Embodiment, simulation and meaning

Approaches to meaning differ in ways as fundamental as the questions they aim to answer. The theoretical outlook described in this chapter, the embodied simulation approach, belongs to the class of perspectives that ask how meaning operates in real time in the brain, mind, and body of language users. Clearly, some approaches to meaning are better suited to this question than others. Mechanistic models that bridge levels of analysis—from the brain and its computations to the functions and behaviours they support—and that recruit the convergent tools of empirical cognitive science are particularly well equipped. The embodied simulation approach is an example of this type of approach. The fundamental idea underlying the embodied simulation hypothesis is a remarkably old one. It’s the notion that language users construct mental experience of what it would be like to perceive or interact with objects and events that are described in language. Carl Wernicke described the basic premise as well as anyone has since (and with remarkably little modern credit, as Gage and Hickok (2005) point out). Wernicke wrote, in 1874:

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