How Brains Think

4th International Conference on Foreign Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, May 2014, Sarajevo

[@farshadnoravesh]

Great talk ! He is very creative. I think his ideas can remove the curse of dimensionality problem in machine learning and all we do in natural language processing by just observing how our brains represents each word, frame,..... The idea of metaphore ,schema,frame, gestalt cricuits are very useful and beautiful.

[@mrshah2043]

There's a lot of amazing research being done by a lot of very smart people today. We're lucky to have access to all this brilliant work. Mr. Lakoff is one of the brightest stars in the Milky Way of Research. Thanks for uploading this, absolutely unbelievable talk. Almost every time I read something you said, or something you wrote I get my mind blown.

[@henosissage2384]

Dear George, I have been watching the progress of your science through your videos (and online texts) for several years now after I first discovered you! This is your best ever, but I have shared it with very few other people. Only those I suspect are capable of "getting it".... because for 99.9999% of this planet it will still sail right over the top of their heads no matter how you present your excellent accumulated findings and supreme analysis of placing all the weirdly odd shaped "pieces" in their rightful place in the Jigsaw Puzzle. Thank you for not wasting your life on BS like most people do (me included unfortunately). One feedback comment from a friend about this video was : "That is an awesome video, Mate. Best I have seen in a long time. It explains many things. I watched about half of it so far. Hope to finish it later tonight." Not bad given all you did was sit at a table and speak plain english to an insane world ... absent all the bells whistles spin and the usual hyperbolic garbage on KZbin and the rest of the global 'media' rubbish. Well done Professor ... KISS Principle par excellance!

[@mrshah2043]

Professor Lakoff is a metaphysical gangster. It's awesome.

[@georgelakoff8154]

How Brains Think- FLTAL'14

[@NikolaiVarankine]

Surprisingly I have found big coincidence with own ideas, spoken from another science. That's quite good for my work... Thank you very much, George Lakoff !

[@zlatkong]

Most dense and amazing stuff ever. Any news on this book? Still can't find anything similar...

[@santacruzman]

It is weirdly frustrating. People seem to have no idea what George and all his various collaborators have managed to do starting in the 1980's with MWLB. It is astonishing.

[@modvs1]

Is our capacity for mental imagery (top down emulation/simulation, reuse redeployment) a basis for primary metaphor? I've often wondered that it could very well be. It would explain homuncularity and talk of 'representation' taking place in sub-personal processes. Philosophy of mind (and certain cognitive sciences) are riddled with it.

[@jps17183]

Will you produce a book with a synthesis of all those conclusions about the cognitive processes of the mind? From my search in wikipedia your latest book is from 2012, and for what i can tell, is a political book. I'm not interested in politics, I want your books on this subject.

[@user-iy7ed4od4b]

your ideas are interesting in the sense that it resembles the buddhist's points of view towards world. Buddhism was talking about it 2000 + years ago. Exited to read 'Don't Think of an Elephant'

[@lesliecunliffe4450]

To describe brain functions using psychological verbs is, at best, intellectually careless. It's embodied persons living in communities that think, not their brains.

[@trashygit]

If we ask "how does civilisation or culture work?", dear George will probably explain it with the electricity supply grid of a city... If we ask "how does the icon on the computer desktop work?", dear George will probably explain it with the transistors... If we ask "how does the heart work?", dear George will probably explain it with the electron bonds between atoms... Or, if we ask "Dear George, what do you think about infinity?", dear George will say "metaphors, special metaphors and maths..." Because he just did above. If we ask anything to Dear George, he will just combine some popular science topics to some others by using "remarkable" magical words without explaining any "working mechanism" whatsoever. While even neuroscientists specifically and repeatedly say "brain is still a big unknown in terms of explaining how individual thoughts operate", dear George will easily locate the neurons and/or neural connections for your wildest dreams. Just name one, he has an answer... The truth is, dear people, we still do not know how mind works. Linguistic metaphors, morality, emotion, meaning and other mental phenomenon operate in a separate domain. You can imagine this "separate domain" as a separate dimension. Just because you can speak certain language, English, German or any other cannot make you expert in various disciplines such as economy, politics, engineering, teaching, medicine etc. that use this or that language: You must understand and preferably "replicate" this or that discipline, this or that profession. Therefore, if dear George, or anybody else for that matter, says that "we understand how mind works", ask them to replicate it somewhere else. Do not buy unsubstantiated prophetic estimations, ask for an evidence, ask for a working mechanisms, ask for solutions to defined problems. If current disciplines do not explain to your questions, well just think outside of the box and invent a new scientific discipline if necessary: This is how Charles Darwin invented biology, this is how others invented Quantum Mechanics. If we have any confidence that we will one day find how the mind works, we get our strength from this concrete yet humble tradition, not from some "neuro-fixed" wishy washy confusions...