Louder Than Words

The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning

By: Benjamin K. Bergen

Narrated by: Benjamin K. Bergen

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.

©2012 Benjamin K. Bergen (P)2013 Gildan Media LLC

A New Book for my list of Favs. Up there with Tomasello and McWhorter.

This book was informative yet creatively written. I pledged to listen to it over and over and over again, and to research all the articles mentioned on the text.

Too Technical for me

After the first 10 minutes I knew I was in over my head. I'm not a linguistics post grad looking for a new research project. I'm an average Joe looking for a little enlightenment. If you're not deep into language you may want to pass this book bye for something simpler.

Worth Reading!

Although the book needs editing it presents important reseach and is well worth the time.

Fantastic!

Absolutely fantastic book! I would recommend it to anyone wanting to understand cognitive semantics and neurolinguistics.

Fascinating, though made my head hurt occasionally

The author does his best to make a complicated topic accessible to the layperson, but there were times that I needed a break so I could process what I had learned. He not only explains what he knows about our minds, but goes over how the information was puzzled out. Definitely a repeat listen.