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.
