Thought Doesnt Just Happen In The Brain Barbara Tversky

TITLE: Thought doesn’t just happen in the brain | Barbara Tversky CHANNEL: The Institute of Art and Ideas DATE: 2026-04-27 ---TRANSCRIPT--- The people sit on their hands, it’s harder for them to find [music] words to explain how to get from their house to the train. And when they explain those things, they generally gesture, and the gestures precede the words. So, they’re somehow facilitating not just the words, but the thinking, [music] and that’s a bit of a mystery to me. Why movements of the body uh seem to be core

[music] to thinking. Barbara [music] Tversky, welcome to How the Light Gets In. Thank you. I’m delighted to be here. [music] So, in your um book Mind in Motion, you argue that thinking is fundamentally spatial and embodied. Can you explain how this changes the way that we understand [music] the mind? So, uh the our spatial thinking takes up half our cortex. It evolved long before language. We communicate, create, and so forth with our bodies. And again, it goes back evolutionarily to one-celled creatures that either approach things that are attractive or nutritious or avoid things that are noxious. And that’s the first kind of interaction with the world. And again, before any language gets in there. So, humans use spatial thinking in many different ways. How we get around the world, how we grasp objects in the world, and then how we communicate. So, if I’m reaching for a glass, you know what I’m doing. And I can use grasp as the word or um the action as a way of communicating to you. So, I grasp ideas and pass them on to you. And those are all actions in the world, but get into our language as actions on thought. And which forms of thinking would you say are spatial and embodied? And which forms of thinking aren’t uh spatial and embodied? So, for example, people might point to things like linguistic reasoning and mathematical abstraction. I think you touched on it there, but would you say that those are also spatial and embodied as well? In in many cases, they’re going to be spatial. They’re going to be uh mathematicians will draw functions, they’ll draw spaces on pieces of paper, they’ll they’ll gesture them with their hands. Um and the that again will be spatial. Even reasoning is one step after another. So, is that spatial, temporal? Um it’s hard to separate what’s spatial and what’s temporal. One step after another, even if it’s not a two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or n-dimensional space, it’s still linear in some sense. So, it’s hard to think of things that can’t in some way be reduced to spatial. I mean, if we get into terms like justice, freedom, those are hard to grasp. And and talking about them spatially is a little harder or grasping them spatially. So, there are limits, but I think a great deal of scientific and mathematical thinking is as a spatial basis. And why do you think this recognition is is an important one? Because it seems like you’re pushing back against a certain type of view where thinking is something that just primarily happens in the head and the brain. And that’s that is arguably been quite central in a lot of Western philosophy, especially in the past few centuries. Do you see it as in as you pushing back against a type of view that is that is the idea that thinking happens primarily sort of up here? So, there are two ways of approaching that. One is thinking only in the brain or does the body contribute? And another is pushing back against language-based view. So, I can talk about the first, and it puzzles me. So, we find These are old experiments. If people sit on their hands, it’s harder for them to find words to explain how to get from their house to the train. And when they explain those things, they generally gesture, and the gestures precede the words. So, they’re somehow facilitating not just the words, but the thinking, and that’s a bit of a mystery to me. Why movements of the body uh seem to be core to thinking. And I think the neuroscientist will work that through. Is it through It must be reflected in the brain, but how necessary is the body for that kind of thinking? So, clearly, we can do that kind of thinking. People without arms, without sensation below the neck can think and can explain. So, we have alternative bases. Um just like blind people can navigate without vision. So, that’s part of it, and it remains a bit of a mystery to me how the body seems to be important for thinking. I mean, another thing we know is if we put people deprive of them any sensation, their mind wanders. They can’t keep control of the mind. And that again indicates something about the body promoting the thinking independent of the brain. The brain is still active, but the body is desensitized and not moving. Um the other part is language, and there I think Western philosophy, certainly educated people, is very dominated by language. And language can mean many things. Some of it is highly codified system of words organized by rules. And there, things like gestures, body movements can’t be discretized in the way that language can be coded into words, nor are there rules. So, if I’m giving you directions and I say there’s an intersection or there’s an intersection or there’s All of that sort of captures the same meaning, but it’s not the same way of expressing it. And if I get to vague concepts like it’s rocky, uh that’s going to be again not something that’s easily codified. Conductors use very different ways of communicating with their orchestras. Their orchestras somehow get it and play music, but it’s not easily codified in the way that language is. So, that would be another contrast where thinking with the body and space is different from language. And um people say this intuitively, but I think there are some studies that also suggest this, which is that there are a group of people in the world um who primarily feel that they reason more with with with spatial images and and pictures and things like that. And there are some people who um think more in words essentially. They think in sentences. And then there are another group of people who just say, “Oh, well, um they I have an internal monologue in my head, and that’s how I come to think about things and I come to conclusions.” How would you say this sort of understanding or this research interacts with what you say about in in bodied thinking? So, we’d need evidence that people really are thinking differently, and I’m open to that kind of evidence. Um and I do know people who think who don’t have spatial imaginations at all. They can’t find their way in environments easily. And they’re brilliant people who think one step after another. And again, that would be linear thinking, whether we want to call that spatial or not, simplify. So, yeah. Um Most people that I encounter are pretty flexible in in the way that they think, again varying. Um I don’t think we think in words. The words kind of come after the thoughts. And we don’t really have access to the thoughts. We can sometimes into introspect on that. And if you look at at athletes, and they’re going to often do mental practice. How do I do a dive? How do I dance a step? That again isn’t words. It’s somehow encoded in their body in some way, and they might be making miniature movements doing that. And again, I think many people can do a bit of this and a bit of that. We aren’t restricted to one way of thinking. But the individual difference work needs to be done, and I think it would be fascinating. I want to separate images from spatial because again, blind people can have excellent spatial memory and spatial thinking. They often gesture. Children blind from birth gesture. And it seems to help their thinking. Adults who are blind gesture and it seems to help their thinking. These are spatial motoric sorts of things don’t come with visual images. So I want to keep those things separate. I mean there are people who say they don’t have visual images and you I trust them although again, I’d love to know the neuroscience behind it. On this like side note because you mentioned blind people, is there any literature on the difference in the way in which blind people from birth think and interact with the environment in the way in which people who weren’t blind from birth but were blind in became blind in later years think? Um What what is that? Again, you’d have to know what you mean by thinking. I don’t mean I don’t think the literature there is very rich but there are blind mathematicians who’ve been blind from birth and who think spatially, blind physicists blind from who think spatially. They do need to reach for things, interact with things in the world, get around their houses and they learn to do that spatially. The sorts of things they pick up, the ground, the texture of the ground, wind, smells and things that we might be picking up but not necessarily consciously. So they’re using those cues of from the world around them, sensory cues that are different from vision. So many of them can navigate quite well and better than I can from their spatial sense. Is there is evidence that people blind from birth or deaf from birth different parts of the brain pick up different things? So for blind people often the back of the brain, the occipital lobes will pick up all sorts of spatial things even tactile things that aren’t that that in sighted people are used for other things. So especially people who are blind or deaf from birth, the brain will will accommodate in many ways. Um some like Iain McGilchrist have put forward the view that cognition and thinking is fundamentally made up of two hemispheres of the brain. The right brain which sees things in a more holistic and contextual way and would maybe map onto the sort of embodied thinking that you’re talking about and the left that’s more sort of analytical, instrumental and linguistic and logically based. Um and and both these sides, the the left and right hemisphere have their own personalities and are kind of vying for power. Does this share similarities with your embodied thinking of view? Do you have any thoughts on that kind of view? Yeah, I mean people love dichotomies or there are two kinds of people in the world, those who love dichotomies and those who don’t. So it’s probably saying the whole hemisphere is one thing or another is a little extreme but language does tend to be left-sided and is more sequential logical and the right side is seems to be more holistic. So on a very abstract way, there’s something to that. He’s not the only one who’s made that distinction. Many people before him have. So sure that but it it’s it doesn’t respect the complexity of the brain and right. In what ways do you think it doesn’t respect the complexity of the brain? Oh, you know there there are places in the brain that are specialized for faces. There are places in the brain that are specialized for certain objects, recognizing them. So the brain is there’s a place in the brain that recognizes mirror that that recognizes that a small b and a small d are mirror images. They aren’t the same. The many other visual portions of the brain don’t care if something is mirror reversed. There’s one tiny place in the brain that does care if something’s mirror reversed. That tiny place is used for recognizing reading. Now the brain didn’t evolve with reading but that area of the brain capitalizes on small b and small d are mirror images and and distinguishes between them. So looking at that complexity of the brain is fascinating and if you just split hemispheres, you’ll miss that. Okay. A lot of philosophy from Plato to Descartes and Christian theology has placed, I think you said earlier, premium on logos, language and reason. Do you think this has been a mistake in causing confusion about the way we think about thinking? A mistake I wouldn’t say. I mean we’re we’re settling on one theory or another is difficult. Data keep coming in, views keep coming out and that makes life very interesting that we like to have things permanent and and complete and a way of dealing with the world but the world doesn’t behave in that way. So we have to keep adapting and changing. Things unexpected things keep happening that aren’t under our control. So it feels to me like relying on one system or another is is relying on shaky grounds. Um And you mentioned earlier which was interesting that um with embodied thinking, when we start to get to concepts like justice or equality or fairness or infinity, it then starts becoming quite difficult to to apply the embodied or spatial thinking hypothesis to it. Do you think these are things that will be accounted for within that framework or do you think they’ll sort of be mysteries outside of that framework or things that aren’t fundamentally just not embodied thinking? So we can talk about justice using this kind of um this kind of gesture, are things balanced in unjust equal? I mean that kind of gesture and I remember one of my grandchildren at three or four was using that kind of gesture. And we know that babies respond to unjust actions viscerally. So if they watch, you know, puppets and one is grabbing something from another, these are kids that don’t yet conceptualize in language, they will react viscerally. They’ll be they won’t like the puppet that grabbed from another puppet. So it it that’s embodied in a way. We have a visceral response to watching injustice and then the concept can get generalized in some way from that. It’s again going back to the primary response is emotional. Are we going to approach something or avoid it? And we don’t want to approach something that’s doing harm to another thing. Um Freud stated Sigmund Freud stated that philosophy sometimes seems to me like a person who keeps cleaning their glasses and they still stay dim. And it seems in a lot of empirical psychology has done away with the need of philosophy. In your view, what is the role of philosophy in psychology? That’s a hard one cuz I get puzzled about philosophy [laughter] as well. So you agree with Freud’s view or And I studied philosophy as an undergraduate and psychology and I it came to a point where should I specialize in one or the other and I went to my philosophy teacher and he said you’ll do just fine but let me tell you, you don’t think like a philosopher. And he was absolutely right. I think empirically. How would you answer that question using data? And I think that’s my lens on the world and I don’t completely grasp the lens of philosophers. Partly, there are so many different kinds of philosophers. And the ones I’m most familiar with are seem to be concerned with the way I use language. And and they’re sure philosophy has a role in sharpening concepts and making clear and that can be the basis for empirical empirical research, the kind that I do. So I I appreciate philosophers for their clarity or that kind of philosophy for the clarity it provides. Barbara [music] Tuchman, thank you very much. Thank you. [music]