Incarnated language

Here are a couple more quotes from the Boston Change Study Group paper I recently mentioned in this post:

...mirror neurons may provide a different neural pathway for linking word and motor experience with different implications. In these senses words are not disincarnated symbols but are also pathways into direct embodied experience that function implicitly, and vice versa. This may help to explain the power of words and stories. We live them virtually.

...although the actual form/sound of the word may be arbitrary (as a symbolic system requires), the embodied concepts that entwine experience with words are not at all arbitrary. They are determined by our morphology, our innate movement patterns, and the real external world of people and things.

This incarnated sense of language vivifies psychotherapeutic enquiry. And, tangentially, here is a quote from a recent post in Science Daily that relates to this "world of people and things":

Studies have shown that infants learn language faster when what they see is synchronized to the sound that they hear.

(The post refers to the importance of babies having a quiet environment in which to learn verbal skills - another subtle and important aspect of incarnating language.)