
Louder Than Words
The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning
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Narrated by:
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Benjamin K. Bergen
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.
©2012 Benjamin K. Bergen (P)2013 Gildan Media LLCListeners also enjoyed...




















A New Book for my list of Favs. Up there with Tomasello and McWhorter.
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Too Technical for me
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Worth Reading!
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funny and informative.
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Fascinating - couldn't stop listening!
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Fascinating, though made my head hurt occasionally
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Performance
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Fantastic!
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Benjamin K. Bergen's performance was also par excellence; especially so because, in my experience most authors are poor narrators.
Great Performance!
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I believe that any researcher or coder interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning should read this book, perhaps several times. The subtlety of representing concrete and abstract knowledge with the imperfect organ we call a brain can only serve to improve the science of machine learning. This, and successive work on the literal representation of knowledge will undoubtedly be key in the development of breakthrough computer thinking - meaning thinking computers.
I'd like to read more. I'd like to know the difference between speaking and listening across similar and diverse individuals. Another aspect I'd like to see explored is how much work it is to understand new and familiar concepts. Given brain plasticity, we don't all use the same brain parts for the same tasks. How does this affect knowledge representation? Please, Mr Bergen, write another book. You have my attention.
Science, story, narration
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