14 January 2008

A great sentence:

"If we had wheels, or moved along the ground on our bellies like snakes," Lakoff argues, "math might be very different."

From a very fascinating article about recent research showing that physical motion is intimately tied in with cognition at all levels (via MR). What impressed me most about this piece, aside from the research, is that it contains several paragraphs summarizing the history of mind-body theory, Descartes up through modern cognitive science.

George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things is the most enjoyable and fun non-technical linguistic text I've read (a small sample).

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