I is an Other Quotes

“Pattern recognition is so basic that the brain's pattern detection modules and its reward circuitry became inextricably linked. Whenever we successfully detect a pattern-or think we detect a pattern-the neurotransmitters responsible for sensations of pleasure squirt through our brains. If a pattern has repeated often enough and successfully enough in the past, the neurotransmitter release occurs in response to the mere presence of suggestive cues, long before the expected outcome of that pattern actually occurs. Like the study participants who reported seeing regular sequences in random stimuli, we will use alomst any pretext to get our pattern recognition kicks.

Pattern recognition is the most primitive form of analogical reasoning, part of the neural circuitry for metaphor. Monkeys, rodents, and birds recognize patterns, too. What distinguishes humans from other species, though, is that we have elevated pattern recognition to an art. "To understand," the philosopher Isaiah Berlin observed, "is to perceive patterns."

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.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“If our bodies were different, though, our metaphors would be different, as Olaf Stapledon showed in Star Maker. Crabs walk sideways, for instance. If crabs could talk, they would undoubtedly describe progress in difficult negotiations as sidling toward agreement and express the hope for a better future by saying their best days are still beside them.

Our bodies prime our metaphors, and our metaphors prime how we think and act.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“To convey the operation of electromagnetic fields, Feynman used the master metaphor of two corks floating in a pool of water. If you move one cork around in the water, you immediately notice that the other one moves, too. Looking only at the two corks, Feynman explained, a naive physicist might be forgiven for thinking there was some kind of interaction between the corks that caused one to move in response to the other.

The second cork, however, is not moved directly by the first cork but by the movement of the water. "If we jiggle the cork...waves travel away," Feynman explained, "so that by jiggling, there is an influence very much farther out, an oscillatory influence. That cannot be understood by the direct interaction. Therefore the idea of direct interaction must be replaced with the existence of the water, or in the electrical case, with what we call the electromagnetic field.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was such a lauded lecturer in large part because, like Hui Tzu, he was skilled in finding the right analogies to illustrate his explanations of extremely abstract-and extremely difficult-concepts. He once compared a drop of water magnified 2,000 times to "a kind of teeming...like a crowd at a football game as seen from a very great distance." That description has all the precision of good physics and good poetry.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“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 backward. It seems that we're not in a position to decline our inclination to regard the future as something in front of us.

In South America, however, speakers of Aymara gesture behind themselves when talking about the future. 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.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“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.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“It scares me shitless," I admitted. (The "scared shitless" metaphor derives from the physiological fact that animals in stressful situations-an antelope pursued by a lion, for example-involuntarily defecate to shed excess weight, thus speeding their flight.)”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“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 faethm, 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 outsretched 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.

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.

Fathom took on its present significance in classic Aristotelian fashion: through the metaphorical transfer of its original meaning (a measurement of cloth or water) to an abstract concept (understanding). This is the primary purpose of metaphor: to carry over existing names or descriptions to things that are either so new that they haven't yet been named or so abstract that they cannot be otherwise explained.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“The word "kenning" comes from the Old Norse verb kenna, which is also a "seeing=knowing" metaphor, meaning "to know, recognize, or perceive." The etymology survives in words meaning "to know" in various Scandinavian languages as well as in German and Dutch. Kenna is also the source of the English "can" as well as the somewhat arcane "ken," as found in the expression "beyond my ken," meaning "beyond my knowledge.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“Metaphors, whether in poems or advertisements, only work with our active collusion. Metaphors are born plotters and we are their eager co-conspirators. They need us, as readers and consumers, to complete the link between deodorant and sexual prowess, fast food and immediate gratification, real toads and imaginary gardens. By stepping outside the constant commerce of imagery and affect, we can allow our actual needs and desires to surface.

Smoke may always get in our eyes, but where there is smoke there is not always fire.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“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.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“Few people may be consciously aware of the etymological origins of common words and phrases, but the essential metaphor-making process of comparing the unknown with the known is still vital and ongoing. This process is the way meaning was, is, and ever shall be made.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“A kenning is a metaphorical circumlocution consisting of paired nouns or a noun phrase. For example, in ancient Icelandic verse, a sword is not a sword but an "icicle of blood"; a ship is not a ship but the "horse of the sea"; and eyes are not eyes but the "moons of the forehead." Similarly, the earth is "the floor of the hall of the winds" or "the sea trodden on by animals," while fire is "destroyer of timber" or "the sun of houses.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“Why should jokes and metaphors give such pleasure? Because we can't stand very much ambiguity. Cognitive dissonance makes us uneasy, and for good reason-survival depends on making the world as predictable as possible. So when we figure something out, when we impose order on what seems chaotic, we heave a psychological sigh of relief.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“No one can achieve profound characterization of a person (or place) without appealing to semi-unconscious associations. To sharpen or intensify a characterization, a writer makes use of metaphor and reinforcing background-weather, physical objects, animals- details which either mirror character or give characters something to react to...The game proves more dramatically than any argument can suggest the mysterious rightness of a good metaphor.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“Why do statisticians never have friends?

Because they're mean people.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“What color is the wind?

Blew.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“What did the Dalai Lama say when he got an electric shock?

Ohm.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“Comparing your beloved to a red, red rose might be fine if you're writing a poem, but these thinkers believed more exact language was needed to express the "truth"-a term, by the way, distilled from Icelandic, Swedish, Anglo-Saxon, and other non-English words meaning "believed" rather than certain.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“that the unknown can only be made known through metaphor and analogy. “When we pass beyond pointing to individual sensible objects330, when we begin to think of causes, relations, of mental states or acts, we become incurably metaphorical,” Lewis wrote. “We apprehend none of these things except through metaphor.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World

“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.”
― James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World