Spatial thinking occupies more than half the cortex and precedes language evolutionarily by millennia. In people, the brain regions that represent space come to represent abstract thought. Spatial thinking comes from the body acting in space, and those actions in space come to represent thinking in language, in gesture, and in the cognitive tools we create in the world to think, to communicate, and to create. 

Barbara Tversky
Professor Emerita
Stanford University/Columbia Teachers College