Product Description
This book describes the many ways that the mind and body are closely interrelated, and how human thought and language are fundamentally linked to bodily action. The embodied nature of mind is explored through many topics, such as perception, thinking, language use, development, emotions, and consciousness. People's embodied experiences are critical to the ways they think and speak and, most generally, understand themselves, other people, and the world around them. This work provides a strong defense of the idea that embodied action is critical to the study of human cognition.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 2 reviews)

Technically oriented by Mark Dubin (Boulder, CO USA)

4 Stars
August 15, 2007
This book is aimed mainly at workers in the field and in related aspects of brain functioning. It is solid, important and well worth reading.

Embodiment Established by E. N. Anderson (Riverside, CA USA)

5 Stars
February 26, 2006
This book definitively establishes the fact that not only is the mind "in" the body, the mind is the body. We think with our whole nervous system. Proprioception, peripheral nerves, bodily motions, all are major parts of cognition and experience. Not only do we think with our bodies, we can't think without them. Our thought is our action in the world. Gibbs' superb uniting of neurology, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and common sense simply buries Descartes (of mind-body dichotomy fame) under mountains of data and theoretically sophisticated interpretation. No one will ever again be able to argue that the mind is an abstract, disembodied entity trapped in flesh. This book is in the great tradition of Tolman, Hebb, and Merleau-Ponty, and should be transformational to anyone who hasn't already gotten the message. Even for me (a veteran reader in this field and lifelong non-Cartesian) the book was transformative. I learned a startling amount about everything from brain cells to babies (the latter are far more aware of their relationship with the world and its objects and trajectories than I thought). Already familiar with George Lakoff's work, I learned rather less about metaphor (discussed rather too repetitiously), but even here Gibbs has much to say, including a convincing interpretation of the bizarre sense of self captured in such phrases as "I'm not myself today" and "I'm so busy I'm beside myself." I notice a tendency in American culture for women to see their bodies as something outside of their "selves," and even neuter in sex, as when a friend of mine who had cancer (mercifully cured) said "I felt my body had let me down, and I was sort of mad at it." I could never think of my body as neuter, or as an opponent. Neither, I think, could most men. But once a bunch of us were discussing this over lunch; in general, things broke along the above gender lines, but a highly analytic mathematician said he could think of his body as something foreign, while a notably accomplished and talented dancer said she could never imagine such a thing--she was firmly in her definitely gendered body. So experience and culture affect body images and body philosophies. This has been discussed a great deal in recent years. Gibbs wisely avoids getting mired in that endless literature, but I suppose the next stage in embodied cognition is to bring it all in. Meanwhile, everyone interested in cognition or consciousness should read Gibbs' book.

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