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I Is an Other

The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

James Geary

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115 quotes

language-arts

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  • To achieve this systematized disorder, Rimbaud believed the poet needed to see similarity in difference and difference in similarity. Things are never just things in themselves; a visionary company of associations, correspondences, semblances always attends them. Everything can be seen—and, for Rimbaud, everything should be seen—as something else.Mar 22 2024 10:45AM
  • “I is an other” is more than just the Seer Letters’ grandest dictum. It is metaphor’s defining maxim, its secret formula, and its principal equation. Metaphor systematically disorganizes the common sense of things—jumbling together the abstract with the concrete, the physical with the psychological, the like with the unlike—and reorganizes it into uncommon combinations.Mar 22 2024 10:46AM

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  • Elvis Presley: She touched my hand13, what a chill I got. Her lips are like a volcano that’s hot. I’m proud to say that she’s my buttercup. I’m in love; I’m all shook up.Mar 22 2024 10:52AM
  • “All Shook Up” is a great love song. It is also a great example of how, whenever we describe anything abstract—ideas, feelings, thoughts, emotions, concepts—we instinctively resort to metaphor. In “All Shook Up,” a touch is not a touch, but a chill; lips are not lips, but volcanoes (technically, any formulation involving the word “like” is a simile—as in, “Her lips are like a volcano that’s hot”—but a simile is just a metaphor with the scaffolding still up); she is not she, but a buttercup; and love is not love, but the state or condition of being all shook up.Mar 22 2024 10:51AM
  • In describing love this way, Elvis follows Aristotle’s classic definition of metaphor as the process of “giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.” This is the mathematics of metaphor, the simplest equation of which can be written like this: X = Y.Mar 22 2024 10:52AM
  • And Shakespeare uses it in his famous line from Romeo and Juliet: “Juliet is the sun15.” In the mathematics of Aristotle’s poetics, the line is written: Juliet = sun. Here, Shakespeare gives the thing (Juliet) a name that belongs to something else (the sun). This is a textbook example of metaphor.Mar 22 2024 10:52AM
  • Derived from the Greek roots meta (over, across, or beyond) and phor (to carry), the literal meaning of metaphor is “to carry across.” A metaphor carries across a name from the source to the targetMar 22 2024 10:53AM
  • Even the simplest, most unassuming words are capable of a bewildering variety of metaphorical mutations. Take “shoulder18,” for instance. You can give someone the cold shoulder or a shoulder to cry on. You can have a chip on your shoulder or be constantly looking over your shoulder. You can stand on the shoulders of giants, stand shoulder to shoulder with your friends, or stand head and shoulders above the rest. Wherever you turn, you can’t help but rub shoulders with one of the word’s multitude of metaphorical meanings.Mar 22 2024 4:05PM
  • Scientists and inventors compare two things: what they know and what they don’t know. The only way to find out about the latter is to investigate the ways it might be like the former. And whenever we explore how one thing is like another, we are in the realm of metaphorical thinking, as in this comparison, another academic staple, from Scottish poet Robert Burns: My love is like a red, red rose21.Mar 22 2024 4:07PM
  • According to the Greeks, the world was made up of just two basic things: atoms and the void. “Atoms are unlimited in size and number23,” wrote Democritus, the fourth-century B.C.E. philosopher who formulated ancient Greece’s version of atomic theory, “and they are borne along in the whole universe in a vortex, and thereby generate all composite things—fire, water, air, earth; for even these are conglomerations of given atoms.”Mar 23 2024 10:37PM
  • But Epicurus, who was born around 341 B.C.E., spotted a flaw in the theory. In order to meet its match, an atom could not simply fall through the void like rain. It must veer from the vertical path and waft its way down like a feather. Otherwise, he reasoned, it would never bump into any other atoms and thus never form the conglomerations Democritus described. So Epicurus came up with the clinamen—the unpredictable moment during which each atom deviates from its course, creating the opportunity for a chance encounter with another atom. It was only through these “clinamactic” collisions, Epicurus believed, that change, surprise, and variety entered the world.Mar 23 2024 10:37PM
  • In The Foundations of Science, Poincaré set out his general theory of ingenuity. Based on his own experience as well as his interrogations of other mathematicians, Poincaré concluded that great creative breakthroughs occur unexpectedly and unconsciously after an extended period of hard, conscious labor. He invoked an Epicurean analogy to explain this. Poincaré described ideas as being like Epicurus’s atoms, writing: During the complete repose of the mind26, these atoms are motionless; they are, so to speak, hooked to the wall . . . During a period of apparent rest and unconscious work, certain of them are detached from the wall and put in motion. They flash in every direction through the space . . . as would, for example, a swarm of gnats . . . Their mutual impacts may produce new combinations. What is the role of the preliminary conscious work? It is evidently to mobilize certain of these atoms, to unhook them from the wall and put them in swing. After this shaking-up imposed upon them by our will, these atoms do not return to their primitive rest. They freely continue their dance.Mar 23 2024 10:39PM
  • Poincaré’s atomic two-step is a deft analogy for how mathematical creativity—indeed, all creativity—lies in the dance of metaphorical thought, the tumultuous tango that ensues when idea rubs up against idea, when thought grapples with thought.Mar 23 2024 10:40PM
  • Metaphor is the mind’s great swerve. Creativity don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that clinamactic swing.Mar 23 2024 10:40PM

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  • Historically, metaphor has often been considered a devious use of language, an imprecise and vaguely suspicious linguistic trick employed chiefly by charlatans, faith healers, snake oil salesmen, and poets. Many philosophers regarded metaphorical language as at best a harmless diversion and at worst a deliberate and potentially dangerous obfuscation. As a result, not many serious thinkers took metaphor at all seriously.Mar 23 2024 11:07PM
  • Open a dictionary at random; metaphors fill every page. Take the word “fathom,” for example. The meaning is clear. A fathom is a measurement of water depth, equivalent to about six feet. But fathom also means “to understand.” Why? Scrabble around in the word’s etymological roots. “Fathom” comes from the Anglo-Saxon fæthm, meaning “the two arms outstretched.” The term was originally used as a measurement of cloth, because the distance from fingertip to fingertip for the average man with his arms outstretched is roughly six feet. This technique was later extended to sounding the depths of bodies of water, since it was easy to lower a cord divided into six-foot increments, or fathoms, over the side of a boat. But how did fathom come to mean “to understand,” as in “I can’t fathom that” or “She’s unfathomable”? Metaphorically, of course.Mar 23 2024 11:10PM
  • You master something—you learn to control or accept it—when you embrace it, when you get your arms around it, when you take it in hand. You comprehend something when you grasp it, take its measure, get to the bottom of it—fathom it.Mar 23 2024 11:12PM
  • This ferrying back and forth happens all the time. What accounts for the amazing acceleration of a sports car? Horsepower. What happens to an economy when growth falls and unemployment rises? A depression. What do you see when you switch on a computer? A desktop. These are all metaphors, names taken from one thing and applied to a completely different thing because someone somewhere once noticed a resemblance.Mar 23 2024 11:13PM
  • Look at and listen to the language around you and you will discover a moveable feast of metaphor. Let me run this idea by you; ideas do not have legs (neither do tables or chairs, by the way) but “run” is used metaphorically to request a brisk consideration of a proposal. Similarly, combs do not have teeth; books do not have spines; and mountains do not have feet.Mar 23 2024 11:13PM
  • The markets are jittery today; markets don’t get the jitters, investors do, but the phrase metaphorically expresses the reigning uncertainty.Mar 23 2024 11:14PM
  • I see what you mean; you “see” absolutely nothing when you say this, but you do convey quite clearly that you understand what someone else is saying.Mar 23 2024 11:14PM
  • Often, the most common phrases have the most intricate etymologies36. When someone does something beyond the pale, they are not pushing the boundaries of pigmentation. They are venturing outside the limits of the acceptable by going beyond the wooden stakes (“pale” comes from the Latin palus, meaning “pole” or “stake,” as in the English word “impaled”) that marked the edge of a settlement in the Middle Ages. Fences made of wooden pales often surrounded medieval towns and villages, demarcating the point beyond which it was considered unsafe—or unacceptable—to go.Mar 23 2024 11:16PM
  • When you take a parting shot at someone, flinging one last insult before you depart, you are reenacting a battlefield technique perfected by the ancient Parthians. The Parthians, who lived near the Caspian Sea around the first century B.C.E., were expert archers and horsemen. They lured enemies into the open by feigning retreat. Then, as their opponents advanced in hot (a metaphor for angry or impassioned) pursuit, they turned in their saddles and picked them off with their arrows, a practice known as the Parthian shot.Mar 23 2024 11:17PM
  • As archaeologist A. H. Sayce, who specialized in deciphering ancient languages, observed in The Principles of Comparative Philology: Our knowledge grows by comparing the unknown with the known, and the record of that increase in knowledge grows in the same way. Things are named from their qualities, but those qualities have first been observed elsewhere. The table like the stable originally meant something that “stands” but the idea of standing had been noted long before the first table was invented . . . Three-fourths of our language may be said to consist of worn-out metaphors.Mar 23 2024 11:18PM
  • In Japanese, anger is equated with hot stuff just as it is in English, Arabic, and the Sotho languages spoken in South Africa, though the locus of the combustion is different. English speakers with bad tempers are hotheads, while angry Tunisian Arabic speakers say their brains are boiling42. In the Sotho languages, angry people are described as hot-blooded but in Japan they have boiling intestines. Even in American Sign Language, anger is depicted as a fire or an explosion in the abdomen.Mar 23 2024 11:19PM
  • A better way to describe the relative animation of metaphors would be to classify them like volcanoes. (Elvis would no doubt approve.) Active metaphors are those still bubbling with figuration, as in early twentieth-century artist and author Wyndham Lewis’s definition: Laughter is the mind sneezing. Dormant metaphors, which tend to petrify into clichés, are those whose figurative nature slumbers just below the surface, as in the expression: We’re getting in over our heads. Extinct metaphors are those whose metaphorical magma will never rise again, as in the phrase: I see what you mean.Mar 23 2024 11:24PM
  • Even economics—the driest of all the sciences, a parched landscape of jagged flow charts and desiccated statistics—is drenched in metaphors, many of which describe money in terms of fluid dynamics. Liquidity is the ability to quickly convert assets into cash. A firm is solvent when it has plenty of liquid assets. Cash flow occurs at the confluence of revenue streams. A company floats shares in an initial public offering. Dark pools are platforms that allow share trading without revealing prices, even to the participants, until the trades are completed. Banks get bailed out when they are too big to fail. Governments prime the pump by pouring money into the economy. When you need money, you can tap a friend, sponge off relatives, dip into savings or—if you’re prepared to be unscrupulous—skim a little something off the top. When growth is buoyant, a rising tide lifts all boats. When options are underwater, though, checking your investment portfolio feels like snorkeling into a shipwreckMar 23 2024 11:27PM
  • Emerson wrote: The poets made all the words58, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.Mar 23 2024 11:29PM

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  • What they call “agent metaphors” describe price movements as the deliberate action of a living thing, as in “the NASDAQ climbed higher” or “the Dow fought its way upward.” In contrast, “object metaphors” describe price movements as non-living things subject to external forces, as in “the NASDAQ dropped off a cliff” or “the Dow fell like a brick.” The researchers found that “agent metaphors tend to be evoked by uptrends whereas object metaphors tend to be evoked by downtrends.” An interesting correlation, perhaps, but what does it have to do with the price of tea in China?Mar 23 2024 11:32PM
  • Morris and his colleagues observed that agent and object metaphors have very different effects on those exposed to them: “Agent metaphors imply that the observed trend reflects an enduring internal goal or disposition and hence it is likely to continue tomorrow . . . Object metaphors do not imply that it reflects an internal force that will manifest itself again tomorrow.”Mar 23 2024 11:32PM
  • To human beings, “agents”—anything to which we attribute human feelings, motives, and motivations—are special, so special, in fact, that attributing agency to stock price movements through agent metaphors can actually affect our financial decisions64.Mar 23 2024 11:32PM
  • Something entirely different is suggested by object metaphors like “the NASDAQ dropped off a cliff.” When something drops off a cliff, it tends to keep falling. And when it hits bottom, it usually remains exactly where it landed. So, if stock prices are described in passive terms as dropping, plunging, or plummeting, investors might be unconsciously prompted into panic selling, imagining that the decline is irreversible. This kind of thinking pushes investors to sell en masse when prices fall, at precisely the time when logic dictates they should be buying since stocks are becoming cheaper. This is exactly what happened during the Great Recession of 2008–2009.Mar 23 2024 11:33PM
  • Economists call this phenomenon expectancy bias. Once we spot what we think is a trend—a steady increase in house prices, for example—we involuntarily expect that trend to continue, an expectation aided and abetted by agent metaphors. This bias originates in the brain regions that are active whenever a stimulus repeats itself. These modules are largely responsible for our ability to detect patterns, an ability crucial to our physical survival—and to the evolution of metaphorical thinking.Mar 23 2024 11:33PM
  • Once a pattern has repeated itself long enough, it starts to influence behavior. Because lush meadows were found to reliably surround lakes and streams, for example, our brains came to associate green grass with fresh water.Mar 23 2024 11:35PM
  • In Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge, Edelman theorizes that the human brain’s astonishing interconnectivity produces consciousness and, because of the astronomical number of associations our brains are capable of making, pattern recognition is the basis not just for metaphorical thinking but for all thinking: Brains operate68 . . . not by logic but by pattern recognition. This process is not precise, as is logic and mathematics. Instead, it trades off specificity and precision, if necessary, to increase its range. It is likely, for example, that early human thought proceeded by metaphor, which, even with the late acquisition of precise means such as logic and mathematical thought, continues to be a major source of imagination and creativity in adult life.Mar 23 2024 11:36PM
  • “To understand,” the philosopher Isaiah Berlin observed, “is to perceive patterns.”Mar 23 2024 11:37PM
  • Metaphor, however, is not the mere detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns, too. When Robert Frost wrote, A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain his brain created a pattern connecting umbrellas to banks, a pattern retraced every time someone else reads this sentence. Frost believed passionately that an understanding of metaphor was essential not just to survival in university literature courses but also to survival in daily life.Mar 23 2024 11:37PM
  • In “Education by Poetry69,” a lecture delivered at Amherst College in 1930, Frost said, “I have wanted in late years to go further and further in making metaphor the whole of thinking.” He argued that, without a proper education in metaphor, students could not examine and evaluate the claims made by historians or scientists, newspaper editorialists or political campaigners. People “don’t know when they are being fooled by a metaphor,” he warned: Unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: You don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down. Knowing how far to ride a metaphor—and getting off before it breaks down—is fundamental when dealing with the figurative language of finance. Evolution may have made our pattern recognition abilities instinctive and involuntary, but it did not make them infallible.Mar 23 2024 11:38PM
  • Perhaps no other creature has had its pattern recognition abilities plumbed in such depth as the humble frog. And the frog’s gullibility in going after false patterns is a sobering analogy for the way we can be fooled by misleading financial metaphors. The frog does not have a very discerning palate. In fact, a frog will try to eat anything you put in front of it, as long as the object is about the size of an insect and moves around in jerky, staccato bursts. If it looks like a fly and acts like a fly, frogs think, it must be a fly. Warren S. McCulloch, a neurophysiologist and early contributor to the field of cybernetics, and a group of colleagues proved this back in the late 1950s when they performed a meticulous study of the frog’s visual apparatus.Mar 23 2024 11:40PM
  • One of the team’s most important discoveries was that, by the time a visual image reaches a frog’s brain, it is already to a large extent classified and interpreted. So, for example, when a frog sees an object about the size of an insect moving around in jerky, staccato bursts, it does not delay, debate, or deliberate. The frog immediately shoots out its tongue to grab it. The researchers called the fibers that respond in this way “bug perceivers71.”Mar 23 2024 11:40PM
  • The frog does not seem to see or, at any rate, is not concerned with the detail of stationary parts of the world around him. He will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving. His choice of food is determined only by size and movement. He will leap to capture any object the size of an insect or worm, providing it moves like one. He can be fooled easily not only by a bit of dangled meat but by any moving small object.Mar 23 2024 11:41PM
  • When it comes to stock price movements, we, too, take a frog’s eye view. We rely on implied trajectories, suggested in part by agent and object metaphors. If it looks like a pattern and acts like a pattern, we think, it must be a pattern. This passion for pattern clouds our judgment whenever numbers or probabilities are involved, as when picking stocks—or playing basketball.Mar 23 2024 11:42PM
  • A team of researchers, including Amos Tversky who, along with Daniel Kahneman, founded the field of behavioral economics, which uses insights from the social sciences to inform theories of how people make financial decisions, investigated the notion of the “hot hand” in basketball. The “hot hand” theory is the belief that a player’s chances of hitting a shot are greater following a basket than following a miss on the previous shot.Mar 23 2024 11:42PM
  • Tversky’s group found that more than percent of fans believed that a player has “a better chance of making a shot after having just made his last two or three shots than he does after having just missed his last two or three shots.” Yet the probability of a hit was actually lower following a basket— percent—than following a miss— percentMar 23 2024 11:43PM
  • Our brains greedily seek patterns in everything, even in the chaos of stock prices and other financial statistics. As soon as we spot anything that looks like a pattern, we latch onto it as quickly as frogs snatch at anything that looks like a fly. Investors regularly chase hot stocks and hot funds, trying to invest in them before they go cold. This is especially true when agent metaphors are at work, because agents pursue goals—and that makes them special.Mar 23 2024 11:43PM
  • The agent and object metaphors of economics tap into this primal urge for pattern. Agents are special because only agents move of their own volition; only agents move with a purpose. And pattern recognition evolved in large part to predict the purpose of living things. According to Morris and his collaborators, “Uptrend stimulus trajectories should automatically trigger schemas for animate action and downtrends should trigger schemas for inanimate motion, regardless of whether the trajectories are encountered on sand dunes or stock charts.”Mar 23 2024 11:47PM

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  • BELT TIGHTENING LIES AHEAD “What does that mean?” she asks. This is a fascinating headline because, taken as a whole, it is an obvious metaphor. But each word in the headline is a metaphor, too. “Belt tightening” is a conventional metaphor for how households reduce spending because of dwindling amounts of disposable income. The phrase has become so familiar that it is now a cliché. Few people would spot it as a metaphor anymore. But the word “lies” is also a metaphor, because it metaphorically locates the abstract act of belt tightening (budget cutting) in physical space. The word “ahead” is a metaphor, too, because it metaphorically conveys that the belt tightening will take place in the future by situating the constriction in the physical space in front of the reader. In this simple set of four words, there are three distinct metaphors at work.Mar 23 2024 11:49PM
  • People with Asperger’s syndrome are typically highly functioning and of average or above average intelligence. Rebecca already has degrees in mathematics and educational research methods. But the difficulties those with ASD have understanding the world and communicating with others can lead to perceived behavioral problems, which can interfere with social relationships. It can be difficult for individuals with ASD to express emotions, to initiate and sustain relationships, and to understand common social cues like gestures and facial expressions. When shown the Heider and Simmel film, for example, most people with ASD won’t attribute intentions or motivations to the animated geometric shapes. Everything tends to be interpreted in strictly literal terms. As a result, those with Asperger’s and other ASDs typically have enormous difficulty understanding metaphorMar 23 2024 11:51PM
  • “The test of a true metaphor92,” the eighteenth-century English essayist, poet, and politician Joseph Addison observed, “is whether or not there is sufficient detail for it to be painted.” People consistently rate metaphors with vivid, concrete imagery as most memorable93, in part because most people recall pictures much better than words. Cicero, too, remarked on the visual aspect of metaphor: Every metaphor, provided it be a good one94, has a direct appeal to the senses, especially the sense of sight, which is the keenest . . . Metaphors drawn from the sense of sight are much more vivid, virtually placing within the range of our mental vision objects not actually visible to our sight.Mar 23 2024 11:54PM
  • The ability to mind-read enables us to understand that what people do is not always what they think; how people act is not always how they feel; and what people mean is not always what they sayMar 23 2024 11:58PM
  • In the 1980s, psychologist Alan Leslie set out to understand how pretend play works in the brain and why people with ASD have difficulty pretending. He started his investigation by posing the somewhat surreal question: “How is it possible for a child to think about a banana as if it were a telephone?” The ability to pretend, and to understand pretense in others, usually develops between the ages of twelve and twenty-four months. To be able to think about a banana as if it were a telephone, you must first be able to hold two different ideas in your mind at the same time. The child knows that if she picks up the banana, she will not hear a dial tone. But just as Robert Burns’s love is, in some respects, like a red, red rose, the banana is, in some respects, like a telephone. They both have roughly the same size and shape, both fit into the hand in the same way, and both cradle snugly between shoulder and chin.Mar 23 2024 11:59PM
  • According to Leslie’s theory, a make-believe game requires a primary representation (the thing itself as it actually is, i.e., the banana) and a second-order representation (the thing as it imaginatively is, i.e., the banana-phone). In pretend play, Leslie suggested, the child takes her primary representation of the banana and copies it to make a second-order representation. She now has two bananas in her mind, the real one and its copy. The child can introduce imaginative changes to the second-order representation that transform it into a telephone while leaving the primary representation intact. The literal truth of the banana is “quarantined103,” as Leslie put it, so that the imaginative truth of the banana-phone can emerge.Mar 24 2024 12:00AM
  • Rebecca has a way with words, too. She loves puns—and jokes in which the punch line is a pun—a passion, she says, that at times can try the patience of friends and family. Some of her favorites: Why do statisticians never have friends? Because they’re mean people. What did the Dalai Lama say when he got an electric shock? Ohm. What color is the wind? Blew. Puns like these share important characteristics with metaphors. Both involve a kind of double knowledge, in which speaker and hearer understand that what is literally said is not what is figuratively meant. To “get” puns, alternative word meanings must be accessed, just as with many metaphors. Unlike metaphors, however, puns can be logically figured out, just like a mathematical problem. “Puns are just different meanings of a word or different words that sound the same,” Rebecca says, “rather than something being used to mean something it isn’t.”Mar 24 2024 12:05AM

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  • Absolut vodka, for example, has been personified as a cool twenty-five-year-old, while Stolichnaya has been considered a more conservative older man. Cars are routinely imbued with human personalities (Explorer, Monarch, Warrior) or animal instincts (Mustang, Bronco, Cougar). Jennifer Aaker, a professor of marketing at the University of California, Los Angeles, has even defined five core elements of “brand personality119”: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.Mar 24 2024 2:00AM
  • After conducting more than 12,000 ZMET sessions for more than one hundred clients in over thirty countries, Zaltman has identified seven recurring motifs that, like Jungian archetypes, bubble up again and again from the depths of the consumer unconscious—balance, connection, container, control, journey, resource, and transformation. These, according to Zaltman, are the guiding metaphors of the marketplace.Mar 24 2024 2:02AM
  • In Zaltman’s taxonomy, the deep metaphor128 of balance refers to social and psychological equilibrium, expressed in phrases like “I am centered” and “It feels slightly off.” Connection involves the sense of belonging (“a team player” or “a loose cannon”). Container describes psychological or emotional states (“in a good mood” or “out of your mind”). Control implies mastery of events (“It’s out of my hands” or “We’re on the same page”). Journey suggests movement toward or away from a goal (“We’re on course” or “We got waylaid”). Resource references basic necessities such as food, family, friends, and finances (“bread and butter issues” and “My job is my lifeline”). Transformation encompasses physical or psychological change (“He turned over a new leaf” or “She’s a different person now”).Mar 24 2024 2:02AM
  • Deep metaphors are, for Zaltman, the ultimate hidden persuadersMar 24 2024 2:03AM
  • In her classic Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising, Judith Williamson dissected the way ads construct affective associations. An avid reader of both Karl Marx and glossy women’s magazines, Williamson would make the perfect ZMET subject. Her interest in advertising began as a result of her habit of tearing out ads from publications such as Vogue in order to study their effect on her. That effect, she concluded, is achieved through affect, the transference of human qualities and characteristics to consumer products.Mar 24 2024 2:11AM
  • In any advertisement, Williamson argues, there are always two meanings at work: the product itself and its host of semi-unconscious associations. Advertising works through metaphor—by transferring meanings back and forth. Ads, Williamson writes, “provide a structure137 which is capable of transforming the language of objects to that of people, and vice versa . . . Once the connection has been made, we begin to translate the other way and in fact to skip translating altogether: taking the sign for what it signifies, the thing for the feeling.”Mar 24 2024 2:12AM
  • The BDRC’s Smith compares interpreting a ZMET study to interpreting a poem: the art lies not in understanding what the words literally describe but what they emotionally realize. Williamson, too, links advertising with poetry, invoking the idea of the “objective correlative” as an explanation for the way ads achieve iconic status in our minds.Mar 24 2024 2:13AM
  • T. S. Eliot defined the objective correlative138 in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems”: The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked . . . The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotionMar 24 2024 2:13AM
  • Williamson suggests that ads create objective correlatives139 for mass consumption. A product becomes linked to a highly emotional state—the desire for everything from status, sex, and wealth to intimacy, community, and security—through powerful affective associations and archetypes. Once these connections are made, “ ‘Objective correlatives’ end up by being . . . the very indefinable qualities they were used to invoke,” Williamson writes.Mar 24 2024 2:14AM
  • The researchers also concluded that ads depicting food as exciting and upbeat—can I interest you in a McDonald’s “happy meal”?—prompted the most snacking. Ads such as these clearly access Zaltman’s “connection” and “resource” metaphors.Mar 24 2024 2:15AM
  • The research team concluded that exposure to fast-food logos not only made people eat more but also made them engage in more behaviors associated with fast food: impatience, hurry, and a desire for immediate gratification. In these experiments, participants took the signs for the qualities signified.Mar 24 2024 2:16AM

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  • Synesthetic metaphors follow a remarkably consistent pattern145: words derived from more immediate senses like touch, taste, and smell describe the experience of less immediate senses like sight and hearing. Touch, taste, and smell are “experience-based sensations,” whereas sight and hearing are “object-based sensations.”Mar 24 2024 2:19AM
  • Some researchers suggest that this movement from less to more immediate parallels the physiological development of the senses themselves146, thereby reflecting a basic mode of perception. Indeed, studies show that people find metaphors that follow this principle of directionality much easier to understand. Which may be why “sweet silence” (taste modifies sound) is common and “silent sweetness” (sound modifies taste) is not, and why “soft brightness” (touch modifies sight) makes sense and “bright softness” (sight modifies touch) does not.Mar 24 2024 2:21AM
  • The directionality of synesthetic metaphors follows the directionality of metaphor in general. Metaphorical thinking usually travels one way, appropriating concrete language—the words we use for everyday experiences and physical things and sensations—to describe abstractions like thoughts, feelings, emotions, and ideas. Juliet is the sun in ways that the sun is not and never will be Juliet.Mar 24 2024 2:23AM
  • Daniel Tammet is a synesthete as well as a savant. His memoir is titled Born on a Blue Day because his birthday—January 31, 1979—was a Wednesday and “Wednesdays are always blue149, like the number and the sound of voices arguing.” Tammet has an especially rich type of synesthesia, in which he experiences individual numbers up to 10,000 as having specific colors, shapes, textures, movements, and even emotional tones. To Tammet, “Five is a clap of thunder150 or the sound of waves crashing against rocks. Thirty-seven is lumpy like porridge, while eighty-nine reminds me of falling snow.”Mar 24 2024 2:24AM
  • In a classic study of how people form first impressions, social psychologist Solomon Asch gave two groups identical lists of character traits—except for one term. Half the participants received a list of adjectives including “intelligent,” “skillful,” “industrious,” “determined,” “practical,” “cautious,” and “warm”; the other half received the same list, except the word “cold” replaced the word “warm.” Each group then wrote a brief sketch of the person thus described. Those whose list included the word “warm” formed far more positive first impressions of the person than those whose list included the word “cold.”157Mar 24 2024 2:26AM
  • Similar studies have shown that people interviewing job applicants while holding a heavy rather than a light clipboard163 rated candidates as more important; people who handled rough jigsaw puzzle pieces described social interactions as more difficult than people who had handled smooth pieces; and people sitting on hard chairs were more rigid in price negotiations compared to people sitting in soft chairs. The metaphorical associations arising from these basic tactile sensations influenced participants’ perceptions of social situations, the researchers foundMar 24 2024 2:28AM
  • English author Olaf Stapledon wondered what metaphors might be used by a species whose primary source of information was a different sense. So in his visionary novel Star Maker, published in 1937, he invented a race of “Other Men” whose main sensory interaction with the world is taste. The “Other Men” have taste buds not just on their tongues and in their mouths but on their hands, their feet, and even their genitalia.Mar 25 2024 9:24PM
  • Lakoff and his collaborators have identified scores of what they call “conceptual metaphors176,” figurative phrases that describe fundamental abstract concepts using the language of physiology and physical experience. Expressions like “Your claims are indefensible” and “He shot down all of my arguments,” for example, are instances of the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR; “This relationship is a dead-end street” and “We’ll just have to go our separate ways” are examples of LOVE IS A JOURNEY; “This plan is half-baked” and “Let me chew it over for a while” exemplify IDEAS ARE FOOD.Mar 25 2024 9:25PM
  • The researchers believe gnostic neurons may be crucial in forming long-term memories as well as enduring concepts, which may arise from the repeated association of specific physical stimuli with specific abstract representations. Experiments with monkeys, for example, show that certain neurons respond to correlations among objects179. When a monkey is repeatedly shown unrelated objects, different neurons encode each object. But when those objects are presented together or in a recurring temporal sequence, the same neurons encode the objects. A neural link is thus formed among distinct things. In humans, this may be how metaphorical associations are formed.Mar 25 2024 9:28PM

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  • Participants looked at a drawing of a chair with a rope attached to it. Half of the subjects imagined pulling the chair toward themselves with the rope; the other half imagined sitting in the chair and pulling themselves forward along the rope. Both groups then read the statement “Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days182” and were asked: What day is the meeting that has been rescheduled?Mar 25 2024 9:30PM
  • The statement about next Wednesday’s meeting contains two metaphors of spatial movement: the first, the meeting itself is a physical object that can be moved; the second, rescheduling the meeting means moving it forward in space. The answer to the question “What day is the meeting that has been rescheduled?” is not obvious, because the concept of “forward” in the context of “the future” is ambiguous. When the meeting is rescheduled, does it move closer to you or do you move closer to it?Mar 25 2024 9:30PM
  • The answer depends on whether you metaphorically regard time as something in motion that approaches you or something in motion that carries you with it. In the former scenario, you remain stationary as time brings next Wednesday’s meeting closer. In the experiment, this corresponds to pulling the chair toward you with the rope. In the latter scenario, you travel with time toward the stationary object of next Wednesday’s meeting. This corresponds to sitting in the chair and pulling yourself forward along the rope. The researchers found that people’s imagined positions in physical space affected their responses to the metaphorical movement of next Wednesday’s meeting.Mar 25 2024 9:37PM
  • Participants who imagined pulling the chair toward themselves more often reported that the meeting had been moved to Monday, consistent with the metaphorical concept that time moves events toward them. Participants who imagined pulling themselves along the rope more often reported that the meeting had been rescheduled to Friday, consistent with the concept that an event is a stationary object toward which time moves them.Mar 25 2024 9:32PM
  • These experiments demonstrate the conceptual synesthesia connecting our ideas of the concrete experience of space and the abstract experience of time. Our concept of physical motion through space is scaffolded onto our concept of chronological motion through time. Experiencing one—indeed, merely thinking about one—influences our experience of and thoughts about the other, just as the theory of embodied cognition suggests.Mar 25 2024 9:33PM
  • In priming, the physical fuses with the psychological. Once this rewiring takes place, as in the association of proximity with emotional warmth, traffic flows both ways: from mind to matter and from matter to mind. Our internal states determine whether we get up close and personal or remain cold and distant. But external circumstances determine our internal states, too. When primed by an associated cue—however trivial or irrelevant that cue might seem—we tend to think and act in ways consistent with the prime.Mar 25 2024 9:37PM
  • Thus, people asked to plot points on a line relatively far apart184 report weaker family bonds than those who plot points on a line relatively close together. People seated in an upright position185 report feeling more pride than when they are seated in a slouched position. In the former case, physical distance foreshadows psychological distance; in the latter case, physical posture stiffens psychological posture. Metaphors function as primes, too. People shown texts containing metaphors for speed186 (“on a fast track to success”) read them faster than texts containing metaphors for slowness (“on a slow path to success”).Mar 25 2024 9:38PM
  • In the West, people typically gesture in front of themselves when talking about the future. In one study, participants contemplating the future even tended to lean forward, while those recalling the past tended to lean backward189. It seems that we’re not in a position to decline our inclination to regard the future as something in front of us.Mar 25 2024 9:40PM
  • In South America, however, speakers of Aymara gesture behind themselves when talking about the future190. Why? In Aymaran culture, the past is ahead because it is already known and can therefore be seen. The future, in contrast, is unknown and can’t be seen; therefore, it is located behind the speaker. Aymaran and Western embodied concepts of the past and future are contradictory, yet they are based on identical bodily metaphors.Mar 25 2024 9:40PM
  • The horizontal metaphors of “front = future” and “back = past” are common in both languages. But Mandarin speakers also use vertical metaphors to refer to chronological sequences. Events occurring earlier in time are said to be “up” (April is above May), while events occurring later in time are said to be “down” (May is under April). English speakers use similar expressions—Her birthday is coming up; the watch was handed down from generation to generation—but far fewer than Mandarin speakers. Mandarin’s vertical bias also shows up in the fact that the language is traditionally written from top to bottom in columns running from right to left.Mar 25 2024 9:41PM
  • Boroditsky exposed speakers of both languages to horizontal or vertical primes—a picture of a black worm in front of a white worm, with an arrow indicating direction, accompanied by the sentence “The black worm is ahead of the white worm” or a picture of a black ball on top of a white ball accompanied by the sentence “The black ball is above the white ball.” She then asked participants temporal questions that did not involve spatial metaphors, such as “Is March earlier than April?” and “Is April later than March?” English speakers answered faster after horizontal primes; Mandarin speakers answered faster after vertical primes. Mandarin speakers answered faster after vertical primes despite the fact that they responded in English, suggesting that their preference for vertical primes was active regardless of the language in which they spoke.Mar 25 2024 9:41PM
  • Boroditsky even trained English speakers to use vertical metaphors when talking about time. They learned to say “cars were invented above fax machines,” for example, and “Wednesday is lower than Tuesday.” Like Mandarin speakers, English speakers trained in this way started answering earlier/later questions faster after vertical primes, suggesting to Boroditsky that “differences in talking do indeed lead to differences in thinking192.”Mar 25 2024 9:42PM
  • The same is true for all types of embodied metaphors. Just as we instinctively associate “up” with positive things and “down” with negative things, we associate “forward” with good things and “backward” with bad things. We routinely describe progress in difficult negotiations as “moving forward” and the return of unsavory personal practices as “going back to old habits.” Similarly, we are happiest when the best is still ahead and the worst is already behind us.Mar 25 2024 9:43PM
  • Our bodies prime our metaphors, and our metaphors prime how we think and act.Mar 25 2024 9:42PM
  • Colors197, too, have metaphorical significance as well as physical influence. We tend to routinely associate darker colors with strength and lighter colors with weakness, an association that holds across cultures. In one study, participants rated teams in darker professional football and hockey uniforms as nastier than teams in lighter uniforms198. The researchers wondered whether this association correlated with actual nasty acts, as measured by the number of penalties received. A review of penalties covering seventeen seasons, from 1970 through 1986, revealed that teams in darker uniforms committed more infractions than teams in lighter uniforms, and the penalties often involved prohibited aggressive acts, such as slashingMar 25 2024 9:46PM
  • During the 1979–1980 season, the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team provided optimum conditions for the study; players wore blue uniforms for the first half of the season and black uniforms for the second half. The team’s penalties averaged eight minutes when they wore blue and twelve minutes when they wore black. The players may have indeed committed more infractions while wearing black uniforms, or the referees may have merely been more wary and watchful of them in darker jerseys. Either way, the color’s metaphorical associations triggered a physical response.Mar 25 2024 9:45PM
  • An analysis of more than fifty seasons of an English soccer league showed that teams wearing red jerseys finished higher in the rankings and won more home games than teams in other colors. In another study, a static variation on the classic Heider and Simmel film, researchers showed volunteers differently colored circles and asked which would be most likely to prevail in a physical competition. And the winner was . . . red.Mar 25 2024 9:47PM
  • Researchers in one study, in which participants had to retrace a memorized path with their eyes closed, found that mental simulation was as effective as physical practice in walking the simplest routes204. Even the duration of actual and simulated strolls tends to be roughly the same. When test subjects are asked to imagine walking specific distances205, the time it takes them to reach the imagined goal is equivalent to the time it would take to actually walk that distanceMar 25 2024 10:08PM
  • The upshot of all this research is: thinking is a kind of simulated interaction with the world206, a metaphorical engagement that makes what we imagine more realistic. Mental images can have the same effect on the body and the mind as actual physical things. And metaphors are mental image makers par excellence (another physical metaphor, by the way, from the Latin excellere via French, meaning “to rise above,” “to project from,” or “to stick out”). Metaphors are experience’s body doubles, standing in for actual objects and events.Mar 25 2024 10:08PM

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  • Priming can even influence judgments intended to be objective, unbiased, and completely independent. A muster of German trial judges read the details of the same criminal case in which the defendant was found guilty229. Researchers then told one group that the prosecutor demanded a two-month sentence and another group that the prosecutor demanded a thirty-four-month sentence. The judges were then asked for their recommendations. The average sentence was nineteen months when judges were told that the prosecutor demanded two months and twenty-nine months when they were told that the prosecutor demanded thirty-four months. Judges even gave significantly longer sentences when they were told that the person demanding the thirty-four-month jail term was not a prosecutor but a first-semester computer science student.Mar 26 2024 6:32AM
  • The Stroop effect237 is named after John Ridley Stroop, a devout Christian preacher and professor of religion who in 1935 happened to publish one of the most widely cited studies in the history of cognitive psychology. Subjects look at the names of colors printed in variously colored inks and must name as quickly as possible the color of the ink in which a specific word is printed. This task is easy when the word and the color of the ink are the same. People easily reel off, say, “green” when the word “green” is printed in green ink. Things get trickier when the name of the color is different from the color in which the word is printed; for example, when the word “green” is printed in blue ink. Then, subjects are inclined to read the word “green” rather than to name the color “blue.” It takes longer for subjects to state the correct ink color, indicating that the meaning of the word itself creates “cognitive dissonance” that interferes with the ability to name the color of the ink. (To take the Stroop test, go to http://www.at-bristol.org.uk/stroopeffect.html.)Mar 26 2024 6:44AM
  • “Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life,” Carlin observed. “Football begins in fall, when everything is dying . . . Football is concerned with ‘downs’; What ‘down’ is it? Baseball is concerned with ‘ups’; Who’s ‘up’?” Carlin concluded his compare-and-contrast exercise with a consideration of the games’ fundamentally different objectives: In football, the object is for the quarterback, otherwise known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy, in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack which punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy’s defensive line. In baseball, the object is to go home and to be safe.Mar 26 2024 7:34AM
  • George Orwell believed the political chaos that he felt characterized his time was connected to the decay of language. “If thought corrupts language267,” he wrote, “language can also corrupt thought.” He had a particular aversion to political language, describing it as “designed to make lies sound truthful268 and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”Mar 26 2024 7:38AM

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  • A good metaphor is like a good detective story320. The solution should not be apparent in advance to maintain the reader’s interest, yet it should seem plausible after the fact to maintain coherence of the story. Consider the simile “An essay is like a fish.” At first, the statement is puzzling. An essay is not expected to be fishy, slippery, or wet. The puzzle is resolved when we recall that (like a fish) an essay has a head and a body, and it occasionally ends with a flip of the tail.Mar 26 2024 7:41AM
  • So the next time you admonish a rambunctious seven-year-old with the wise words “Look before you leap,” don’t be surprised if all that greets you is a blank stare. The wisdom of those words won’t sink in until she has taken a few falls for herself. Similarly, a despondent teenager recovering from his first unrequited love affair won’t find “There are plenty of fish in the sea” very helpful, at least not until he hooks up with someone else he likes even better. We see the world darkly, through Black’s piece of heavily smoked glass. It takes time and lots of real-life encounters before children are able to clear new lines of sight.Mar 26 2024 7:44AM

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  • But Deutsch warns against prematurely invoking metaphor. As Oppenheimer pointed out, analogies are always flawed because one thing is never exactly like some other thingMar 26 2024 7:49AM

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  • Synectics members had to have a high tolerance for the irrelevant, a childlike willingness to engage in combinatory play, and an advanced ability to suspend criticism and disbelief. They also had to perform extended role-playing. If a team was tasked with developing a new kind of unbreakable glass, for example, they were asked to imagine and articulate what it would be like to be a piece of glass, in much the same way that Iowa Writers’ Workshop participants were asked to imagine what kind of smoke Marlon Brando might be.Mar 26 2024 8:00AM
  • According to Gordon, the Synectics process involves two things: making the strange familiar and making the familiar strange. Playing with metaphor, he believed, is the best way to do that: “Ultimate solutions to problems400 are rational, the process of finding them is not.” Aristotle was on to a similar idea when he wrote: “Strange words simply puzzle us401; ordinary words convey only what we know already. It is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh.”Mar 26 2024 7:59AM
  • Williams instructed the client team in how to recognize and solicit metaphors while working with consumers in the field. They used the tried and tested personification method, for instance, asking the panel: “If insurance companies were animals, what kind of animals would they be?”Mar 26 2024 8:43AM
  • Williams taught them how to fish for analogies through which they might catch crucial market insights. The client team regularly asked seemingly off-the-wall questions, like “What was your favorite toy growing up?” and then encouraged members of the consumer panel to think about how health insurance could be like that toy.Mar 26 2024 8:43AM
  • In working with this material, Williams encouraged the client team to practice “metaphor mining: Find out what’s below the surface. Pull out things that are surprising, paradoxical, or don’t make sense, things that might reveal what the consumer intended without knowing he intended it.” Or, as Gordon and Prince would say, look for things that make it strange.Mar 26 2024 8:44AM
  • While Synecticsworld’s client made the familiar world of health insurance strange by exploring the metaphors of the uninsured, practitioners of the emerging field of biomimicry make the strange world of nature familiar by emulating the survival strategies of living things to solve human problems.Mar 26 2024 8:55AM
  • Biomimicry is yet another term imported from the Greek, drawn from the prefix bio (life) and the noun mimesis (imitation). Biomimicry is, literally, the imitation of life. Janine Benyus, the field’s most prominent theorist, calls biomimicry “innovation inspired by nature404.” Faced with a human problem—say, how to prevent hospital-acquired infections, like the “super-bug” methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)—biomimics look for natural models in which the same or a similar problem has already been solved. Once a suitable model is found, inventors, designers, and scientists copy it, adapting nature’s solution to fit the human need.Mar 26 2024 8:55AM
  • Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone after studying the operation of the bones inside the human ear. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, engineer of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, realized how to dig tunnels under the Thames for the London Underground by watching a worm burrow into a piece of timber. The distinctive design of Pringles resulted from a Synectics session in which participants thought about how compaction was accomplished in nature; an analogy with the way fallen leaves stack together led to the innovative shape of the potato chip and its vertical packaging.Mar 26 2024 8:57AM
  • Benjamin Franklin made many of his discoveries about electricity by looking to nature for analogies. Franklin observed that electricity behaved a lot like lightning, a resemblance he described in detail in a journal entry on November 7, 1749Mar 26 2024 8:57AM

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  • So, when a client uses a metaphor in a clean session, the therapist treats the phrase literally and begins asking questions of it. “When someone says, ‘I’m a ticking bomb,’ normal logic says, ‘That’s not real,’ ” Lawley explains. “Clean language asks, ‘What kind of bomb? Is there anything else about that ticking?’ ”Mar 26 2024 8:59AM
  • The first six clean questions, known as “developing” questions, are signposts to direct clients deeper into their metaphor landscapes. Each question begins with “and” to emphasize the sense of a continuing narrative and the expectation that the metaphor, if followed, will actually lead somewhere. The therapist also repeats the client’s exact words when posing questions, thus keeping the landscape clear of everything but the client’s own metaphors.Mar 26 2024 8:59AM
  • The six developing questions are as follows (X and Y represent verbatim quotations of what the client has previously said): And is there anything else about X? And what kind of X is that X? And where/whereabouts is X? And that X is like what? And is there a relationship between X and Y? And when X, what happens to Y?Mar 26 2024 8:59AM
  • The second set of questions, known as “moving time” questions, create the metaphor’s backstory, sketching in the context against which the metaphor plays out. The three moving time questions are: And then what happens?/And what happens next? And what happens just before X? And where could/does X come from?Mar 26 2024 8:59AM
  • The final set of basic questions, known as “intention” questions, nudge the metaphor toward the client’s actual experience, connecting the metaphor landscape with the changes the client would like to see in his or her actual life. The three intention questions are as follows (the material in brackets represents the exact words the client has previously used): And what would you/X like to have happen? And what needs to happen for X to [achieve what X would like to have happen]? And can X [achieve what X would like to have happen]?Mar 26 2024 8:59AM
  • Metaphor has a paradoxical power. It distances an experience by equating it with something else, but in so doing actually brings that experience closer. “By talking about what something is not, you understand what it is,” as Lawley puts it.Mar 26 2024 9:01AM

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  • The logic of metaphor is the logic of our lives. Metaphor impinges on everything, allowing us—poets and non-poets alike—to experience and think about the world in fluid, unusual ways. Metaphor is the bridge we fling between the utterly strange and the utterly familiar, between dice and drowned men’s bones, between I and an other.Mar 26 2024 9:03AM

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