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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris.

Today I'm speaking with Barbara Tversky. Barbara is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Stanford

University and Professor of Psychology at the Teachers College at Columbia University.

She's also the President of the Association for Psychological Science, and she has published more

than 200 scholarly articles about memory, spatial thinking, design, creativity, and she regularly

speaks about embodied cognition at conferences. And she was married to one of the most famous and

influential psychologists ever, Amos Tversky, who partnered with Danny Coniman in all those

studies of judgment under uncertainty, and he would have certainly won the Nobel Prize,

along with Danny, had he lived. Anyway, Barbara and I talk about her new book, Mind in Motion,

How Action Shapes Thought. And we talk about many topics in this vein. We talk about the evolution

of mind prior to language, and the way in which our sense of space and motion have governed

our capacity for thinking. We talk about the importance of imitation and gesture,

the sensory and motor homunculi in the brain, the information that's communicated by motion,

the role of mirror neurons, the sense of direction, natural and unnatural categories,

and the way in which our categorical thinking is derivative of our sense of space.

...