Mind in Motion

Mind in Motion PDF

Author: Barbara Tversky

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2019-05-21

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0465093078

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An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.

Minds in Motion

Minds in Motion PDF

Author: Susan Griss

Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13:

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Kids use movement to play, communicate, and express emotions. This book show teachers how they can channel this kinesthetic language into constructive learning experiences.

Changing Minds

Changing Minds PDF

Author: Howard Gardner

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

Published: 2006-09-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1633690652

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Think about the last time you tried to change someone’s mind about something important: a voter’s political beliefs; a customer’s favorite brand; a spouse’s decorating taste. Chances are you weren’t successful in shifting that person’s beliefs in any way. In his book, Changing Minds, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner explains what happens during the course of changing a mind – and offers ways to influence that process. Remember that we don’t change our minds overnight, it happens in gradual stages that can be powerfully influenced along the way. This book provides insights that can broaden our horizons and shape our lives.

Our Own Minds

Our Own Minds PDF

Author: Radu J. Bogdan

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0262026376

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An argument that in response to sociocultural pressures, human minds develope self-consciousness by activating a complex machinery of self-regulation. In Our Own Minds, Radu Bogdan takes a developmental perspective on consciousness--its functional design in particular--and proposes that children's functional capacity for consciousness is assembled during development out of a variety of ontogenetic adaptations that respond mostly to sociocultural challenges specific to distinct stages of childhood. Young human minds develop self-consciousness--in the broad sense of being conscious of the self's mental and behavioral relatedness to the world--because they face extraordinary and escalating sociocultural pressures that cannot be handled without setting in motion a complex executive machinery of self-regulation under the guidance of an increasingly sophisticated intuitive psychology. Bogdan suggests that self-consciousness develops gradually during childhood. Children move from being oriented toward the outside world in early childhood to becoming (at about age four) oriented also toward their own minds. Bogdan argues that the sociocultural tasks and practices that children must assimilate and engage in competently demand the development of an intuitive psychology (also known as theory of mind or mind reading); the intuitive psychology assembles a suite of executive abilities (intending, controlling, monitoring, and so on) that install self-consciousness and drive its development. Understanding minds, first the minds of others and then our own, drives the development of self-consciousness, world-bound or extrovert at the beginning and later mind-bound or introvert. This asymmetric development of the intuitive psychology drives a commensurate asymmetric development of self-consciousness.

Minds and Gods

Minds and Gods PDF

Author: Todd Tremlin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006-03-02

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 019988546X

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Around the world and throughout history, in cultures as diverse as ancient Mesopotamia and modern America, human beings have been compelled by belief in gods and developed complex religions around them. But why? What makes belief in supernatural beings so widespread? And why are the gods of so many different people so similar in nature? This provocative book explains the origins and persistence of religious ideas by looking through the lens of science at the common structures and functions of human thought. The first general introduction to the "cognitive science of religion," Minds and Gods presents the major themes, theories, and thinkers involved in this revolutionary new approach to human religiosity. Arguing that we cannot understand what we think until we first understand how we think, the book sets out to study the evolutionary forces that modeled the modern human mind and continue to shape our ideas and actions today. Todd Tremlin details many of the adapted features of the brain -- illustrating their operation with examples of everyday human behavior -- and shows how mental endowments inherited from our ancestral past lead many people to naturally entertain religious ideas. In short, belief in gods and the social formation of religion have their genesis in biology, in powerful cognitive processes that all humans share. In the course of illuminating the nature of religion, this book also sheds light on human nature: why we think we do the things we do and how the reasons for these things are so often hidden from view. This discussion ranges broadly across recent scientific findings in areas such as paleoanthropology, primate studies, evolutionary psychology, early brain development, and cultural transmission. While these subjects are complex, the story is told here in a conversational style that is engaging, jargon free, and accessible to all readers. With Minds and Gods , Tremlin offers a roadmap to a fascinating and growing field of study, one that is sure to generate interest and debate and provide readers with a better understanding of themselves and their beliefs.

Minds in Motion

Minds in Motion PDF

Author: Anne M. Thell

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 2017-08-31

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1611488281

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The central claim of Minds in Motion is that British travel writing of the long eighteenth century functions as an epistemological playing field where authors test empiricist models of engagement with the world while simultaneously seeking out the role of the self and the imagination in producing knowledge. Whether exploring the relationship between the senses and the mind, the narrative viability of experimental detachment, or the literary dynamics of virtual witnessing, eighteenth-century travel authors persistently confront their positionality and raise difficult questions about the nature and value of first-hand experience. In one way or another, they also complicate empiricist ideals by exploring the limits of individual perception and the role of the imagination in generating and relating knowledge. While the genre is often viewed as either numbingly documentary or non-literary and commercial, travel literature actually operates at the front line of the period’s intellectual developments, illustrating both how individual writers grapple with philosophical ideals and how these ideals filter into the lives of ordinary people. Indeed, travel literature directly engages the scientific and philosophical concerns of the period, while it is also widely, avidly read; as such, it offers models for cognitive and rhetorical practices that are evaluated and either embraced or rejected by readers (in a process of identification not unlike that which occurs in early English fiction). Moreover, because eighteenth-century travel literature is so crucial to the development of so many fields—from botany to the novel—it illustrates vividly the divisive energies of discipline and genre formation while also archiving the shared aims and methods of what will become discrete fields of study. Travelogues as diverse as Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666) and Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) reveal the epistemological circuitry of the eighteenth century and historicize the absorption of the philosophical tendencies that have come to define modernity.

Body and Mind in Motion

Body and Mind in Motion PDF

Author: Glenna Batson

Publisher: Intellect Books

Published: 2014-06-01

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 178320236X

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Western contemporary dance and body-mind education have engaged in a pas de deux for more than four decades. The rich interchange of somatics and dance has altered both fields, but scholarship that substantiates these ideas through the findings of twentieth-century scientific advances has been missing. This book fills that gap and brings to light contemporary discoveries of neuroscience and somatic education as they relate to dance. Drawing from the burgeoning field of “embodiment”—itself an idea at the intersection of the sciences, humanities, arts, and technologies—Body and Mind in Motion highlights the relevance of somatic education within dance education, dance science, and body-mind studies.

Hands On, Minds On

Hands On, Minds On PDF

Author: Claire E. Cameron

Publisher: Teachers College Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 0807776947

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A growing body of research indicates that three foundational cognitive skills—executive function, motor skills, and spatial skills—form the basis for children to make a strong academic, behavioral, and social transition to formal school. Given inequitable early learning environments or “opportunity gaps” in the United States, these skills are also a source of substantial achievement and behavioral gaps. Hands On, Minds On describes the importance of children’s foundational cognitive skills for academic achievement in literacy and mathematics, as well as their connections with other areas of school readiness, including physical health, social and emotional development, and approaches to learning. The author emphasizes how social relationships and interactions, both in and outside the classroom, encourage or constrain young children’s development in these skills. The book concludes with a summary of the growing evidence in favor of guided object play, which teachers can introduce to children to exercise and strengthen foundational cognitive skills. “Teachers, both novice and veteran, are eager to learn how to apply brain research to their practice, and Dr. Cameron has offered some very real knowledge and support to this effort.” —From the Foreword by Sharon Ritchie, FPG Child Development Institute “Research has accelerated in the last decade, and Hands On, Minds On deftly summarizes and integrates these exciting advances. This is a must-read for educators and policymakers.” —Daniel T. Willingham, University of Virginia “Offers educators an entry point into what developmental research is telling us about early childhood and how best to support our youngest learners.” —Nora S. Newcombe, Temple University

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