The Neural Mind: How Brains Think
Jun 2025 · University of Chicago Press
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About this ebook
Offers an expansive, unified theory of thought that brings together the vast resources of neuroscience, computation, and cognitive linguistics.
What is an idea, and where does it come from? We experience thought as if it were abstract, but every thought is actually a physical thing, carried out by the neural systems of our brains. Thought does not occur neuron-by-neuron; it happens when neurons come together to form circuits and when simple circuits combine to form complex ones. Thoughts, then, derive their structures from the circuitry we also use for vision, touch, and hearing. This circuitry is what allows simple thoughts to come together into complex concepts, making meaning, creating metaphors, and framing our social and political ideas.
With The Neural Mind, George Lakoff, a pioneering cognitive linguist, and computer scientist Srini Narayanan deftly combine insights from cognitive science, computational modeling, and linguistics to show how thoughts arise from the neural circuitry that runs throughout our bodies. They answer key questions about the ways we make meaning: How does neural circuitry create the conceptual “frames” through which we understand our social lives? What kind of neural circuitry characterizes metaphorical thought, in which ideas are understood in terms of other ideas with similar structures? Lively and accessible, the book shows convincingly that the “metaphors we live by”—to use Lakoff’s famous phrase—aren’t abstractions but deeply embodied neural constructs.
The Neural Mind is the first book of its kind, bringing together the ideas of multiple disciplines to offer a unified, accessible theory of thought. A field-defining work, Lakoff and Narayanan’s book will be of interest not just to linguists and cognitive scientists but also to psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, journalists, sociologists, and political scientists—and anyone who wants to understand how we really think.
What is an idea, and where does it come from? We experience thought as if it were abstract, but every thought is actually a physical thing, carried out by the neural systems of our brains. Thought does not occur neuron-by-neuron; it happens when neurons come together to form circuits and when simple circuits combine to form complex ones. Thoughts, then, derive their structures from the circuitry we also use for vision, touch, and hearing. This circuitry is what allows simple thoughts to come together into complex concepts, making meaning, creating metaphors, and framing our social and political ideas.
With The Neural Mind, George Lakoff, a pioneering cognitive linguist, and computer scientist Srini Narayanan deftly combine insights from cognitive science, computational modeling, and linguistics to show how thoughts arise from the neural circuitry that runs throughout our bodies. They answer key questions about the ways we make meaning: How does neural circuitry create the conceptual “frames” through which we understand our social lives? What kind of neural circuitry characterizes metaphorical thought, in which ideas are understood in terms of other ideas with similar structures? Lively and accessible, the book shows convincingly that the “metaphors we live by”—to use Lakoff’s famous phrase—aren’t abstractions but deeply embodied neural constructs.
The Neural Mind is the first book of its kind, bringing together the ideas of multiple disciplines to offer a unified, accessible theory of thought. A field-defining work, Lakoff and Narayanan’s book will be of interest not just to linguists and cognitive scientists but also to psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, journalists, sociologists, and political scientists—and anyone who wants to understand how we really think.
Ratings and reviews
3.0
3 reviews
Rishivanth Thulasiraman
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July 5, 2025
I refuse to believe that this book was written by the same person who wrote Metaphors We Live By. It reads more like a poorly written medium article name-dropping concepts and less like a scholarly treatise. I counted more than 50 grammatical and spelling errors in the first 20 pages. As far as the topics itself are concerned, there is nothing new in this book. You are better off reading the papers by the authors published before 2010s.
Harivansh Chauhan
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July 8, 2025
very very very very bad book!
About the author
George Lakoff is professor emeritus of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Metaphors We Live By, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Srini Narayanan is distinguished scientist and senior research director at Google DeepMind, Zurich, where he leads a research group on machine learning and natural language processing. Until 2014, he was director of the International Computer Science Institute, a core faculty member in the Cognitive Science Program, and a faculty member at the Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, all at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was also a cofounder of the Berkeley Neural Theory of Language group.
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