![]() Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. While mass audiences exist for popular science writing on cosmology, evolution, medicine, and technology, this often ingenious exploration of spatial thinking will command a more limited readership.Ī well-informed book that will appeal to psychology buffs willing to pay close attention.Ī neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. When experimental subjects sit on their hands, their ability to communicate efficiently drops, and people blind from birth gesture as they talk. Moving our hands-gesturing-is a form of communication older than language. This is reflected in the architecture of the brain, where a single nerve cell, called a mirror neuron, fires both when we observe another person do something such as pick up an object and when we perform the same action. ![]() We are constantly acting in that world and adapting to it.” Put bluntly, this means that our thoughts are intimately connected with movements-our own and those in our environment. The actions and sensations of our bodies form our conceptions of our bodies. These actions yield sensations both from within our body and outside our body. “From the beginning of life,” she writes, “we move and act in space, interacting with our surroundings, with space itself, and with the things we encounter in space. She summarizes her life’s work with an admirable absence of turgid academic prose and technical jargon, although it remains a somewhat arcane field. The author has enjoyed a distinguished career as a cognitive psychologist specializing in visual-spatial reasoning, and this is her first book for a general audience. Induced Pictorial Representations, 1993), however, this is simply rephrasing the question. According to Tversky (Emerita, Psychology/Stanford Univ. Scientists seeking to explain how we think-no one has fully succeeded yet-prefer to focus on language and perception. An earnest effort to describe how our physical movements and the movements of those around us shape our consciousness.
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