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    Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning
    Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning
    Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning
    Audiobook6 hours

    Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning

    Written by Benjamin K. Bergen

    Narrated by Benjamin K. Bergen

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAscent Audio
    Release dateJan 1, 2014
    ISBN9781469089782
    Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning

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    • 4/5
      Fascinating and utterly convincing, written in a very approachable way with a bit of wit but without clowning. Short and limited in scope but totally worth the time.
    • 4/5
      The author's premise, that we understand language in part through "embodied simulation," is convincingly (to me) presented here and supported by descriptions of many (many!) experiments. Occasionally the explanations of studies and variations on studies and the nuances of what each study demonstrated and did not demonstrate get to be a little much, but for the most part Bergen keeps things lively with engaging anecdotes and silly humor. A fun book on current research into the ways we process language.