interesting things though.

Interesting ideas, unnecessarily protracted

There are some interesting insights in this book, but they are mixed with excessive detail and obvious points. The result is that this is not enjoyable to listen to.

good as asource of adittional information

good as asource of adittional information for study of the mind but will not be enoth as a main source of information . found some interesting topics that did not incounter in other sources of mind resarch.

All over the place...

Interesting content, yet I agree with other reviewers that it's a tedious, tiresome listen. The narrator is fine, but the author writes in a style I've never liked:

3 sentences about the main topic. Then 2 sentences about something related. Then 4 sentences with an example re: the main topic. Then yet another example, but from a totally different arena.

The numbers above are not specific – just to illustrate how an author's writing in that style constantly confuses the brain of the listener. It's difficult to constantly have to reorient as to what the author is now talking about. If you skip forward 2 minutes, you'll be scratching your head as to why the heck the author is now talking about kids, when the example is about trees, and was talking about pizza 4 minutes ago.

All the examples and anecdotes feel like being the bounced-around ball in a pinball machine.

Verbose

The ideas contained in this book could be expressed in a 1/10th the space, if not less. Why are writers driven to be so verbose? Also, the author really likes the word gestalt. Typical white tower academic blatherskite.

Interesting book - shame no PDF

The ideas in this book are fascinating but really would have been enhanced if I’d had access to the promised PDF which I couldn’t find anywhere. This was particularly disappointing given so much of what the book is about is diagrammatic.

Terrible audio

Wasn't able to focus on the narration due to an audio glitch. What a shame, such an interesting subject