"We are neural beings," states Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff. "Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit."
GEORGE LAKOFF, currently a fellow at The Rockridge Institute, has been Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley since 1972, where he is on the faculty of the Institute of Cognitive Studies and a Senior Fellow of the Rockridge Institute. He has been a member of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society, President of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association, and a member of the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of Metaphors We Live By (with Mark Johnson); Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind; More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (with Mark Turner); Moral Politics, an application of cognitive science to the study of the conceptual systems of liberals and conservatives; Philosophy in the Flesh (with Mark Johnson); Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Creates Mathematics (with Rafael Nunez).
