The Spider's Thread: Metaphor in Mind, Brain, and Poetry

by Keith J. Holyoak

An examination of metaphor in poetry as a microcosm of the human imagination—a way to understand the mechanisms of creativity.

In The Spider's Thread, Keith Holyoak looks at metaphor as a microcosm of the creative imagination. Holyoak, a psychologist and poet, draws on the perspectives of thinkers from the humanities—poets, philosophers, and critics—and from the sciences—psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, and computer scientists. He begins each chapter with a poem—by poets including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Du Fu, William Butler Yeats, and Pablo Neruda—and then widens the discussion to broader notions of metaphor and mind.

Holyoak uses Whitman's poem “A Noiseless Patient Spider” to illustrate the process of interpreting a poem, and explains the relevance of two psychological mechanisms, analogy and conceptual combination, to metaphor. He outlines ideas first sketched by Coleridge—who called poetry “the best words in their best order”—and links them to modern research on the interplay between cognition and emotion, controlled and associative thinking, memory and creativity. Building on Emily Dickinson's declaration “the brain is wider than the sky,” Holyoak suggests that the control and default networks in the brain may combine to support creativity. He also considers, among other things, the interplay of sound and meaning in poetry; symbolism in the work of Yeats, Jung, and others; indirect communication in poems; the mixture of active and passive processes in creativity; and whether artificial intelligence could ever achieve poetic authenticity. Guided by Holyoak, we can begin to trace the outlines of creativity through the mechanisms of metaphor.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology

288 pages, Hardcover

Published February 26, 2019

About the author

Keith Holyoak—cognitive scientist, poet, and translator of classical Chinese poetry—grew up on a dairy farm in British Columbia, Canada. He received his B.A. from the University of British Columbia, and his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University. He first joined the faculty of the University of Michigan, and later the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology. Holyoak has published over 200 papers and books. A recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Reviews

[Mateusz Kasprowicz]

The book keeps a good level of depth and as a result I felt engaged the whole time. Holyoak takes a lot of different approaches in tackling his subject but the end result is 'cohesive', in the sense that Holyoak uses this term: meaning, insights here are set against insights there to find alignment. That this works, reinforces the idea that metaphors are fundamental to the working of the mind.

[Paul Spencer]

An interesting review of metaphor, its use in poetry, the brain's unique processing of smallest verbal comparison to most sweeping conceptual analogy, and the mind's reliance on the deeper relations of reality. Really very fascinating and overall an enjoyable read. Recommended for anyone with the ability to appreciate a little bit of the sciences and humanities together.

[Ted]

Talk about up my alley: a book about the cognitive neuroscientific basis of metaphor in poetry? Sign me up. I fairly devoured this book.