ABSTRACT
Kinesic intelligence is a higher-order intellectual competence that allows human beings to interact and grow cognitively and intersubjectively through sensorimotricity and interpersonal movement. It is foundational to most forms of human communication, and it is dynamic at every level: it grows through brain development and embodied cognitive processes, it occurs during interactions with others in variable contexts and in response to experience, and it evolves in relation to historical, environmental, and technological situations and semiotic sociocultural systems, logics, and practices. This introduction presents the rationale and structure of the book, a collective research volume in which leading international scholars investigate kinesic intelligence from the perspective of their own fields of research, namely linguistics and the multimodality of language acquisition in children; teenagers and young adults in clinical psychology and medical humanities; nonverbal communication in history; legal language and reasoning; literature and cognitive studies; the Internet and multispecies anthropology; and sensoriality in history and art with a focus on scent.
Keywords: Kinesis; cognition; human intelligence; sensorimotor communication; dynamic neuronal networks; humanities
