Barbara Tversky, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought (2019)

This is a rich book. I had been tentatively familiar with its central idea, that the foundation of thought was movement and action. Somebody I'd read thirty years ago, possibly Victor Vanberg, had written that "Denken ist Hantieren im Sich Vorgestellten Raum" - thinking is movement in imagined space. That idea - of chimps swinging from branch to branch, and us doing the same when we were contemplating something - has stuck with me. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's seminal Metaphors We Live By had explored the foundational role of metaphorical thinking. Recently, Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success had pointed out that the same regions of the brain involved in movement also light up when we think. So the basic idea was not totally unfamiliar. But Tversky, an emerita professor of psychology at Stanford, extends and deepens these ideas, showing their support in numerous psychological studies and connecting them to all sorts of aspects of our thinking, behavior and culture. Particularly interesting (and possibly relevant for my course Media & Minds) were Tversky's ideas about how we "put thought in the world," for example through gesture, writing, and graphic media of all kinds. Those outside products then become food for inside thought - for us and others. Spirals of thought ensue. In one reading, I'm sure that I didn't absorb everything from this book; I'll almost certainly return to it, perhaps repeatedly.