Review: Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

I went into Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought thinking it was The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis.

That is, I thought it was a biography about Barbara Tversky’s husband and his work. And then, I realized it was her work--her phenomenal breadth of work-- and that made the book more exciting to me. It also did make me aware of the ignorance of my own ignorance. I knew there was a world of cognition research around Tversky, but I had not really understood this Tversky, this body of work, this way of thinking about how action shapes thought.

The book is just incredibly rich.  What I’m still sitting with most is this idea of how much our spatial reasoning shapes our mental reasoning, which then shapes the way we build the world around us. Tversky makes it feel obvious in the best way: of course our sense of physical awareness, our sense of spatial awareness, plays into our minds. Of course the physical world gets mapped into thought. But then once she lays it out, the implications start unfolding everywhere.

Tversky’s nine laws of cognition gave the book a coherent structure. It unified a range of research and studies that she had conducted and helped the reader see how the dots were connected.  The book becomes a framework for thinking about the feedback loop between body, mind, and world: the physical world shapes the mind, the mind uses that spatial understanding to think, and then the mind rebuilds those patterns back into the world at large.

That train of thought has me chewing on online learning, AI tutors, virtual meetings, and all the strange ways we are spatially located and delocated at the same time. If spatial cognition is foundational for thought itself, then what does that mean for an online class? What does it mean to “navigate” an LMS instead of navigating from your house to a classroom? There are parallels, obviously. You move from not being in the course to being in the course. You find your way around. But the comparison starts to fray pretty quickly.

In an LMS, time is compressed. You can navigate to the past through previous modules, to the present through the current module, and maybe even to the future through upcoming assignments. That is a very different kind of spatial experience than walking into a room, sitting down, making eye contact, and listening live. And if action molds perception, then what kind of perception is shaped by looking at a screen, watching one-directional content, or interacting through carefully arranged digital chunks?

Online learning gives us convenience, access, flexibility. But what are the costs? What kinds of spatial engagement are missing, altered, or transformed? What do we need to compensate for? What kinds of feelings are we actually generating in these online spaces?

That is where Mind in Motion felt immediately applicable or expansive. It gave me a vocabulary and a framework for thinking about things I already care about, especially learning, virtual interaction, and how technology shapes experience. It also connects strongly for me with Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind, another book that asks where the mind ends and the external world begins. Both books push against the idea that cognition is simply sealed inside the head. They make the boundaries feel much less clean, much more intertwined. I also found myself thinking about My Grandmother’s Hands, because that book also circles around the ways the body carries experience and shapes how we move through the world.

Tversky’s work was both a little familiar and a little new.  I found myself intrigued and wanting to sit longer about her of her tenants to think about where I see it and where can I anticipate it.  It made me wonder if spatial cognition works differently across people, then what does it mean to map spatial cognition across two people? How do we create spaces, live in spaces, and build spaces that bridge those differences?

Mind in Motion is accessible in a coherent ways that doesn't feel reductive. It is a book that helps us understand how our minds work, but also how we operate in the world individually and collectively.

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