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The first comprehensive presentation of the dynamical approach to cognition. It contains a representative sampling of original, current research on topics such as perception, motor control, speech and language, decision making, and development.
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.
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.
Kids use movement to play, communicate, and express emotions. This book show teachers how they can channel this kinesthetic language into constructive learning experiences.
The renowned physicist Emilio Segr� (1905-1989) left his memoirs to be published posthumously because, he said, "I tell the truth the way it was and not the way many of my colleagues wish it had been." This compelling autobiography offers a personal account of his fascinating life as well as candid portraits of some of this century's most important scientists, such as Enrico Fermi, E. O. Lawrence, and Robert Oppenheimer. Born in Italy to a well-to-do Jewish family, Segr� showed early signs of scientific genius--at age seven he began a notebook of physics experiments. He became Fermi's first graduate student in 1928 and contributed to the discovery of slow neutrons, and later was appointed director of the physics laboratory at the University of Palermo. While visiting the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley in 1938, he learned that he had been dismissed from his Palermo post by Mussolini's Fascist regime. Lawrence then hired him to work on the cyclotron at Berkeley with Luis Alvarez, Edwin McMillan, and Glenn Seaborg. Segr� was one of the first to join Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, where he became a group leader on the Manhattan Project. His account of that mysterious enclave of scientists, all working feverishly to develop the atomic bomb before the Nazis did, includes his description of the first explosion at Alamogordo. Segr� writes movingly of the personal devastation wrought by the Nazis, his struggles with fellow scientists, and his love of nature. His book offers an intimate glimpse into a bygone era as well as a unique perspective on some of the most important scientific developments of this century.
A retrospective on the life and work of the gifted sculptor, Charles H. Forrester (1928-2010), reveals a man whose mind was in constant motion. His artwork spans six decades and is lavishly illustrated with commentary from art historians and contemporary artists. A Mind in Motion: The Art of Charles H. Forrester offers an in-depth guide into the mind and artistic legacy of the artist. Curated by his daughter, Winifred, the book vividly presents more than eighty stunning images organized by ten distinct categories and five creative series of his most significant artwork. This richly visual coffee table book will appeal to art lovers everywhere. Forrester was the master of the visual pun and comes to life through his legacy — sculptures, paintings and drawings, and journals. He was especially adept at working with the human figure, creating abstract figurative forms in materials ranging from welded steel to laminated-plywood. His engineering prowess was reflected in his kinetic sphere sculptures and wire suspension works. He captured startlingly realistic details, yet his works are highly stylized – often twisted into sly visual puzzles and riddles. The artist’s large concrete outdoor sculptures across the United States and England are among his most well-known works, but he also created many smaller sculptures cast in bronze and aluminum. With roots in New York and the Pacific Northwest, and as a teacher for thirty years in England and Kentucky, Forrester’s work directly impacted generations of sculptors and artists. His frequent sabbaticals and residencies in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas provided him inspiration for his life-long creativity. In 1998, Forrester and his wife, Dorothy, moved to East Nashville, where he maintained a studio up until his death in 2010. The late artist’s sculptures have been exhibited nationwide, receiving numerous awards. Some of Forrester’s more notable public artwork was commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce, Springfield, Oregon; Medford, Oregon public parks; Shakespeare Memorial Theater in Ashland, Oregon; the Bundy Art Museum, Waitsfield, Vermont; Broughton High School, Salford, England; Bowling Green-Warren County, Kentucky Hospital; and Northern Telecom, Nashville, Tennessee Additional contributors to the book are: John Forrester, son of Charles Forrester, Rome, Italy; Russ Faxon, sculptor, Bell Buckle, TN; Caroline Phillips, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon; Sam Hunt, Adjunct Professor of Art, Western Kentucky University.
This volume investigates the implications of how our brain directs our movements on decision making. An extensive body of knowledge in chapters from international experts is presented as well as integrative group reports discussing new directions for future research.The understanding of how people make decisions is of central interest to experts working in fields such as psychology, economics, movement science, cognitive neuroscience, neuroinformatics, robotics, and sport science. For the first time the current volume provides a multidisciplinary overview of how action and cognition are integrated in the planning of and decisions about action. - Offers intense, focused, and genuine interdisciplinary perspective - Conveys state-of-the-art and outlines future research directions on the hot topic of mind and motion (or embodied cognition) - Includes contributions from psychologists, neuroscientists, movement scientists, economists, and others
Mind-body wellness and fitness expert combines mantra, self-reflection, and movement into an accessible 14-day routine for manifesting your best self. Holistic wellness and fitness expert Erin Stutland harnesses all the body's mental, physical, and spiritual energy in her tri-fold approach to creating change. When you move your body while repeating mantras--speaking your desires aloud--manifesting is no longer a purely intellectual exercise or an occasional craft project. Instead, you are expressing your passion through your voice and your body, putting every ounce of your energy in service of what you want. Each chapter breaks down one mantra to use to focus on a key step to achieving your best self, including unearthing your desires, releasing resistance, and taking inspired action. Alongside each mantra, Stutland provides stories from her own life and those of her clients, a meditation or visualization, a journaling exercise, and an easy movement to accompany the mantra to help enhance its resonant power. And to put it all together, you are provided with a 14-day plan so you can design the life you want, infusing the power of movement, mantra, and self-reflection.
Discussed here are the eight novels that Patricia Warrick considers representative of Dick's finest writing--the works that will become classics, including The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Warrick shows that Dick had a remarkable sense of the cultural transformation taking place in the last half of the 20th century. Dick points out the cracks in our institutions, our ideologies, and our value systems that will inevitably lead to their collapse. His moral vision perceived a universe of infinite possibility, with shapes that constantly transformed themselves--a universe in process. And his mind was a mind in motion, constantly questioning, finding answers, rejecting them in order to seek other possibilities. For Dick, having fixed, unchangeable answers was tantamount to entropy and death.
When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain-bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.
