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.

The great physicist's elegant, concise survey of Newtonian dynamics proceeds gradually from simple particles of matter to physical systems beyond complete analysis. Includes "On the Equation of Motion of a Connected System," from Volume II of Electricity and Magnetism. Appendixes deal with relativity motion and principles of least action.

Written for students, Mind, Matter, and Nature presumes no prior philosophical training on the part of the reader. The book nevertheless holds the arguments discussed to rigorous standards and is conversant with recent literature, thus making it useful as well to more advanced students and professionals interested in a resource on Thomistic hylomorphism in the philosophy of mind.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A captivating exploration of deep time and humanity's search for purpose, from the world-renowned physicist and best-selling author of The Elegant Universe. "Few humans share Greene’s mastery of both the latest cosmological science and English prose." —The New York Times Until the End of Time is Brian Greene's breathtaking new exploration of the cosmos and our quest to find meaning in the face of this vast expanse. Greene takes us on a journey from the big bang to the end of time, exploring how lasting structures formed, how life and mind emerged, and how we grapple with our existence through narrative, myth, religion, creative expression, science, the quest for truth, and a deep longing for the eternal. From particles to planets, consciousness to creativity, matter to meaning—Brian Greene allows us all to grasp and appreciate our fleeting but utterly exquisite moment in the cosmos.

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.

BRILLIANTLY EXPLORING TODAY'S CUTTING-EDGE BRAIN RESEARCH, MIND WIDE OPEN IS AN UNPRECEDENTED JOURNEY INTO THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN PERSONALITY, ALLOWING READERS TO UNDERSTAND THEMSELVES AND THE PEOPLE IN THEIR LIVES AS NEVER BEFORE. Using a mix of experiential reportage, personal storytelling, and fresh scientific discovery, Steven Johnson describes how the brain works -- its chemicals, structures, and subroutines -- and how these systems connect to the day-to-day realities of individual lives. For a hundred years, he says, many of us have assumed that the most powerful route to self-knowledge took the form of lying on a couch, talking about our childhoods. The possibility entertained in this book is that you can follow another path, in which learning about the brain's mechanics can widen one's self-awareness as powerfully as any therapy or meditation or drug. In Mind Wide Open, Johnson embarks on this path as his own test subject, participating in a battery of attention tests, learning to control video games by altering his brain waves, scanning his own brain with a $2 million fMRI machine, all in search of a modern answer to the oldest of questions: who am I? Along the way, Johnson explores how we "read" other people, how the brain processes frightening events (and how we might rid ourselves of the scars those memories leave), what the neurochemistry is behind love and sex, what it means that our brains are teeming with powerful chemicals closely related to recreational drugs, why music moves us to tears, and where our breakthrough ideas come from. Johnson's clear, engaging explanation of the physical functions of the brain reveals not only the broad strokes of our aptitudes and fears, our skills and weaknesses and desires, but also the momentary brain phenomena that a whole human life comprises. Why, when hearing a tale of woe, do we sometimes smile inappropriately, even if we don't want to? Why are some of us so bad at remembering phone numbers but brilliant at recognizing faces? Why does depression make us feel stupid? To read Mind Wide Open is to rethink family histories, individual fates, and the very nature of the self, and to see that brain science is now personally transformative -- a valuable tool for better relationships and better living.

Nature appears to be composed of two completely different kinds of things: rocklike things and idealike things. The first is epitomized by an enduring rock, the second by a fleeting thought. A rock can be experienced by many of us together, while a thought seems to belong to one of us alone. Thoughts and rocks are intertwined in the unfolding of nature, as Michelangelo's David so eloquently attests. Yet is it possible to under stand rationally how two completely different kinds of things can interact with each other? Logic says no, and history confirms that verdict. To form a rational comprehension of the interplay between the matterlike and mind like parts of nature these two components ought to be understood as aspects of some single primal stuff. But what is the nature of a primal stuff that can have mind and matter as two of its aspects? An answer to this age-old question has now been forced upon us. Physi cists, probing ever deeper into the nature of matter, found that they were forced to bring into their theory the human observers and their thoughts. Moreover, the mathematical structure of the theory combines in a marvelous way the features of nature that go with the concepts of mind and matter. Although it is possible, in the face of this linkage, to try to maintain the tra ditionallogical nonrelatedness of these two aspects of nature, that endeavor leads to great puzzles and mysteries.