Stanford Professor Explores How Actions Speak Faster Than Words

PALO ALTO, CA — Stanford psychologist Barbara Tversky has blown the lid off whether words or actions have more weight in terms of reaction time in her new book "Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought," the university news service reported.

The author who has captured how people tick sat down for a question and answer session with a member of the Stanford News team, Melissa De Witte, to explore how actions come quicker than words. Think how the rolling of one's eyes in ridicule occurs before anyone ever says: "That was stupid or silly."

That’s why to understand how people think Tversky argues that one must understand how people act and come to understand the world through their spatial reasoning. Spatial thinking is the foundation of thought and evolved long before language, she noted.

Tversky is a professor emerita in psychology in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of psychology at the Teachers College at Columbia University. She is also the president of the Association for Psychological Science.

Q): In your book, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought, you say that spatial thinking, not language, is the foundation of thought. Why?

A): Spatial thinking comes from moving and acting in the world. All creatures must do so to survive. Actions in space create spatial representations in the brain. Simply looking isn’t enough. There are far too many things and possible relations in the world to notice and represent in your mind. Spatial thinking evolved long before language and is supported by all our senses. Altogether half the cortex is involved in spatial thinking. What’s amazing is that abstract thought uses the same brain circuitry that underlies spatial thought. Thinking is finding relations and paths between things. Just as our feet move from place to place along spatial paths, our minds move from thought to thought along conceptual paths.

Q): Are there other ways that spatial thinking is expressed?
A): We talk about actions on ideas as if they were actions on objects: We raise ideas, tear them apart, link them together. Our gestures reflect those actions. Gestures are often defined as actions on ideas. Usually we aren’t aware of our gestures, just as we’re not usually aware of selecting each and every word as we talk. Words simply pop out of our mouths and gestures from our bodies.

Q): Where else do we see visual-spatial communication?
A): Everywhere. In the ways we arrange our homes and the world, books ordered on bookshelves, dishes arranged by size and shape, 1-1 correspondences and repetitions in table settings and facades of building. You see it in maps, timelines, diagrams, graphs and sketches. Designers and artists say that the discoveries they make in their own sketches is a wordless conversation. Music, mathematical notation and even written language have crucial spatial components. Ancient maps, tallies and depictions of events have been found all over the world and fascinate us to this day.

Q): How can people apply your research to their lives and how they think about thinking and communicating?
A): Research into spatial thinking can give insight into how we think using the body and the world – what goes on under the tiny tip of the iceberg that is conscious.