It is 11 PM during training week at Breakthrough and I have been in workshops since 8 AM, writing lesson plans since 8 PM. It’s times like these that I need a reminder of what I’m in the game for. This does it for me.
His name is Eric Taylor. Hope you find it as powerful as I did.
Frank
Filed under Uncategorized
“As cognitive science and neuroscience have learned more about the human brain and mind, it has become clear that the brain is not a general-purpose device. The brain and body co-evolved so that the brain could make the body function optimally. Most of the brain is devoted to vision, motion, spatial understanding, interpersonal interaction, coordination, emotions, language, and everyday reasoning. Human concepts and human language are not random or arbitrary; they are highly structured and limited, because of the limits and structure of the brain, the body, and the world.”
– George Lakoff and Rafael Nunez, Where Mathematics Comes From
This is the central tenet of cognitive science today: that cognition is embodied. That everything we know comes from what we perceive. All our thoughts are grounded in tangible experiences, and any abstract ideas we can conceive of are built by combining the ones we have experienced firsthand. Concepts like Time, Love, and Government are built on our understanding of concrete concepts like Movement, Bonds, and Parenting. Sound crazy? Yes. But it also makes a lot of sense.
All of this is organized by, and expressed in, language. The evidence comes from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cross-cultural linguistics. And the implications are vast: for politics, for education, for human psychology, and for self-understanding. If our understanding of concepts as powerful and wide-reaching as Government are grounded in concrete experiences like Parenting, then understanding that underlying concept is key to understanding what we are doing with Government. And that is key to understanding why politicians do what they do, why the world works the way it does, and how we can begin to change it.
And that’s only one concept in the whole field of cognitive science. This is the first part of a series where I’ll try to lay out the foundations of the field, showcase some of its great applications, and ruminate on new directions: what this could mean for human development, the structure of the mind, and life, the universe, and everything.
Thanks for reading, and please drop me a comment if you’re interested!
Frank
Filed under Lakoff's Work
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