Perception

How Our Bodies Shape Our Minds

De: Dennis Proffitt, Drake Baer

Narrado por: Angela Dawe

A groundbreaking popular psychology book that explores the deep connection between our body and our brain.

Over decades of study, University of Virginia psychologist Dennis Proffitt has shown that we are each living our own personal version of Gulliver’s Travels, where the size and shape of the things we see are scaled to the size of our bodies, and our ability to interact with them.

Stairs look less steep as dieters lose weight, baseballs grow bigger the better players hit, hills look less daunting if you’re standing next to a close friend, and learning happens faster when you can talk with your hands.

Written with journalist Drake Baer, Perception marries academic rigor with mainstream accessibility. The research presented and the personalities profiled will show what it means to not only have, but be, your unique human body. The positive ramifications of viewing ourselves from this embodied perspective include greater athletic, academic, and professional achievement, more nourishing relationships, and greater personal well-being.

The better we can understand what our bodies are - what they excel at, what they need, what they must avoid - the better we can live our lives.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press

©2020 Dennis Proffitt and Drake Baer (P)2020 Macmillan Audio

Excellent book

The narration is very good
The book is very good and I learned much from reading it. Though I don’t agree with all the theories, they are easily understood with this well written book

The body-mind connection well explained

The book explores and explains how our physical body, including the non-sensory parts (not eyes, nose, ears, or skin), influences our understanding and interpretation of spaces and subjects around us. It has plentiful fun examples and well-augured concepts.

The book covers the body-mind connection in three categories of "doing", "knowing", and "belonging", from more tangible to more abstract. Our mind doesn't learn in isolation. All learning and perceiving require assistance and feedback from more than one part of our physical body. For example, babies can't learn a new language by watching YouTube alone. Readers new to the body-mind concept will get the most from this book, and readers familiar with the topic can also find intriguing perspectives and informative illustrations.

After this book, if you want to delve deeper and read more about how the mind constructs the world consciously and subconsciously, check out "A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins (2022). If you are curious about how and why our brain connects body and mind from scratch, check out "Zero to Birth: How the Human Brain Is Built" by W.A. Harris (2022). If you are interested in how children learn or adults acquire new skills, check out "Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning" by Tom Vanderbilt (2021).

Nice tidbits here and there...

Nice tidbits here and there, but never really comes together as a strong piece of work that maintains one's attention. The strong narration helps, but even that is hampered by the inconsistency of the text.

Association does not equal causality

The book has a good premise which is, “how you perceive the world is shaped by how you are able to interact with it”. The rest of the book is dedicated to conclusions and proposed interventions that are in no way supported by the provided evidence. If you like NPR or CNN, you’ll love this book.