Welcome to the Brain Sounds Podcast, I'm your host Dr. Ginger Campbell and this is episode 94. Today we are going to be talking

with linguist Benjamin Bergen about his book Louder than Words, The New Science of

How the Mind Makes Meaning. But before I tell you about that, I want to

remind you to visit our website at brainscience podcast.com. We just launched a

completely redesigned website and I would love to hear what you think. You'd send me email

at doc Artemis at gmail.com and I'll tell you more about the new website after the interview.

Dr Benjamin Bergen is one of a new breed of linguists who are

teeming up with neuroscientists an attempt to unravel how her brains generate and

understand language.

His work is strongly influenced by the embodied cognition movement.

In his book, louder than words, he discusses the experimental evidence that argues that traditional theories of meaning should be

supplanted by a new hypothesis called embodied simulation.

If you are new to the podcast, please don't be intimidated by these unfamiliar terms.

Borgan's book is aimed at general readers and he does a great job of making his material both accessible and fun.

On the other hand, those of you who are long-term listeners know that Embodied

cognition is one of my favorite topics.

So I was intrigued to see how the insights of embodied

cognition are beginning to influence the work of linguists like Bergen. I'll be

back after the interview to review the key ideas and to tell you a little bit more about

the new Brain Science Podcast website. Benjamin, it's great to have you on the brain science podcast today.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Could you start out by just telling us a little bit about yourself?

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