Overview

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 anyone who wants to understand how we really think.

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Reviews

“Lakoff and Narayanan offer a comprehensive, easy-to-read review of fifty years of research in cognitive linguistics married with neurally inspired computational modeling. A must-read for anyone interested in how the human mind works.” * Rafael Núñez, University of California, San Diego * “This is potentially the most important book ever written on the relation of mind, thought, and language. With a sweeping interdisciplinary vision, supported by wonderful examples and accessible explanations, it integrates linguistic, psychological, cognitive scientific, and neuroscientific research that provides a new understanding of how our minds work. It is a deep exploration of how the brain is continuously reorganized by the way we live and engage our environments, thereby structuring our brains, which, in turn, shape our experience, meaning, thought, and language.” * Mark Johnson, University of Oregon * “The Neural Mind offers one of the only encompassing reviews of embodied cognitive science. Lakoff and Narayanan cover a large expanse of theories, data, and science and try to explain, in a way that is easy to understand, theories surrounding the underlying structure of how the brain works. The Neural Mind is novel, important, and expansive. It will be of great interest to anyone interested in how the brain may function.” * Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, University of Southern California *

Author Information

George Lakoff is professor emeritus of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Metaphors We Live By, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Srini Narayanan is distinguished scientist and senior research director at Google DeepMind, Zurich, where he leads a research group on machine learning and natural language processing. Until 2014, he was director of the International Computer Science Institute, a core faculty member in the Cognitive Science Program, and a faculty member at the Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, all at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was also a cofounder of the Berkeley Neural Theory of Language group.

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