Mind in Motion

gestures—that they use actions in space to create meaning,

recent estimate is eighty-six billion.

Now some jargon. What I’ve been calling ideas psychologists often call representations.

We talk that way, too, as if ideas were objects and thinking were action on objects.

extensive practice using tools enlarges both our conscious body image and our largely unconscious body schema.

What I’ve called actions on ideas psychologists often call transformations.

neurons

Thinking is mental actions on mental objects—ideas. Actions on ideas that transform them into something else.

That same distortion, finer discrimination for things that are close to us than for things that are far, occurs for judgments of people on social dimensions. People judge members of their own social group, a close group, to be more different from each other than members of other social groups,