A goal of mine for 2020 is to write more — a goal many academics commit to each year. This year, however, as I have stepped away from the ivory tower, I am going to make a concerted effort to write more public essays and blog posts now that I am far less tied to the necessity of formal academic publishing. As part of this goal, I am introducing a new series, Brief Book Reviews, where I will do exactly as the title suggests: I’ll offer brief reviews of (hopefully) all the books I read this year. I hope to provide readers with at least a couple of interesting recommendations. (To see my 2019 book recommendations, see here)
First up for 2020 was Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought, by Barbara Tversky. I first heard of this book on Sam Harris’ podcast where he discussed Tversky’s interesting thesis that action and motion are the basis of abstract though. The thesis was phenomenally interesting as, evolutionarily speaking, we (and other animals) evolved diverse means of communication previous to the evolution of our remarkable and complex language systems. Her thesis is doubly interesting in that one hypothesis for the ultimate function of the brain (or, centralized nervous system) that I find enchanting is that the brain ultimately evolved to facilitate locomotion — all animals must move; and, those that do not, typically don’t need a brain. Take, as a favorite example of mine, the sea squirt (and other related species) which, upon locomoting to a suitable permanent location to attach to, it promptly digests its own brain — it is no longer needed.
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This post originally appeared on my Medium account on 22 January 2020.
Nicole Barbaro, Ph.D. 