When you are as thoughtful, intellectually curious, and gracious as Larry Barsalou is, you can inspire others without even knowing it. While I have never been lucky enough to work with Larry closely as a mentee or a colleague, my career would not be what it is today without his personal influence.

To understand Larry’s impact on me, I need to give some background. In the 1990s, I was a philosophy and linguistics graduate student at the University of Chicago, where Larry was a faculty member. While in graduate school, I had a close friend, Jesse Prinz, who was younger, hipper, and smarter than I was. Jesse started going to classes and seminars taught by Larry, and I tagged along – not realizing the delayed effect that they would eventually have on me. I seriously doubt that Larry remembers me from this time. After all, I was not in his department, I was working on a topic that was unrelated to his research interests (our biological endowment for language), and I wasn’t contributing much to class discussion.

Jesse would go on to work with Larry directly. He would write a dissertation that would become his first book, “Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and their Perceptual Basis.” He and Larry would also write a couple of well-cited book chapters together.

In the last stages of graduate school, I moved from Chicago to Louisville to be the primary caregiver of my daughter while my wife went through medical school and residency. Eventually, I served as a post-doctoral fellow in a developmental neuropsychology lab at the University of Louisville. Working on various projects in the lab, I became interested in research on imageability and concreteness effects. Thinking back to those classes in graduate school, I recognized that abstract concepts provided an important challenge to grounded cognition in general and Larry’s perceptual symbol system theory in specific. I wrote up my concerns in a long piece that I submitted (against the very reasonable advice of my colleagues) to a prominent journal. I received two constructive but challenging reviews. One was signed by Larry. After two difficult rounds of revision, the manuscript was accepted.

Like many academics, my early career was tenuous. It is not an exaggeration to say that I might not be in academia now if it were not for Larry’s guidance on a manuscript that was somewhat critical of his approach. Not only did the article provide a significant boost to my self-confidence, but the subject matter laid the groundwork for almost two decades of research. I have been exploring various themes related to abstract concepts and what they reveal about how the brain encodes word meaning ever since. Several articles and a book were to follow.

I haven’t been in the same room with Larry since graduate school. During the Covid-19 pandemic, though, I was able to interact with him in several virtual forums. Remarkably, he has lost none of his creativity or verve. He continues to inspire me with new ideas and to show patience when I express my heterodox views.

I realize that there are many contributors to this celebration of Larry’s career who have a deeper personal connection to him than I do. However, I could not pass up the opportunity to show my gratitude to Larry for the influence that he has had on me as a teacher, a researcher, and a colleague. Thanks, Larry!