Offers an expansive unified theory of thought that brings together the vast resources of
neuroscience computation and cognitive linguistics. What is an idea and where does it come
from? We experience thought as if it were abstract but every thought is actually a physical
thing carried out by the neural systems of our brains. Thought does not occur neuron-by-neuron
it happens when neurons come together to form circuits and when simple circuits combine to form
complex ones. Thoughts then derive their structures from the circuitry we also use for vision
touch and hearing. This circuitry is what allows simple thoughts to come together into complex
concepts making meaning creating metaphors and framing our social and political ideas. With
The Neural Mind George Lakoff a pioneering cognitive linguist and computer scientist Srini
Narayanan deftly combine insights from cognitive science computational modeling and
linguistics to show how thoughts arise from the neural circuitry that runs throughout our
bodies. They answer key questions about the ways we make meaning: How does neural circuitry
create the conceptual "frames" through which we understand our social lives? What kind of
neural circuitry characterizes metaphorical thought in which ideas are understood in terms of
other ideas with similar structures? Lively and accessible the book shows convincingly that
the "metaphors we live by"--to use Lakoff's famous phrase--aren't abstractions but deeply
embodied neural constructs. The Neural Mind is the first book of its kind bringing together
the ideas of multiple disciplines to offer a unified accessible theory of thought. A
field-defining work Lakoff and Narayanan's book will be of interest not just to linguists and
cognitive scientists but also to psychologists philosophers anthropologists journalists
sociologists and political scientists--and to anyone who wants to understand how we really
think.
