Barbara Tversky - Mind In Motion (Basic Books, 2019) ****

Barbara Tversky is a cognitive scientist, wife to the late Amos Tversky whose research with Daniel Kahneman is possibly better known. But Barbara Tversky's work in the area of the spatial aspects of cognition is highly original and of equal importance. In "Mind in Motion" she explains in lay language the current state of affairs in her research, with the obvious additions of what other, and more recent, research has unveiled.

She explains why and how front/back, left/right and upside/down perspectives may impact our way of perceiving reality and how we think. She shows how errors of perception arise because of these perspectives. For instance: most people will misjudge distances, overestimating what is close by and underestimating what is far away, which corresponds with discerning details or not. Extrapolating, you could see how that level of perception also impacts how we judge cultures that are far away from us: they are all the same, while people living close by all have different identities.

She shows how our own body perception impacts the way we see, or how the use of our hands, gestures but also drawings help in having different approaches to understanding reality or by turning our intuitions into concepts and thoughts.

She builds her narrative around the Nine Laws Of Cognition:

1. There are no benefits without costs
2. Action molds perception
3. Feeling comes first
4. The mind can override perception
5. Cognition mirrors perception
6. Spatial thinking is the foundation of abstract thought
7. The mind fills in missing information
8. When thought overflows the mind, the mind puts it into the world
9. We organise the stuff in the world the way we organise stuff in the mind.

Like with all recent work on cognitive science, a simpler version of these findings should be compulsory teaching in every school in the world. With a better understanding of the mechanism underlying our thinking, I am convinced the world will be a better place. 

Even if many chapters are very descriptive and not all findings are immediately surprising or unsettling (less than in Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast And Slow"), it is a must read for anybody interested in the workings of our mind.