Review by Choice Review
Gibbs (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz) makes a compelling argument for a much closer connection between the corporeal body and the expressions of a person's mind and behavior than the tenets of cognitive science usually admit. He reads signs of a shift toward appreciation of varieties of "embodied" selves in the work of, for example, Antonio Damasio (neuroscience) and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (language), but in the main he shows that since the 1950s--and the inception of cognitive science and the metaphor of the thinking mind as a computer--the discipline has essentially developed along the old Cartesian lines, which distinguish the body as irrational and the mind as a higher order of rationality. The seven core chapters of this book cover perception, action, imagery, memory, reasoning, affects, development, and the million-dollar-question of consciousness, and the author adds interesting details of psychological experiments that back up this substantial development of his thesis. This fascinating and well-written book should be read by psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and students of the "person." Gibbs provides much cognitive research evidence for a notion parallel to his own: Freud's claim that the ego (roughly speaking, the self) is "first and foremost a bodily ego." Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. R. H. Balsam Yale University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
