![]() Try sitting on your hands and explaining a complex route or process. Gestures do more than help others understand. Gestures are often more precise than words, and certainly more direct. When people tell you how to get from A to B or how to do something – like open a lock or fold a shirt – watch their hands. Quite often, information gets expressed in gesture that doesn’t find its way to words. Words simply pop out of our mouths and gestures from our bodies. Usually we aren’t aware of our gestures, just as we’re not usually aware of selecting each and every word as we talk. Gestures are often defined as actions on ideas. We talk about actions on ideas as if they were actions on objects: We raise ideas, tear them apart, link them together. All that happens far too fast for words.Īre there other ways that spatial thinking is expressed? We quickly grasp each other’s actions and intentions and use those to plan our own. Extraordinary and ordinary people alike think and make discoveries, both remarkable and mundane, by acting: Einstein imagining flying into space at the speed of light, an architect designing a building, a coach planning a football play and the players executing it. Babies wow their parents with their cleverness long before they can talk. Just as our feet move from place to place along spatial paths, our minds move from thought to thought along conceptual paths.īarbara Tversky (Image credit: Roslyn Banish)Īnimals perform impressive feats of the mind, yet they seem to lack language as we know it. Thinking is finding relations and paths between things. What’s amazing is that abstract thought uses the same brain circuitry that underlies spatial thought. Altogether half the cortex is involved in spatial thinking. Spatial thinking evolved long before language and is supported by all our senses. There are far too many things and possible relations in the world to notice and represent in your mind. Actions in space create spatial representations in the brain simply looking isn’t enough. Spatial thinking comes from moving and acting in the world. In your book, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought, you say that spatial thinking, not language, is the foundation of thought. She has published more than 200 articles about memory, categorization, language, spatial cognition, creativity, design and gesture. She is also the president of the Association for Psychological Science. Tversky is a professor emerita in psychology in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of psychology at the Teachers College at Columbia University. Here, Tversky discusses the influence of spatial thinking on abstract thought and communication from her new book, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought. Spatial thinking is the foundation of thought and evolved long before language, she says. That’s why to understand how people think, Tversky argues that one must understand how people act and come to understand the world through their spatial reasoning. In a new book, psychology Professor Emerita Barbara Tversky says that spatial thinking is the foundation of thought and evolved long before language.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |