Your Mind is a Projector

Let's explore what kind of tool a metaphor can be in the context of thought and decision making, creative and otherwise.

In an earlier post about media consumption I touched on this briefly when I explained how to make listening to music in a particular way transferable to other contexts. In that post, I explain how the music and what happened with it as it changed can be seen as a metaphor for whatever other thing you're trying to do. Today I would like to explore this idea a bit further.

Now I shall bring to your attention an atrociously short snippet from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet that you may have come across before. It's been discussed in practically every English-speaking high school classroom as well as among scholars and armchair philosophers.

“...Juliet is the sun.”

A line written for Romeo, and part of a much larger excerpt that is often quoted.

A Bit of Background

Not being a great fan of this play, I nonetheless want to throw this line at you to introduce my topic because, for many people, this is what the study of metaphors begins with. Metaphors leave it up to the reader/listener to interpret the meaning, and the process of interpretation activates the same areas of your brain a sensory activity would, because it invokes your imagination in order for the interpretation to happen. In order for your brain to process the metaphor, it needs to deconstruct the word into associations you have with it, most of which will usually be sensory or motor-based.

Thus when we hear that Juliet = sun, we're unlikely to think of the sun's true form, with Juliet being compared to a spherical mass of burning gas capable of giving you skin cancer or even simply burning you to ash depending on your level of exposure (but hey, that's a fun interpretation. There's the joy of creativity: even an old, overused expression can take on new meanings when you dig around in it. Oh Juliet, you ol' ball o' gas.) No, we're more likely to think of our actual experience with the sun. Pleasant, warm, and literally lighting up your world.

Though I do wonder if this metaphor might me perceived differently by people from places where the sun is harsh and scorching. People from the world's hottest countries, holler at me! If you were writing that someone was the sun, what would you mean by that?

Metaphors are Easy Learnin'

So, to skip ahead a bit, we're pretty hardwired to process metaphors. We've been using metaphors to explain complex concepts for millennia, and we still employ this tactic. For example, when introducing the topic of electric currents to schoolchildren, we might talk about it using the concept of crowds moving through the school hallways, which kids would be familiar with.

This does have a bit of a dark side, though, as leaning on a metaphor, consciously or subconsciously, can lead to a misunderstanding or a limited action plan, for example. Using a metaphor to explain a more complex topic like electricity might be misleading when trying to explain the parts where the analogy no longer works. There have been cases where metaphors have so thoroughly shaped someone's thoughts, that they neglected vital information because it didn't fit with the metaphor-driven narrative they'd devised when explaining the situation at hand.

As Paul H. Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky write in their article, Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning, because we think in metaphors, it can affect the action we choose to take, depending on what analogy our brain is most familiar with in a given situation. They explore how crime policies would differ based on whether people were exposed to a "crime is a beast" versus "crime is a virus". In a nutshell, team beast would come up with policies centring around capturing, detention, and punishment while team virus tended to formulate their ideas in terms of looking for the root of the problem and "inoculating" the populace against the spread of criminal thinking. It is also worth mentioning that the folks who took part in the study didn't give the existence of the metaphor due significance when asked what they believed affected their thought process. It's a fascinating read, please check it out.

That said, being aware that this is the case means that we can always a) reflect on whether we're stuck because we're thinking within the boundaries of a metaphor, and b) try on a different metaphor in order to come up with a different action plan. Turn the bug into a feature, as it were. To do that, try the following exercise.

The Exercise

1. Write a brief description of what you're doing and for what purpose

2. Check for figures of speech and words with strong associations (are you fighting something? Maybe crime is a virus?). If you found some, see if the actions being taken or proposed are in line with the associations and literal context of said phrases

3. Try to rephrase your description using a metaphor, regardless of whether or not you'd already found metaphors in there. If you did find some figures of speech in there, write a different metaphor in

4. Try to avoid using existing metaphors. See what happens when you write (and then deconstruct) something weird, like "this presentation is eggs."

The Takeaway

As Francis Bacon apparently said, knowledge is power. As I definitely said, knowing this little tidbit about ourselves can help turn something that could, in theory, cloud our vision, into something that can open up new avenues for creative problem solving. But knowing the theory is just a part of it. If we actually work at it, that's where results eventually happen.

I shall leave you with the following metaphor-laden meme as food for thought. See what happens if you allow yourself to consider it in all seriousness just for fun: Knowledge is power, France is bacon.

Good day to you.