Mind in Motion How Action Shapes Thought

Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:

https://medipdf.com/product/mind-in-motion-how-action-shapes-thought/

Click Download Now

owned by the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tversky, Barbara Gans, author.

Title: Mind in motion: how action shapes thought / Barbara Tversky.
Description: New York: Basic Books, [2019] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019007927| ISBN 9780465093069 (hardcover) | ISBN
9780465093076 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Thought and thinking. | Intellect. | Space. | Cognition.
Classification: LCC BF441 .T94 2019 | DDC 153.4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007927

ISBNs: 978-0-465-09306-9 (hardcover); 978-0-465-09307-6 (ebook)

E3-20190417-JV-NF-ORI
Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication

PROLOGUE
Moving in Space: The Foundation of Thought

PART I: THE WORLD IN THE MIND

CHAPTER ONE
The Space of the Body: Space Is for Action
CHAPTER TWO
The Bubble Around the Body: People, Places, and Things
CHAPTER THREE
Here and Now and There and Then: The Spaces Around Us
CHAPTER FOUR
Transforming Thought

PART II: THE MIND IN THE WORLD

CHAPTER FIVE
The Body Speaks a Different Language
CHAPTER SIX
Points, Lines, and Perspective: Space in Talk and Thought
CHAPTER SEVEN
Boxes, Lines, and Trees: Talk and Thought About Almost
Everything Else
CHAPTER EIGHT
Spaces We Create: Maps, Diagrams, Sketches, Explanations,
Comics
CHAPTER NINE
Conversations with a Page: Design, Science, and Art
CHAPTER TEN
The World Is a Diagram

Discover More
The Nine Laws of Cognition
About the Author
Figure Credits
Bibliographic Notes
Index
To Amos, whose mind was always in motion.
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

Tap here to learn more.

PROLOGUE

Moving in Space: The Foundation of Thought

A creature didn’t think in order to move; it just moved, and by

moving it discovered the world that then formed the content of its
thoughts.
—LARISSA MACFARQUHAR, “The mind-expanding ideas of
Andy Clark,” The New Yorker

EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS IN MOTION. PHYSICISTS TELL US THAT IF the

quivering molecules in your desk moved in sync, the desk would leap from
the floor. Even sedentary plants grow and sway and turn toward the sun and
open and close. They have to; they would die if they didn’t move. Space
places two fundamental constraints on movement, constraints that are
reflected in thought: proximity—near places are easier to get to than far
ones; and gravity—going up is more effortful than going down.
Thought, too, is constantly moving, and sometimes hard to catch. Ideas
leapfrog over ideas. But there it is: idea. I’ve frozen it, reified it into
something static, the only way to catch it. From the never-ceasing flux
around us, we carve entities out of space and out of time: people, places,
things, events. We freeze them, turn them into words and concepts. We
change those moving things into static things so that we can act on them
with our minds.
Constant motion in space is a given, the background for everything that
has happened and that will happen. No wonder it is the foundation of
thought. Action in space came long before language, as did thought based
on action in space.
Our actions in space change space, change ourselves, and change others.
Our actions create things we put in space that change us and others. They
change our thought and the thought of others. The things we create (like
these words) stay there, in space, changing the thought of people we will
never know and can’t even imagine.
We don’t just freeze the stuff in space and time. We study its form and
look for its structure: in our bodies, in our actions and reactions, in the
world, in the events that happen in the world, in the language we speak. We
find the parts and how they connect to form a whole. The parts and how
they fit together tell us what the things can do and what can be done with
them. We look for patterns, lines, circles, shapes, branching. We create
structure, too, in actions, in talk, in communities, in science, in art—
painting, sculpture, film, dance, poetry, drama, opera, journalism, fiction,
music. Structure is what holds the pieces together; without structure, things
fall apart. And sometimes we do just that, deconstruct and even destroy, to
see what happens, to shake things up, to find new structures. Pick Up
Sticks. Rearrange the furniture. Reorganize the company. Select musical
notes from a random number table. Read Hopscotch in any order. Revolt.
Spew chaos on the world.
Prose is linear, one word after another. Narratives have a linear structure
driven by time, theories have a linear structure directed by logic. In theory,
that is. The structure of Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual is place, an
apartment building and a puzzle, not time. The linearity of prose doesn’t
harness readers, they can jump back and forth. Speaking is linear, one word
after another, but that doesn’t stop speakers from interrupting themselves
with tangential thoughts nor does it stop listeners from doing the same.
Then there are our own thoughts, frequently articulated in inner speech;
they hardly walk a straight line and sometimes fly out in too many
directions at once. Music is linear in time but spatial over the instruments,
which can come in at different times and play different notes at different
paces and places. Painting has composition, not linear, but center and
periphery. Until Pollack and Rothko. Structure is complicated. It gets done,
undone, and redone.
Pleas, plays, sermons, campaign speeches. Like music, they zig and zag
between the earthly and the lofty, the logical and the emotional, stories that
become parables with messages; they zig and zag emotionally, pensive,
spirited, ominous, wistful, joyful. They change pace, slow and ponderous,
fast and light. Narrative does that, too.
Formal gardens are arranged in perfectly symmetric patterns, with
distinct straight paths among the beds of flowers and pruned trees;
everything is clear and certain; don’t dare go off the paths. Chinese gardens
are different. The paths curve and twist this way and that, up and down,
always new vistas around the bend pulling you onward; little is clear,
nothing certain; you get lost, and then found.
Writing a book makes you, or me, think of structure. There is structure
to this book, but you don’t have to stay on the paths, you are free to explore
it like a Chinese garden rather than a formal one. The book means to show
how we think about space and how we use space to think. These are the two
parts of the book. The premise is audacious: spatial thinking, rooted in
perception of space and action in it, is the foundation for all thought. The
foundation, not the entire edifice. Try describing the faces of friends, places
you love, events that were meaningful. The memories and images may be
vivid, but words flail and fail to capture them. Think about rearranging the
furniture in your living room or how to fold a sweater or how many
windows were in your childhood home or where the X key is on the
keyboard. You might feel your eyes moving or your body squirming. Words
alone won’t do it.
This focus, on space, action, and thought, means that there are large
swaths of excellent work I couldn’t include, to my regret. This book is
meant to interest many different communities, the diverse communities that
I’ve had the good fortune to work with: psychologists, computer scientists,
linguists, neuroscientists, biologists, chemists, designers, engineers, artists,
art educators, museum educators, science educators, and others who, for
one reason or another, are interested in spatial thinking. As for a stroll in a
Chinese garden, some of you may want to walk from end to end, others
may go hither and thither, visiting some sights and skipping others. You
don’t have to look at every tree and flower.
Below, a guide for special interests.
For the fundamentals, how perception and action mold thinking about
the spaces we inhabit: Chapters One (space of the body), Two (space
around the body), Three (space of navigation).
For varieties and transformations of spatial thinking and spatial ability,
Chapter Four.
 For ways gesture reflects and affects thought, Chapter Five.
For talk and thought about space and just about everything else:
Chapters Five, Six, and Seven.
For designing and using cognitive tools, maps, diagrams, notation,
charts, graphs, visualizations, explanations, comics, sketches, design, and
art, Chapters Eight, Nine, and Ten.
An artist I know and admire, Gideon Rubin, says he always leaves his
paintings unfinished. That way, the viewers finish them. His art is based in
old nostalgic photographs, the kind you might find in your grandparents’
albums, sweet photos of children and youths in happy settings, looking at
the camera. He paints over the faces so you find yourself looking at, indeed
feeling, the postures of the body and you realize how much you learn from
the bodies and the clothing and the background. You look at the background
and the clothing and you realize that you usually miss that because you’re
looking at the faces. You can fill in the empty faces, with your
grandmother’s or your cousin’s, and you realize that you forgot what people
looked like when they were young. And many viewers fill in so intently that
they are sure they saw a face.
In science, history, politics, perhaps even more than in art, nothing is
ever finished.
That said, this book is finished. Or rather, I have to let it go.
Research is nearly impossible to do without funding, and I have been
fortunate for support from NSF, ONR, NIMH, AFOSR, and the John
Templeton Foundation. I have been blessed by the many students, friends,
and colleagues whose thinking I have drawn on, directly or indirectly, over
many years. Most of you are unaware of this book and haven’t seen it. I
apologize to those I’ve forgotten, to those I’ve misrepresented or failed to
represent. There was so much more I wanted to include. I’ve reduced you to
an alphabetic list, which pains me; each of you gave me something unique
and each of you is insightful, inimitable, and irreplaceable. Maneesh
Agrawala, Gemma Anderson, Mireille Betrancourt, Gordon Bower,
Jonathan Bresman, Jerry Bruner, David Bryant, Stu Card, Daniel Casasanto,
Roberto Casati, Juliet Chou, Eve Clark, Herb Clark, Tony Cohn, Michel
Denis, Susan Epstein, Yvonne Eriksson, Steve Feiner, Felice Frankel,
Nancy Franklin, Christian Freksa, Randy Gallistel, Rochel Gelman, Dedre
Gentner, John Gero, Valeria Giardino, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Pat
Hanrahan, Eric Henney, Bridgette Martin Hard, Julie Heiser, Kathy
Hemenway, Azadeh Jamalian, Danny Kahneman, Andrea Kantrowitz, T. J.
Kelleher, David Kirsh, Stephen Kosslyn, Pim Levelt, Steve Levinson,
Elizabeth Marsh, Katinka Matson, Rebecca McGinnis, Julie Morrison,
Morris Moscovitch, Lynn Nadel, Jane Nisselson, Steven Pinker, Dan
Schacter, Roger Shepard, Ben Shneiderman, Ed Smith, Masaki Suwa, Holly
Taylor, Herb Terrace, Anthony Wagner, Mark Wing-Davey, Jeff Zacks.
For not enough years, there was Amos, and his voice stays with me. The
kids, too, my second biggest fans, I can hear all of them echoing him,
shouting, “Go, Mom,” the way I shouted at them watching their soccer
games.
CHAPTER ONE

The Space of the Body: Space Is for Action

In which we show that we have an insider’s view of the body,
one shaped by our actions and sensations, unlike our outsider
view of other things in our world that is shaped by appearance.
Mirror neurons map others’ bodies onto our own, allowing us to
understand other bodies through our own and to coordinate
our actions with theirs.

WE BEGIN IN OUR SKIN, THAT THIN, FLEXIBLE MEMBRANE THAT encloses our
bodies and separates us from everything else. A highly significant boundary.
All our actions take place in the space outside our skin, and our lives
depend on those actions. As any mother will happily tell you, that activity
begins before birth. Who knows why those curious creatures growing inside
us keep “kicking”—perhaps to find a more comfortable position? Or why
they seem so active at importune times—one of them kept popping my
dress up and down during my PhD orals.
Mercifully, bodies do far more than kick. They eventually perform an
astounding assortment of activities. The harmonious coordination
underlying those diverse behaviors depends on the continuous integration of
a variable stream of information from many senses with the articulated
actions of dozens of muscles (apologies for beginning with such a
mouthful!). Although our skin encloses and separates our bodies from the
surrounding world, accomplishing those activities entails countless
interactions with the world. We cannot truly be separated from the world
around us. It is those interactions that underlie our conceptions of our
bodies.
 Viewed from the outside, bodies are like other familiar objects: tables,
chairs, apples, trees, dogs, or cars. We become adept at rapidly recognizing
those common objects, primarily from their outlines, their contours, in their
prototypical orientations. The contours of objects are, in turn, shaped by the
configuration of their parts, legs and bodies for dogs and tables, trunks and
canopies for trees. That skill, recognizing objects, takes up residency in a
slew of places in the brain. Faces in one array, bodies in another, scenes in
yet another. Those regions are active—light up—when we view those kinds
of things and not when we view things from other categories.
For objects (and faces), some views are better than others. An upside-
down table or tree is harder to recognize than a right-side-up version; the
backside of a dog or the top view of a bicycle is harder to recognize than
side views of either. A good view is one that shows the distinctive features
of the object. A prototypical dog has four legs (like a prototypical table), an
elongated horizontal tube for a body, and a symmetric head with eyes,
snout, and a mouth as well as ears protruding from either side. The best
view of a dog would show those features. Exactly those views, the ones that
present more of the characteristic features in the proper configuration, are
the ones we are fastest to recognize and the ones we judge as better
representations of the object. For many objects, like dogs or tables, the best
views are of course upright, and three-quarters view or profile. In many
cases, the contours or silhouettes of good views are sufficient for rapid
recognition.

BODIES AND THEIR PARTS

Just as for objects, contours of canonical orientations are especially
effective for recognizing bodies—when we view them from the outside.
But, singularly, for bodies we also have an insider perspective. That
intimate insider perspective comes with many extras. We know what bodies
can do and what bodies feel like from the inside. We can’t have that
knowledge for chairs or even bugs (Kafka aside) or dogs or chimpanzees.
We know what it feels like to stand tall or sit slumped, to climb stairs and
trees, to jump and hop, to fasten buttons and tie shoes, to signal thumbs up
or OK, to cry and laugh. We know not only what it feels like to act in those
ways but, even more significantly, also what it means to act in those ways,
stretching or slumping, crying or laughing. Importantly, we can map other
bodies and their actions onto our own, suggesting that we understand other
bodies not only by recognizing them but also by internalizing them.
Before that, we map our bodies onto our brains, onto the homunculus,
the “little man,” sprawled ear-to-ear across the top shell, the cortex, of our
brains. (See Figure 1.1.) The cortex is a thick, crenellated layer splayed over
the parts of the brain that are evolutionarily older. From the outside, the
brain looks like a giant walnut. And like a walnut, the brain is divided front
to back into two not quite symmetric halves, or hemispheres, right and left.
For the most part, the right hemisphere controls and has inputs from the left
side of the body. The reverse holds for the left hemisphere. Each
hemisphere is divided into plateaus called lobes that are separated by
valleys, or sulci (singular, sulcus). It’s hard not to talk about the cortex
geographically, and undoubtedly there are analogies in the formation of
plateaus and layers and valleys on the earth and in the brain. Those wrinkles
create more surface, important for the land and important for the brain. The
inputs from the various sensory systems are partly channeled to separate
lobes of the cortex, for example, vision to the occipital lobe at back of the
head and sound to the temporal lobes above the ears. Yet each lobe is
wondrously complex, with many regions, many layers, many connections,
many kinds of cells, and many functions. Remarkably, even single neurons
can be specialized, for a specific view of a face or for tracking an object
that moves behind a screen. And there are billions of them in the human
brain. A recent estimate is eighty-six billion.
There are actually two pairs of homunculi splayed along the central
sulcus; one pair maps the sensations from the body, the other pair maps
motor output to the body. The pair on the left side of the brain maps the
right side of the body and the pair on the right side of the brain maps the left
side of the body. The sensory and motor homunculi face each other. The
motor homunculus is, perhaps significantly, positioned more forward
(technical terms: anterior or frontal), toward the eyes and nose. It controls
the output, telling the muscles how to move. The sensory homunculus is
positioned toward the back of the head (technical terms: posterior or dorsal,
from Latin for “tail”). It brings the input from the many kinds of sensations
our bodies respond to, position, pain, pressure, temperature, and more. The
homunculi are strange little people, with oversized heads, huge tongues,
enormous hands, and skinny torsos and limbs.

FIGURE 1.1. Sensory homunculus.

You can’t help but see that these cortical proportions are far from the
proportions of the body. Rather than representing the sizes of the body
parts, the sizes of the cortical representations of the various body parts are
proportional to the quantities of neurons ascending to them or descending
from them. That is, the head and hands have more cortical neurons relative
to their body size, and the torso and limbs have fewer cortical neurons
relative to their body size. More neural connections mean more sensory
sensitivity on the sensory side and more action articulation on the action
side. The disproportionate sizes of cortical real estate make perfect sense
once we think about the multitude of articulated actions that the face,
tongue, and hands must perform and the sensory feedback needed to
modulate their actions. Our tongues are involved in the intricate coordinated
actions necessary for eating, sucking, and swallowing, for speaking,
groaning, and singing, and for many other activities that I will leave to your
imagination. Our mouths smile and frown and scowl, they blow bubbles
and whistle and kiss. Hands type and play the piano, throw balls and catch
them, weave and knit, tickle babies and pat puppies. Our toes, on the other