“The cerebellum (which is involved in timing and motor control) has vastly more neurons than the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain most associated with our advanced intelligence)”, says Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University, editor of “The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists.”
How does this relate to understanding how our mind works? Well, the above observation is consistent with the theories in evolutionary biology that see language as emerging from movement. Says Maxine Sheets-Johnstone: “language is post-kinetic”.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, author of “The Roots of Thinking” and several other books, earned doctorates in both philosophy and in evolutionary biology. She says: “… movement is our mother tongue. That’s the way in which we learn our own bodies; we learn to move ourselves; we learn the surrounding world in which we live; we explore the world in movement; and that’s the way we understand things and come to know them.”
This is what has happened to our species as it developed into acquiring more sophisticated ways of dealing with the world, such as language. It has happened for each of us, in our infancy. And it continues to happen, day in and day out, as we move and think in the course of our daily activities. For instance, notice how the phrase “I feel that something shifted” is more than a poetic image…
