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MARCO CARACCIOLO, A Walk Through Deep History

statement, without any overt reference to the body: “Your relationship
was very important to you.” The study found that participants in the
metaphorical condition tended to walk for a longer time, and ended up
farther away from the start position, than those in the nonmetaphorical
condition. Gibbs reads this result as confirmation for his embodied sim-
ulation theory of metaphor understanding: we understand embodied
language by enacting, internally and mostly unconsciously, the verbally
portrayed embodied action; in the case of Gibbs’s experiment, this sim-
ulation mechanism primed the participants towards bodily movement
and subtly boosted their performance when it came to actual walking.
This is just a simple example of how language understanding trig-
gers embodied responses, which can have very overt effects on how peo-
ple use their bodies. In other scenarios, the role of the body in language
comprehension remains covert—unless scientists probe it by way of brain
imaging or more indirect, behavioral methods (for instance, by measur-
ing response times to linguistic stimuli). Friedemann Pulvermüller has
reviewed neuroscientific studies linking language comprehension to the
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motor cortex, including so-called mirror neurons. We understand verbs
denoting embodied actions by relying on some of the same neural struc-
tures that are implicated in performing real actions. Consider verbal
phrases such as ‘holding on’ and ‘le ing go’ in the Salopek passage dis-
cussed above: processing these expressions activates neural mechanisms
involved in the physical gesture of holding onto an object or le ing go of
it. Behavioral research in psycholinguistics—for example, by Arthur
Glenberg and Michael Kaschak, or Martin Fischer and Rolf Zwaan—con-
firms this intuition: after parsing a sentence suggesting forward motion
(such as Salopek’s “Walking is falling forward”), readers will be quicker
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to push a lever forward than in the opposite direction. Put otherwise,

7
Friedemann Pulvermüller, “Brain Mechanisms Linking Language and Ac-
tion,” Nature Reviews. Neuroscience 6, no. 7 (2005): 576-82; for an analogous
argument in the domain of conceptualization, see also Vi orio Gallese and
George Lakoff, “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-Motor System
in Conceptual Knowledge,” Cognitive Neuropsychology, no. 22 (2005): 455-79.
8 Arthur M. Glenberg and Michael P. Kaschak, “Grounding Language in Ac-
tion,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 9, no. 3 (2002): 558-65; Martin H. Fischer

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