Book: Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning by Benjamin K. Bergen. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️.

A good book, but maybe it’s not for me.

I really like books that have a lot of research behind it, this is one of them. For almost every assumption made, the author reveals research done to support his point.

This book made me realize that our words do not give meaning to something. For example, the word “pen” is not the meaning of something that writes with ink, it is just a pointer to that meaning. The meaning is the source that we generate. When you learn a different language, you’re pointing to this same meaning.

Sometimes this meaning can be made of sounds, smells, movements, and so on. Meaning is a different thing for different people.

The thing with simulation is really interesting. We use the same part of the brain to do an action and to simulate it. The same area of the brain activates for executing an action, thinking about an action, and understanding a word about an action.

Expertise affects how people understand words. It may look obvious but sometimes we forget that some concepts that are obvious to us are not obvious to someone else.

This book also comments about a TMS and how it may interfere with how we speak. But the interesting thing about this experiment is that it also interferes with how we talk to ourselves when stimulating the “talking area” of the brain. That happens because we use the same area to speak and to talk to ourselves.

The book talks a lot about English grammar and it’s not so good for non-native English speakers (like me).

The book is good and there were some interesting insights, but some parts were just tedious for me.

Here are my raw notes about the book:

  • Meaning is something that you point words to. When you’re learning a new language, you are pointing words to a meaning
  • A meaning can be a real world experience made by sounds, smells, movements and so on.
  • Torture means different things for different people. You may think of it as an iron maiden when a different person think about a different thing
  • We imagine sounds with the same region of the brain as we hear sounds
  • The same area of the brain activate for executing an action, thinking about an action, and understanding a word about an action
  • Think about how people will simulate the movement when you’re writing a sentence. If the definition of the object or its shape is at the end of the sentence, it will take longer for the reader to simulate the scene.
  • Expertise affects how people understand language
  • TMS, powerful magnet that affects neurons. You can’t even use your inner speech correctly
  • The language you speak makes you think differently. Egocentric versus geocentric to describe a place.