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1: The Polar Bear's Nose 1-22
p.2-3 How do you take scribbles on a page or for that matter the pops, buzzes, and hums of human speech and make them mean something to you? How do you know what the words and sentences mean and how do you fill in the gaps? How do you do what you're doing right now? That's the mystery of meaning. And that is in fact what this book is about.
p.3 Making meaning might be one of the most important things we do. For starters, it's something we're doing almost constantly. We swim in a sea of words... Constantly, tirelessly, automatically, we make meaning. What's perhaps most remarkable about it is that we hardly notice we're doing anything at all.
p.5 Language matters to us because it is a vehicle for meaning
p.13 the embodied simulation hypothesis... Maybe we understand language by simulating in our minds what it would be like to experience the things that the language describes.
p.17 One of the important innovations of the embodied simulation hypothesis... is that it claims that meaning is something that you construct in your mind, based on your own experiences.
p.19 People simulate in response to language, but their simulations appear to vary substantially.
p.22 this is the story of how you ever manage to understand anything.
2: Keep Your Mind on the Ball 23-48
p.30 the things you see can be confused with - and integrated with - the visual images you fabricate.
3: Meaning and the Mind's Eye 49-72
p.49 Vision is the main way we collect information from the world, so its fitting that vision is also the sense we most closely associate with the internal life of our minds.
p.59 Hearing or reading language about objects leads people to mentally simulate those objects.
4: Over the Top 73-92
p.84 The knowledge you have about how to interact with an object is known as that object's affordances
p.85 when you read nouns, even merely to decide whether they're words or not, you evoke knowledge about how you physically interact with the things that the nouns denote. The easier it is to activate that motor simulation, the faster you're able to understand the word.
p.91-92 Humans... can take a few characters on a page or a sequence of sound waves and convert them into a mental representation of actions as complex as arm-wrestling techniques. We've now seen some of the mounting evidence that, during this process, people automatically mentally simulate lots of motor details of the described actions, including the direction that they would move in, how they would rotate their hands, what body part or parts they would use, and how their hands would be shaped, and that doing so engages the same brain systems as performing real actions. The motor systems of the brain appear to be working overtime... people perform motor simulation while understanding language.
5: More than Words 93-120
p.97 Grammar contributes to simulation by putting together all the pieces contributed by words in the right configuration.
p.98 Linguists view sentences as like plants, in that words are leaves hanging from the stems of grammar.
p.108 There's actually a third way that grammar contributes to simulation. It also tells you not what to simulate, but how to simulate it.
6: Early and Often 121-150
7: What Do Hockey Players Know? 151-174
8: Lost in Translation 175-194
9: Meaning in Your Grasp 195-222
p.195 in understanding language, we use our perceptual and motor systems to run embodied simulations.
p.196 Maybe we don't just use words for concrete things like clubbing and grasping to talk about abstract concepts like convincing and understanding. Maybe that's also the way we think about them.
p.198 When using metaphor, you describe abstract concepts in terms of concrete ones... Maybe you understand abstract concepts through concrete, though metaphorical, simulation. Let's call this the metaphorical simulation hypothesis.
10: What is Simulation Good For? 223-247
p.223 Shortly after the sound waves of spoken words hit our ears or the light of written characters hits our eyes, we engage our vision and motor systems to recreate the nonpresent visions and actions that are described.
p.224 most research has focused on showing how and when what simulation occurs. There has been less concern about what that simulation is actually good for.... So we're going to tackle it... What is the evidence, the skeptic might ask, that this embodied simulation actually does anything?
p.238 hearing language about action engages the understander's motor system. [JLJ - this is likely due to the fact that a yelled command such as "duck!" has, in the past, been strongly associated with actions which need to be taken immediately. Much like a short tap on a horn when at a stoplight communicates, "pay attention!" to a driver who has forgotten to notice that a stop light has changed. Our bodies are attuned to respond automatically to certain cues and symbols in our environment where we have determined in advance that it would be in our best interest to do so, without delay.]
p.244 Someone yells duck! and you do. But other times, you have to do some calculations to know exactly what the most apt response would be.
11: The Repurposed Mind 247-260
p.248 the embodied simulation hypothesis does make very clear predictions about what we're doing when we're making meaning. It predicts that you should be doing all the stuff we now know you did when you read that paragraph about the polar bear's nose. And there's now some evidence... that we don't understand, or at least understand differently, when we don't simulate.
p.249 knowing more about how the brain makes meaning is important is we want to make machines smart like us. If you're trying to build a piece of software that not only behaves like a human but also understands language like a human, you'll need to build something like the solutions that humans use to make meaning.
p.253 the systems we use for meaning don't seem to have spontaneously sprouted ex nihilo to subserve only language. Instead, in the human capacity for understanding language, evolution has cobbled together a new machine from old parts it had lying around in the junkyard of the brain... Evolution has repurposed parts of our brains... Evolution is a tinkerer. Using existing systems in new ways, that is, exapting them [JLJ - exapting: a shift in the function of a trait during evolution], is a pretty good way to quickly and incrementally develop cognitive machinery that can perform a complex function, like understanding language. And it seems to be what evolution has done.
p.256 as we run down the list of higher human cognitive functions, like reasoning, problem solving, decision making, and so on, we may well find that these work the same way, that these functions are cobbled together at least in part by using relatively older, lower-level systems in new ways.
p.259 What is it to communicate successfully? ...To successfully communicate, you don't have to get it just right, you just have to get it close enough.
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