Mind in Motion

Barbara Tversky, a psychologist, puts forward a new account of how thinking works: that our sense of space and movement, rather than words, forms the base on which thought is built. Asked to reflect on our own thinking, we tend to reach for language, and some have even described language as the material of thought. Yet we remember images more reliably than words, and no set of words can fully capture a face, a room, or an unfolding event.

Tversky argues that spatial reasoning is central to cognition, not a side feature of it. Her examples range from taking a shortcut and planning a chess or basketball move to mentally moving furniture around a room, all of which involve abstract thought without language. Our physical experiences in the real world become mental operations, and these often show up as spontaneous gestures. The same kind of reasoning lies behind reading maps, assembling flat-pack furniture, planning football plays, designing airports, and tracking how people, vehicles, water, and ideas move through a system.

The book also looks at how spatial thinking shapes the meaning of everyday speech, explaining phrases such as pushing an idea forward, tearing an argument apart, feeling up, or growing apart. Written as a companion to Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, it asks readers to reconsider where thinking happens and what it rests on.