When I first agreed to write a review of Lakoff & Narayanan’s book The neural mind, I was asked to focus on its ‘relevance and usefulness to those working with socio-cognitive approaches to sociolinguistics and discourse studies’ (Brian King, pc, 21 June 2025). There is no doubt that the book covers an impressively large terrain of neuroscience, computer science, and cognitive linguistics, in which computational models serve to bridge theories from neuroscience with those from cognitive linguistics. The authors provide accessible introductions to relevant aspects of these disciplines, but ideas and facts that are relevant to social cognition and discourse are left largely implicit.
The main premise of the book is that ‘ideas arise from and reside in neural circuitry interacting with the social and physical world’ (vii). This entails the phenomenon of neural plasticity, that is, increases or decreases in synaptic strength, according to experiences of, and interaction with, people and ideas. Importantly, this is a social phenomenon: when expressed in language use and other behaviour, ideas spread by being repeated in social situations and in turn strengthen other people’s synapses. The authors’ observation that ‘whoever gets their language to dominate public discourse will have their ideas of what is right dominate in society’ (331) is reminiscent of the earlier assertion that ‘people in power get to impose their metaphors’ (Lakoff & Johnson Reference Lakoff and Johnson1980:157). In addition, neural optimisation—the principle of using the least possible energy for a given purpose—means that existing neural structure is preferred, making it hard, although not impossible, to change such hegemonies.
A related stabilising factor is unconscious neural integration, meaning that conscious thought is based on unconscious processes such as perception, which are changed to fit existing neural connections. It would have been easy to relate this observation to the notion of confirmation bias as formulated in social cognition. There are many such instances in The neural mind where scholars in cognitive sociolinguistics or (socio-)cognitive critical discourse analysis would wish Lakoff and Narayanan to go further. They state that ‘the neural unconscious, working socially and politically, is constantly creating a reality that can be very scary and needs to be understood’ (73), but they do not elaborate on how the neural is linked to the social and the political. Similarly, when discussing the link between grammatical aspect and event schemas, they merely mention that metaphor has a function in discourse domains like politics and economics, but do not expand on what that function may be. A final example is the distinction between action schemas and event schemas, where the latter do not include agents; it would be a small step to add that event schemas may be used ideologically to background agents and responsibility, yet the authors neglect to make that point.
Cognitive linguistics is said to be ‘about the nature of ideas’ (8), including what the authors alternatively call primary ideas, embodied schemas, or embodied primitives. These can be combined into more complex conceptual frames, which characterise institutions and govern behaviour and which ‘can be consciously imposed on a situation by the use of language’ (114). Mapping one embodied primary schema, or indeed a conceptual frame, onto another yields conceptual metaphors. This hierarchy echoes Kövecses’ (Reference Kövecses2017) levels of metaphor, albeit without acknowledging his work on extended conceptual metaphor theory (Kövecses Reference Kövecses2020). It could also be added that ‘social cognition in the form of ideology is at work at every stage after the formation of primary metaphors’ (Koller Reference Koller2004:42). The final ‘idea’ in cognitive linguistics is conceptual integration, which the authors see realised in ‘cultural constructions that go beyond natural experience—such as myths, stories, cultural practices, and institutions’ (150).
As for the role of discourse as a form of social interaction, the authors draw on speech act theory and Grice’s cooperative principle to emphasise that the interpersonal function of language use is primary. They state unequivocally that ‘language is less about communicating facts and more about social coordination’ (28). However, the social functions of language are limited to pragmatics, which is in turn reduced to speech act theory and within that mostly to the illocutionary force of speech acts. This narrow perspective, discussed in no more than eight pages (251–58), is in stark contrast to the wealth of neural detail, down to electro-chemical processes in the brain, that the authors present elsewhere to explain central concepts in cognitive linguistics. As Lakoff & Narayanan put it: ‘This book is about science, but its ramifications are about power’ (73). As such, it provides ideas that readers who are interested in the relations between language, power, and society can develop further.
The title of the book makes a sweeping promise to explain ‘how brains think’. While this is not unusual for volumes in cognitive linguistics (see e.g. Fauconnier & Turner’s (Reference Fauconnier and Turner2002) work The way we think), Lakoff & Narayanan’s style is characterised by hyperbole: they repeatedly call their subject matter ‘shocking’ and ‘dramatic’ and make liberal use of italics and exclamation marks. There are also some long quotes from Lakoff’s own works and the occasional self-praise, although this is tempered by positive evaluation of others’ research and occasional criticism of the first author’s earlier work. What is striking, however, is the choice of metaphor when dismissing generative approaches: ‘The idea of a … ‘language organ,’ as proposed by Noam Chomsky, is dead, killed off by our understanding of the neural mind’ (335–36). The tone of this very late reckoning with a former advisor seems out of place. There are also a few strawman fallacies, when the authors claim that unspecified linguists and philosophers adhere to the modular theory of mind or to the idea that meaning fits reality.
At times, The neural mind seems to patch together previous works without sufficient editing, for example, when someone else’s work is referred to as a ‘chapter in this volume’ (150) or works published between 1997 to 2009 are called ‘recent evidence’ (201). The organisation of material gets increasingly incoherent towards the end of the book, and what sounds like a closing sentence (‘we hope that this book has been a significant step…’, p. 338) is followed by a seemingly unmotivated section on neural phonology. Lack of proofreading reinforces the impression that the book has been put together somewhat carelessly.
Given that the first author is known not only for his contributions to cognitive linguistics but also for his political interventions, it is surprising to get glimpses of western and US-centric, heteronormative, and binary thinking, all of which suggest a lack of reflexivity. At one point, the authors ask whether ‘social and political views [are] reflected in … neural circuitry? For example, are there generalized brain differences between liberals and conservatives?’ (81). This may be ‘an important and interesting empirical question’ (81), but it also is one that reinforces existing polarisation. The neural mind thus offers fascinating insights into the neural bases of ideological thought and discourse, but its social and political perspective remains limited.
