#1164 Rafael Núñez: Embodied Cognition, Time, Space, and Mathematics

Oct 17, 2025

In this engaging discussion, Rafael Núñez, a Cognitive Science Professor at UC San Diego, delves into the fascinating world of embodied cognition. He explains how our minds process time and space using bodily experiences and gestures. Núñez highlights cultural differences in conceptualizing time, revealing how languages shape our understanding. He also explores the development of numerical cognition, emphasizing the role of cultural practices in shaping mathematical concepts. Overall, this conversation unravels the interplay between our physical existence and cognitive processes.

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INSIGHT

Mind Is Body And Context

Embodied cognition rejects a purely abstract, brain-only view and emphasizes the body's physiology and social context.
Different embodied approaches vary but share grounding cognition in bodily and environmental constraints.

INSIGHT

Brain In A Living Body

The brain exists within a body that has anatomy, metabolism, and social dependencies shaping cognition.
Núñez stresses analyzing cognition as brain-plus-body-plus-social interaction across development.

INSIGHT

Reduce Carefully, Include Gesture

Research must balance necessary reductionism with preserving bodily and social factors that shape cognition.
Gesture production reveals meanings that grammar-alone analyses miss.

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Dr. Rafael Núñez is a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Núñez investigates cognition from the perspective of the embodied mind. He is particularly interested in high-level cognitive phenomena such as conceptual systems, abstraction, and inference mechanisms, as they manifest themselves naturally through largely unconscious bodily/mental activity (e.g., gesture production co-produced with a variety of conceptual mappings). He is the author of Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being.

In this episode, we talk about embodied cognition, time and space, and mathematics. We first discuss embodied cognition. We talk about how we process time and space cognitively. We then get into what numbers are, and how numerical cognition develops. Finally, we discuss where mathematics comes from.

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