Be it brusque, convincing, fraught with emotion, or dripping with innuendo, vocabulary is fundamentally an instrument for conveying meaning-a uniquely individual magic trick in which you vibrate your vocal cords to create your innermost thoughts pop-up in someone else’s mind. You can use it to speak about all sorts of things-from your brand-new labradoodle puppy towards the expansive gardens at Versailles, from Roger Federer’s backhand to issues that don’t exist whatsoever, like flying pigs. So when you talk, your about Louder Than Terms: The New Science of How the Brain Makes Meaning listener fills in lots of information you didn’t mention-the curliness from the dog’s fur or the vast statuary on the grounds of the French palace. What’s the trick behind this magic? So how exactly does meaning work?

In Louder than Phrases, cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen draws jointly a decade’s worthy of of research in psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience to provide a fresh theory of how our minds make meaning. When we hear words and sentences, Bergen contends, we employ the elements of our human brain that we make use of for perception and actions, repurposing these evolutionarily older networks to produce simulations inside our thoughts. These embodied simulations, as they’re known as, are why is it easy for us to be better baseball players by merely visualizing a well-executed swing; what we can remember which cupboard the diapers are in without looking, and what makes it so difficult to talk on a cellular phone while we’re generating on the road. Meaning is a lot more than just knowing definitions of terms, as others have previously argued. In understanding language, our brains take part in a creative process of constructing rich mental worlds in which we discover, hear, experience, and act.

Through whimsical examples and clever experiments, Bergen leads us on a digital tour of the new science of embodied cognition. A brilliant account of our human capacity to understand vocabulary, Louder than Terms will profoundly transformation how you examine, speak, and listen.