The title of Mark Turner's bold new book describes not a bookish mind but the ordinary human mind, in which literary mental powers are the basis of everyday thought. In The Literary Mind, Turner argues that we have been looking in the wrong places for answers to basic questions about meaning, mind, and language. Here, Turner ranges from the tools of modern linguistics and classical rhetoric, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, as he explains how story and projection--and their powerful combination in parable--are fundamental to everyday thought. Language itself, he concludes, is the child of the literary mind. Offering major revisions to our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origin and nature of language, The Literary Mind presents a unified theory of central problems in cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. Adventurous and convincing, Turner's work launches a new understanding of what it is to have a human brain.