  Modal symbols, on the other hand, retain information about the sources of their origin. They are not just symbols, but, in Barsalou’s (1999; Barsalou et al. 2003) terminology, perceptual symbols. Thoughts about a lake, for instance, consist in activation of the sensorimotor areas of the brain that had been activated during previous encounters with actual lakes. A lake thought re-activates areas of visual cortex that respond to visual information corresponding to lakes; areas of auditory cortex that respond to auditory information corresponding to lakes; areas of motor cortex that correspond to actions typically associated with lakes (although this activation is suppressed so that it does not lead to actual motion), and so on. The result is a lake concept that reflects the kinds of sensory and motor activities that are unique to human bodies and sensory systems. Lake means something like “thing that looks like this, sounds like this, smells like this, allows me to swim within it like this”. Moreover, because how things look and sound depend on the properties of sensory systems, and because the interactions something affords depends on the properties of motor systems, concepts will be body-specific.