I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World

by James Geary

  Philosopher Roger Scruton suggests that even something as immaterial as the appreciation of music depends on our experience of physical space. Citing musical terms like high and low notes and rising and falling tones, he argues that we can only understand music through spatial metaphors. “There lies, in our most basic apprehension of music165, a complex system of metaphor,” Scruton writes. “Take the metaphor away, and you cease to describe the experience of music.”

  Some experiments provide evidence that even mathematical thought may be at least partly based in the body166. Researchers asked a dozen right-handed subjects to randomly recite forty different numbers between 1 and 30 and monitored their eye movements as they did so. They noticed that if participants looked up and to the right they were more likely to pick a higher number than the previous one; if they looked down and to the left they were more likely to pick a lower number than the previous one.

  The research team concluded that even the disembodied realm of numbers is connected to the experience of our bodies in space. That connection may derive from basic physical facts we experience from birth, such as “more” generally equals “up,” an observation that applies to everything from Lego bricks to skyscrapers. Thus, anything that is greater than something else, even numbers, becomes associated with height.

  Similarly, the team concluded that right-handed people favor the right side of their bodies because they are more competent on that side. And since most people are right-handed, this preference could be the origin of metaphors like “my right-hand man” and the association of “left” with “evil” or “lesser” things, as in the word “sinister,” which is derived from the Latin for “left.”

  The synesthetic link between music/space and numbers/height167, like the correlations between sound/light, may be due to our ability to extract similar properties from dissimilar things. Just as we extract “depth” from a bass note because the sound is “low” in frequency, we extract “height” from a greater number because it is “more than” a lesser number.

  In terms of neurobiological economy, the mix of physical and metaphorical makes sense. As we evolved to process not only concrete sensory information but also increasingly abstract thoughts, new neural circuits did not evolve to handle these tasks. Instead, in a proposed evolutionary process called “scaffolding168,” existing circuits were adapted to do double duty.

  Thus, the brain module devoted to monitoring environmental temperatures branched out into monitoring emotional temperatures, too. The modules devoted to assessing physical space and weight started moonlighting as assessors of psychological space and weight as well. In this way, the concept of psychological warmth became scaffolded onto physical warmth and the concepts of psychological space and weight became scaffolded onto physical space and weight.

  This synesthetic link between the abstract and the concrete may be the source of more than just metaphor, as cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker observed in The Stuff of Thought:

  If all abstract thought is metaphorical169, and all metaphors are assembled out of biologically based concepts, then we would have an explanation for the evolution of human intelligence. Human intelligence would be a product of metaphor and combinatorics. Metaphor allows the mind to use a few basic ideas . . . to understand more abstract domains. Combinatorics allows a finite set of simple ideas to give rise to an infinite set of complex ones.

  The theory that biological experience forms the basis for metaphorical thinking—or, indeed, for all thinking—is known as “embodied cognition,” an idea given contemporary formulation by cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Lakoff and Johnson observed that the most common metaphors, the ones we use instinctively and unconsciously every day, are all deeply rooted in our physiology.

  Expressions like “I’m feeling up today” and “I’m high,” Lakoff and Johnson argue, derive from the metaphorical equation of happiness and height, while expressions like “I’m feeling down today” and “I’m low” derive from the metaphorical equation of dejection with depth. Why? Because we are literally up (i.e., vertical) when we are active, alert, and awake and we are literally down (i.e., horizontal) when we are sluggish, sleepy, or sick.

  Ordinary language is filled with such elevated and depressed phrases. People who come across all high and mighty need to be taken down a peg. If you put someone on a pedestal, they often sink to new lows. You can look up to someone, at least until he crashes and burns.

  All kinds of studies show the physical-psychological links between high and low. People recognize negative words faster in a low versus a high vertical position170 and positive words faster in a high versus a low vertical position. The taller the vertical lines on a company’s organizational chart, the more powerful people judge that company’s executives to be171. People reporting symptoms of depression respond faster to objects in the lower rather than the higher portions of their visual fields172. Even a physical action as mundane as moving marbles from a lower to a higher position correlates with the recall of positive memories173, while moving marbles from a higher to a lower position correlates with the recall of negative memories.

  The same synesthetic effect shows up in links between desirability and size. Study participants evaluate positive words more quickly when they are presented in larger font sizes174 and negative words more quickly when they are presented in smaller font sizes. This correlation lies behind common metaphorical expressions like “He has a big salary” and “She has a small mind,” providing a physical grounding for the truism “bigger is better” and a plausible psychological clarification for the popularity of “super-sized” meals.

  The “Belt Tightening Lies Ahead” headline that Rebecca had so much trouble with is another example of a synesthetic metaphor in which an abstract concept is described via a physical property. Phrases like “She’s out in front on this issue” and “We’re all behind you” conceal the spatial metaphors of front and back. Even the “seeing is knowing” metaphor is synesthetic, equating the concrete experience of vision with the abstract experience of understanding. But “seeing is knowing” only makes sense if you’re a member of a species for whom vision is the primary source of information.

  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. And their synesthetic metaphors are similarly gustatory:

  Taste played as important a part in their imagery175 and conception as sight in our own. Many ideas which terrestrial man has reached by way of sight, and which even in their most abstract form still bear traces of their visual origin, the Other Men conceived in terms of taste. For example, our “brilliant,” as applied to persons or ideas, they would translate by a word whose literal meaning was “tasty” . . . Many of our non-visual concepts also were rendered by means of taste. “Complexity” was “many-flavored,” a word applied originally to the confusion of tastes round a drinking pool frequented by many kinds of beasts.

  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.

  Without conceptual metaphors like these, Lakoff and other advocates of embodied cognition believe, we would have no way of talking about—or even thinking about—abstractions like love, beauty, suf
fering, and joy. According to Lakoff and Mark Turner, another cognitive scientist:

  Basic conceptual metaphors177 are part of the common conceptual apparatus shared by members of a culture . . . We usually understand them in terms of common experiences. They are largely unconscious, though attention may be drawn to them. Their operation in cognition is mostly automatic. And they are widely conventionalized in language, that is, there are a great number of words and idiomatic expressions in our language whose interpretations depend upon those conceptual metaphors.

  There may even be a neurological basis for some conceptual metaphors. Back in the late 1960s, Polish neurophysiologist Jerzy Konorski identified what he called “gnostic neurons,” brain cells that fire in response to images of specific people or objects. These neurons later came to be known as “grandmother cells” because of an experiment in which researchers observed that specific brain cells responded to pictures of participants’ grandmothers. More recent work has shown that these neurons respond not only to physical representations but also to the concepts behind those representations.

  Researchers showed eight epileptics, each of whom had electrodes implanted in their brains to identify areas responsible for their seizures, a series of pictures of famous people or places. The team then recorded which neurons fired in response to which pictures. They found that specific neurons were activated in response to specific images.

  Some neurons responded only to pictures of Bill Clinton, for example; others responded only to pictures of The Beatles or basketball star Michael Jordan or characters from The Simpsons. The same neurons even responded to a person’s name. One participant had “Halle Berry neurons178” that fired in response to pictures of the actor as well as the words of her name, suggesting that these cells were responding not just to the image of Halle Berry but to the idea of Halle Berry, too.

  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.

  Some scientists speculate that such brain cells might also encode behaviorally important features of the environment, allowing us to toggle back and forth between physical space and conceptual space. If that suggestion is correct, these cells would have evolved, or been scaffolded, to perform exactly the kind of double duty needed to process literal and metaphorical thought. If a single cluster of neurons can encode the concept of Halle Berry, why not LOVE IS A JOURNEY or IDEAS ARE FOOD as well?

  Most conceptual metaphorical expressions have long ago petrified into cliché. Yet that is not to say the synesthetic connections and grandmotherly cells that may have occasioned them in the first place also lie dormant. As cognitive linguist Zoltan Kovecses has pointed out, “The ‘dead metaphor180’ account misses an important point; namely, that what is deeply entrenched, hardly noticed, and thus effortlessly used is most active in our thought.”

  Synesthesia creates the experience of one sense in the context of another. Metaphorical thinking creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which one concept is understood in the context of another. The abstract is understood in the context of the concrete, the metaphysical in the context of the physical, the emotional in the context of the biological. Through metaphor, body and mind are inextricably intertwined.

  Metaphor and the Body

  Anger Is a Heated Fluid in a Container

  Time flies. The day drags by. The hours crawl. Spatial metaphors of movement like these are commonplace when describing time. But time, of course, does nothing of the kind. Each of these figurative phrases is, Lakoff and Johnson would argue, an instance of the TIME IS MOTION conceptual metaphor.

  Time’s physical flight is evident even in basic temporal terms like “then” and “when,” which have etymologies rooted in space—“then” and “when” both come from a Germanic word indicating “from that place.” Indeed, brain scans show that when we think about time, the regions devoted to motion and spatial relations are active as well181. A simple experiment demonstrated just how embodied our concept of time actually is.

  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?

  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?

  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.

  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.

  The same experiment was carried out with students waiting in line at a café and people on a moving train183. In both cases, the results were the same. Those who had experienced the most forward motion—the students at the front of the line and the passengers nearest the end of their journeys—were more likely to say that the meeting had been moved to Friday, consistent with the metaphorical understanding of an event in time as a stationary object toward which we move.

  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.

  Metaphor grounds even the most abstract ideas in the physiological facts of our bodies. Through a process known as “priming,” these physiological facts insensibly shape our beliefs and behavior.

  Priming posits that, through a process of metaphorical association, the physical profoundly impacts the psychological, and vice versa. Sensations, objects, and experiences repeatedly occur together with internal states, thereby becoming linked in our minds. Proximity, for instance, occasions both bodily and emotional warmth. So over time, we come to connect the two, describing our loved ones as near and dear and our most intimate friends as bosom buddies.

  A similar process takes place in the brain. The more often clusters of neurons respond together, the stronger the connections among them become. If speci
fic neuronal groups respond repeatedly over time to the same stimulus—anything to do, say, with Halle Berry—the connections become fixed. In neuroscience, this is known as the “neurons that fire together wire together” axiom.

  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.

  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”).

  In his famous studies of impression formation, Solomon Asch noticed how the physical correlated with the metaphorical. He compiled a list of adjectives that applied to both, including the pairs “warm” and “cold,” “dull” and “bright,” “straight” and “crooked,” and “bitter” and “sweet.” He then researched other, very different languages187—Old Testament Hebrew, Homeric Greek, Thai, Malayalam (a language spoken in southwestern India), Hausa (spoken in West Africa), and Burmese, among others—and found exactly the same words used in exactly the same ways.