(Ebook) Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky ISBN 9780465093069, 9780465093076, 046509306X, 0465093078

(Ebook) Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky ISBN 9780465093069, 9780465093076, 046509306X, 0465093078

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,