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MARCO CARACCIOLO, A Walk Through Deep History

when the verbally described and the physically performed gesture are
incongruent, there is an interference effect that suggests that the linguistic
processing and the execution of movement have a shared neural basis.
Results along these lines strongly imply that language under-
standing involves bodily schemata in a much more consistent way
than was previously thought. Benjamin Bergen articulates this embod-
ied view of language in Louder than Words, where he builds on the con-
cept of “embodied simulation”: the physical enactment of a verbally
conveyed action, such as holding something in one’s hand or walking
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in a certain direction. For Bergen, embodied simulation is the central
mechanism of language comprehension, even if different kinds of lan-
guage may activate it to varying degrees: the comprehension of ab-
stract language (such as we may find in an encyclopedia entry on ‘de-
terminism’ or ‘chemical valence’) is clearly less embodied than the pro-
cessing of language evoking concrete states of affairs and situations. 10
Because narrative is by definition about concrete situations (and
more specifically about events affecting one or more characters), its base-
line embodiment will be fairly high. Thus, in a seminal article Hannah
Chapelle Wojciehowski and Vi orio Gallese develop an account of nar-
rative comprehension centered on the idea of “liberated embodied sim-
ulation,” a term that suggests that the simulations that accompany nar-
rative reading are not directed at the reader’s physical surroundings, but
at a nonactual scenario. Liberated embodied simulations are cognitive
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processes that operate at the same unconscious level as what psycholin-

and Rolf A. Zwaan, “Embodied Language: A Review of the Role of the Motor
System in Language Comprehension,” The Quarterly Journal of Experimental
Psychology 61, no. 6 (2008): 825-50.
9 Benjamin K. Bergen, Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind
Makes Meaning (New York: Basic Books, 2012); for more on embodied simula-
tion, see Vi orio Gallese, “Embodied Simulation: From Neurons to Phenom-
enal Experience,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (2005): 23-48.
10 See Bergen, Louder Than Words, 281.
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Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski and Vi orio Gallese, “How Stories Make
Us Feel: Toward an Embodied Narratology,” California Italian Studies 2, no. 1
(2011), n.p., h ps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jg726c2.

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