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

by James Geary

  Morris observed that expectancy bias was at its height when information was presented in trajectory-like graphs. It was lower when financial information was presented in tables of numbers. They speculated that this is because graphs, such as those showing future growth projections, work much like visual metaphors, often depicting a trend heading inexorably in one direction. One way to tamp down expectations raised by agent metaphors is to display information as tables of numbers rather than in graph format.

  Another way to limit expectancy bias is to mind your metaphors. The next time you hear “the NASDAQ climbed higher” or “dropped off a cliff,” remember this simply means that the NASDAQ increased or decreased, terms that don’t trigger such powerful metaphorical associations. “Unexamined metaphor87 is a substitute for thinking—which is a recommendation to examine the metaphors, not to attempt the impossible by banishing them,” McCloskey wrote in The Rhetoric of Economics. “Metaphors evoke attitudes that are better kept in the open and under the control of reasoning.”

  Given the proliferation of financial commentary in print, online, and on TV, we might do well to pry our tongues from the price graphs on our plasma screens or, as Robert Frost warned, risk being taken for a ride by metaphor.

  Metaphor and the Mind

  Imagining an Apple in Someone’s Eye

  Rebecca arrives for our appointment, at a London café near the Thames, clutching a newspaper clipping. The headline reads:

  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.

  Rebecca (not her real name) has no idea what this headline means. The use of “lies” in this context she can just about grasp, since similar usages have been explained to her in the past. But “belt tightening”? “I don’t wear a belt,” she notes matter-of-factly. On first reading the headline, she says she pictured lots of belts and lots of people tightening them. “Is the article about a new fashion trend? Or a new diet craze?” Rebecca hasn’t got a clue.

  Almost anyone else, of course, immediately understands that this headline refers to how a recession weakens consumer confidence, prompting households to cut back on spending. Rebecca, however, needs to read the entire article to understand this. And even then, the link between the economy and an article of clothing that holds up your pants still eludes her.

  This failure to understand metaphor happens to Rebecca, who is working toward a doctorate in mathematics education, all the time. During one particularly animated classroom discussion, for example, a student nonchalantly referred to the elephant in the room. Alarmed, Rebecca quickly looked around to see if she could find the beast.

  After a series of clashes with other staff at her first teaching job, Rebecca was called into the office of the headmaster, who kicked off the conversation by observing, “So you’ve been burning bridges again.” Rebecca became indignant, convinced he had accused her of arson, and stormed out of the room.

  Rebecca has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism characterized by impaired social communication, interaction, and imagination. She was diagnosed with the condition in 2007, when she was twenty-seven years old. Asperger’s and other autism spectrum disorders (ASD) affect about 1 percent of the population and are found much more commonly in males than in females. The causes of ASD are unknown, though genetic factors are almost certainly involved.

  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 motivations88 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 metaphor.

  Mark Haddon deftly explored the angst and alienation this causes in his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, in which the main character, Christopher Boone, a young boy with ASD, is bewildered by routine social situations. Christopher finds people confusing because they use so many metaphors, like: “I laughed my socks off89. He was the apple of her eye. They had a skeleton in the cupboard. We had a real pig of a day. The dog was stone dead.”

  Christopher muses on metaphor, describing it in classic Aristotelian fashion as “when you describe something90 by using a word for something that it isn’t.” He ultimately concludes (like Hobbes, Berkeley, and Locke) that metaphors are both deceptive and dangerous:

  I think it should be called a lie91 because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining an apple in someone’s eye doesn’t have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.

  Individuals with ASD tend to find socialization and communication so difficult because so many of our daily interactions—everything from etiquette to gossip to business negotiations—are mediated by metaphor. It was only after her diagnosis that Rebecca “recognized how much I didn’t recognize,” she says. Before that, she thought everybody was just as confused as she was by figurative language. Her condition can turn the simplest social situations into frightening and embarrassing experiences.

  When Rebecca joined her university’s climbing club, the instructor welcomed her to the first class by warmly greeting her and saying she would send someone over to “show you the ropes.” “I know what a rope is,” Rebecca thought to herself, “and why you need one in a climbing club. Why do they need to show me those?” She completely failed to get the social meaning of what the instructor was saying; namely, “I will send someone over to familiarize you with the way we do things around here.” “You look very odd when someone says something and you don’t get it,” Rebecca explains.

  When someone used the phrase “he’s a big fish in a small pond” in conversation, she thought it was a reference to a shark in a goldfish pond. This amused the people she was with, but embarrassed Rebecca.

  “It separates you from people,” she says, “and so you start to avoid situations that cause difficulty, which in turn causes even more isolation. If I feel I missed something important, it is very upsetting. I worry about the future of my career, how I will be able to work with people, to have a normal social life.”

  Rebecca feels the metaphor deficit in all aspects of her life. She doesn’t read poetry and has trouble with novels, too; the metaphors mean nothing to her. She finds it hard to get emotionally involved in films, since she can’t pick up the verbal and physical hints that reveal a character’s feelings. She prefers the clarity and precision of mathematics.

  Rebecca is learning to recognize phrases that contain figurative language, but she can’t always decipher them. Sometimes, she can understand the meaning of a metaphor if it is explained to
her. But, more often than not, she can’t.

  She has a number of coping strategies. If she encounters a phrase she doesn’t understand during class, she Googles it when she gets home. That doesn’t always help, however. She still can’t figure out how the story of the Trojan horse relates to computer viruses. The more unusual the metaphor—the more distant the source from the target—the more difficult it is for her to grasp.

  Rebecca, like individuals without ASD, has no problem using or comprehending simple extinct metaphors, such as “I see what you mean.” But in trying to comprehend active and dormant metaphors, Rebecca automatically visualizes them in literal representations, as she did with the “belt tightening” headline. This is, in fact, a sensible interpretative technique, since the best metaphors invite us to picture astonishing events like laughter propelling socks from feet, apples lodged in eyeballs, and skeletons capering in closets.

  “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.

  So it’s logical that a reference to an important issue no one wants to discuss will set off Rebecca on an elephant safari. When she doesn’t find the animal, though, she cannot make the leap to the figurative meaning. Then she wonders what people are talking about. If it seems important, she plays it over and over in her mind, obsessing about it until it crowds out everything else. “It interferes with everything,” Rebecca says. “Other people just think I’m being strange, a bit odd.”

  The oddity other people often notice about individuals with ASD has to do with the lack of what researchers call “theory of mind,” the ability to understand—or read—the mental states of others and to predict their behavior based on social cues such as body language, facial expressions, and figures of speech.

  Most of us can easily read other people’s minds. We do it all the time. Say, for example, you’re chatting pleasantly with someone who has his arms firmly crossed across his chest. You instinctively note the disconnect between that person’s posture and what he is saying. The person’s body language belies his speech, leading you to conclude that (unless he’s chilly) he may not be as happy as he seems. We call this intuition; autism researchers call it mind-reading; those with ASD cannot do it.

  Individuals with ASD tend to be easily flummoxed by social situations in which other people’s feelings must be inferred from ambiguous clues. In one study, people with ASD were shown a series of illustrations depicting a burglar making his getaway after robbing a house. A policeman happens to stroll by, unaware that a crime has just been committed. The policeman sees the burglar drop a glove and shouts95, “Stop!” The burglar puts his hands in the air, turns around, and gives himself up.

  Participants in the study did not get the irony of the story96 because they were unable to read what was in each character’s mind. The burglar thought he had been caught red handed, but the policeman was just trying to return his glove. The individuals studied were unable to attribute different beliefs to the different characters. They could not put themselves in someone else’s shoes.

  Yet putting ourselves in other people’s shoes is exactly what the protocols of social life require us to do. We understand other people’s intentions and states of mind by understanding the physical cues of body language and the verbal clues of figurative language. Social language “is riddled with figurative phrases97 that require one to compute the speaker’s unspoken meaning or intention,” writes Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge in the United Kingdom, in Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. “In decoding figurative speech98 (such as irony, sarcasm, metaphor, or humor), mind-reading is even more essential.”

  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 say, a process akin to pretend play, another activity in which people with ASD have difficulty engaging.

  In pretend play, two people both know that a specific scenario is not literally the case—and they both know that the other person knows this, too. A child knows, for example, that when an adult touches a toy teacup and withdraws his hand in pain, the teacup is not really hot. The same principle is at work in metaphor. Unlike Rebecca, most people do not think that the headline “Belt Tightening Lies Ahead” introduces a fashion article.

  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 possible99 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.

  Researchers call this ability to hold two ideas about one thing in the mind at the same time “double knowledge,” and it becomes pronounced around the age of two when children begin to play “make-believe” games and use their first words.

  In children, just as in the pattern recognition experiments with the chimpanzee Sarah, the two sides of double knowledge are normally linked either through functional similarity100 (a shoe can double as a teacup because both can hold liquid) or perceptual similarity (a banana looks like a telephone).

  Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget observed this kind of double knowledge at work in his own daughter, Jacqueline, who once said of a bent twig, “It’s like a machine for putting in petrol101.” Piaget called this phenomenon “syncretism102,” describing it as a “condensation by which several disparate images melt into one . . . and transference by which the qualities belonging to one object are transferred to another.” We discover—or invent—these functional and perceptual similarities using our pattern recognition abilities.

  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.

  Make-believe games are therefore “not representations of the world104 but representations of representations,” or metarepresentations. “Pretence is105 an early manifestation of what has been called theory of mind,” Leslie concluded.

  Metarepresentations are not a million miles away from metaphors. Take the relatively straightforward metaphor

  My job is a jail.

  From a cognitive point of view, saying “My job is a jail” is a lot like pretending that a banana is a tel
ephone. In both cases, there are primary representations (my actual job, the actual banana) and second-order representations (my job-jail, the banana-phone). By grafting certain characteristics of jails—a confined space, soul-crushing routine, no chance of escape—onto my idea of my job, I create a metarepresentation of my job while leaving the primary representation of my job intact. I select only those features of jails that I regard as relevant to my job and ignore the rest.

  This process is exactly what happens in pretend play. The shape of the banana is relevant for my telephonic purposes, so I include that in my second-order representation; the banana’s squishiness is not, so I ignore it. At no time do I mistake the banana for an actual phone, just as when I say “My job is a jail,” few people will take me literally—unless, of course, I happen to be employed in a prison. Both the speaker and the listener know that my job is not a real jail, and they both know that the other person knows this, too.

  Leslie suggested that people with ASD have difficulty with pretend play because they are unable to make metarepresentations, an inability that may also hamper their comprehension of metaphor. To understand metaphors, literal truth must be quarantined so metaphorical truth can emerge. Some research suggests that individuals with ASD find it difficult to quarantine literal truth because of malfunctioning brain cells known as mirror neurons106.

  Mirror neurons (note the metaphor in the name!)107 were first discovered in the mid-1990s, in the premotor cortex of monkeys. Since then, they have been discovered in human brains, too. These neurons are active whenever an animal performs an action (reaching for a banana, for example) and whenever the animal observes that same action performed by another animal.

  Mirror neurons also kick in during emotional responses. The same neurons that fire when we wrinkle our noses and stick out our tongues in response to foul smells also fire when we see someone else wrinkle her nose and stick out her tongue. The same thing happens with pain; neurons active when we observe someone in pain are also active when we are in pain ourselves. By reflecting the actions of others in our own brains, mirror neurons may enable us to feel empathy, to intuit other people’s emotions, and to guess other people’s motivations. Mirror neurons may be the neurological shoehorn that allows us to slip into other people’s shoes.