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

by James Geary

  Studies show that the mirror neuron system108 in people with ASD does not function properly. In one experiment, two groups of twelve-year-olds—one with ASD and one without—were shown pictures of faces displaying various emotions, such as fear, anger, or happiness. The children were asked to either observe the faces or to imitate them. In both cases, brain scans of typically developing children showed activity in sites identified with mirror neuron properties; scans of children with ASD did not.

  There may yet turn out to be cracks in the mirror neuron hypothesis, but the correlation between mirror system dysfunction and ASD109 suggests that these brain cells may provide a neurological basis for both theory of mind and metaphor. “To mind-read110, or to imagine the world from someone else’s different perspective, one has to switch from one’s own primary representations . . . to someone else’s representation,” Baron-Cohen writes. “Arguably, empathy, dialogue, and relationships are all impossible without such an ability to switch between our primary and our second-order representations.”

  This inability to switch between primary and second-order representations, between the literal and the figurative, may also help explain the metaphor deficit ASD brings with it. Yet not all forms of metaphorical thinking are inaccessible to those with ASD.

  In his memoir Born on a Blue Day, Daniel Tammet, who has Asperger’s and is a so-called autistic savant, describes how his mind works by association, a prime characteristic of metaphorical thought: “A chance word or name111 in the middle of a conversation can cause a flood of associations in my mind, like a domino effect . . . The sequence of my thoughts is not always logical, but often comes together by a form of visual association.”

  Like Rebecca, Tammet uses visual imagination to understand abstract or metaphorical terms. The word “complexity112,” for example, calls up in his mind an image of braided or plaited hair. He imagines the metaphor “fragile peace” as a glass dove.

  Tammet has extraordinary mathematical and linguistic abilities. He once recited the number pi from memory to 22,514 digits in just over five hours. For the past several years, he has been inventing his own language, called Mänti.

  Tammet builds Mänti in a way that would please über-etymologist Owen Barfield: he makes new words from the pre-existing words that most closely resemble what he is trying to describe. Thus, tardiness is kellokült113 (kello, meaning “clock,” and kült, meaning “debt”) and telephone is pullo114 (derived from puhe, “to speak,” and kello, “bell”).

  Rebecca has a way with words, too. She loves puns—and jokes in which the punch line is a pun—a passion, she says, that at times can try the patience of friends and family. Some of her favorites:

  Why do statisticians never have friends?

  Because they’re mean people.

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

  Ohm.

  What color is the wind?

  Blew.

  Puns like these share important characteristics with metaphors. Both involve a kind of double knowledge, in which speaker and hearer understand that what is literally said is not what is figuratively meant. To “get” puns, alternative word meanings must be accessed, just as with many metaphors.

  Unlike metaphors, however, puns can be logically figured out, just like a mathematical problem. “Puns are just different meanings of a word or different words that sound the same,” Rebecca says, “rather than something being used to mean something it isn’t.”

  Rebecca also has no trouble with analogical reasoning, even using an analogy to describe the difficulty she has with metaphor. When Rebecca encounters a non-literal phrase, she says she can learn it and its figurative translation word for word, just as she would memorize a phrase in an obscure foreign language. If she saw that exact phrase again, she would know what it meant because she had memorized it.

  The trouble is, metaphor is a moving target. “People are annoying in that they don’t use metaphors consistently—changing words, using two phrases together, mixing them up or simply making up their own,” Rebecca says. “This means I do not recognize the phrases, or work out far too late what they mean.”

  This process is analogous, she explains, to encountering a foreign phrase containing some of the words she has memorized but with new ones thrown in. Even though she can recognize certain words, she cannot translate the phrase as a whole. Knowing the exact meaning of one phrase doesn’t help in guessing the meaning of others.

  To help her translate the foreignness of figurative language, Rebecca often travels with a copy of The Asperger Dictionary of Everyday Expressions. The book contains over 5,000 phrases (which, as the compiler admits in the introduction, represents only a fraction of the metaphorical expressions in common use) and functions as a kind of tourist’s dictionary for strangers in the strange land of metaphor.

  With help from the Asperger Dictionary, Rebecca was able to understand what it means to play devil’s advocate115, defined as presenting “the argument for the opposite case without necessarily believing it.” The metaphor is derived from the title given to the cardinal at the Vatican assigned the task of finding evidence against a person being considered for sainthood.

  However, Rebecca still doesn’t get the meaning behind “to give someone the cold shoulder116,” which the Asperger Dictionary defines as “to be made to feel unwelcome.” The expression derives from the medieval habit of giving an unwanted guest unappetizing cold shoulder of mutton, suggesting they had outstayed their welcome.

  Rebecca’s experience, as well as that of others with ASD, reveals just how riddled with metaphor daily life is. The way individuals with ASD process and try to cope with figurative language provides important clues about how metaphorical thinking works in the brain, offering a fleeting glimpse of what goes on in our minds when imagining an apple in someone’s eye.

  Metaphor and Advertising

  Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads in Them

  What kind of smoke are you?

  That question may sound as nonsensical as asking how it is possible to think about a banana as a telephone, but in the 1950s members of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop regularly played a game called “Smoke117” designed to answer it.

  Intended as a warm-up exercise for workshop participants, Smoke was a more literary version of the old television game show What’s My Line?, in which celebrity panelists interrogated contestants in order to guess their (typically somewhat unusual) occupations.

  In Smoke, one player thinks of a person with whom the other players are familiar and provides a general clue about that person’s identity, such as “I am a living American” or “I am a dead European.” The other players then try to guess who that person is by asking offbeat, evocative questions like “What kind of smoke are you?” or “What kind of weather are you?” The player answers these questions as if the person really is a specific kind of smoke or weather.

  If the person in question is, say, Marlon Brando, the smoke might be from a fire in an empty oil drum on a desolate, rain-soaked dock; the weather would be sultry, smoldering, with dark clouds brooding.

  The aim of the game is to demonstrate how figurative language adds depth to characterization in fiction, as the novelist John Gardner, a member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1950s and an avid Smoker, explained:

  No one can achieve profound characterization118 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 character something to react to . . . The game proves more dramatically than any argument can suggest the mysterious rightness of a good metaphor.

  The mysterious rightness of metaphor is, of course, essential to arts other than fiction. Successful advertisements depend almost entirely on metaphors that resonate with the target audience. Advertising executives, copywriters, and graphic designers are, in many respects, prof
essional metaphor-makers.

  In devising campaigns, marketers regularly ask themselves and their focus groups questions like “If Product X was an automobile, what kind of automobile would it be?” and “If Product Y was an alcoholic drink, what kind of alcoholic drink would it be?” In fashioning commercial messages from answers to these kinds of questions, advertising executives are doing more than just blowing smoke up our assessments of consumer goods. They are searching for metaphors that tap into the emotional associations that motivate purchasing decisions.

  The metaphorical technique of personification is one of the primary ways to achieve this. After all, if we eagerly attribute human traits to Heider and Simmel’s animated geometric shapes, why wouldn’t we do the same for brand name products and corporations? Consumer surveys show this is exactly what we do.

  Absolut vodka, for example, has been personified as a cool twenty-five-year-old, while Stolichnaya has been considered a more conservative older man. Cars are routinely imbued with human personalities (Explorer, Monarch, Warrior) or animal instincts (Mustang, Bronco, Cougar). Jennifer Aaker, a professor of marketing at the University of California, Los Angeles, has even defined five core elements of “brand personality119”: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.

  The influence of these kinds of semi-unconscious associations on decision making is known as the “affect heuristic.” Decisions are easily influenced by our affective state, which can be determined by everything from the images we see to the words we read.120

  Affective states can be swayed by the seemingly innocuous, such as simply asking consumers about their buying intentions121. In one study involving some 40,000 participants, asking people whether they intended to purchase a car increased actual purchases by 35 percent. Another study found that those asked if they intended to avoid eating fatty foods in the coming week consistently chose a low-fat snack (a rice cake) over a high-fat snack (a chocolate chip cookie) in a taste test.

  Researchers have observed that simply placing a “Limit 12 per customer122” sign above a stack of tomato soup cans influences sales. Shoppers read the sign, and the word “limit” immediately raises associations of value and scarcity. That tomato soup must be pretty good, we think, otherwise the store would not have to restrict purchases. Better stock up while supplies last.

  We may have had no intention whatsoever of buying tomato soup when we walked into that shop—we may not even like tomato soup—but the associative wisps rising from that sign create a persuasive affective state. For potential dieters and car purchasers, questions regarding intent immediately trigger thoughts like “You know, I really should cut out the snacks” and “Come to think of it, a new car would be nice.”

  The same thing happens when a salesperson tries to sell an extended warranty. Not long ago, I bought a digital camera for around $200. After studying all the brands on offer, I was pretty pleased with my choice. My mood changed abruptly when I brought the camera to the checkout and the salesperson asked, “Do you want an extended warranty with that?”

  To be honest, the idea of purchasing an extended warranty had never occurred to me. When I walked into that electronics shop, I was blissfully unaware of the many and varied risks to my new digital camera. But to make me suddenly and painfully conscious of everything that could possibly go wrong, all the salesperson had to do was say “extended warranty.” My affective state had been dramatically altered.

  The affect heuristic affects all of us, even supposedly sophisticated consumers who might be expected to know better.

  Decision-making researcher Paul Slovic and colleagues asked business students in a securities analysis course to evaluate industry groups represented on the New York Stock Exchange. The students saw imagery and affective evaluations for each industry group and then reported whether they would invest in companies associated with each group. Groups with the coolest, most alluring affective profiles123 (the computer and technology sectors) received the most investments, even though they were among the poorest actual performers.

  Image trumps information.

  Social psychologists suggest that affective language and imagery nudge us into mental states that subtly influence our subsequent decisions. A specific picture or specific phrase activates a field of unconscious correlations, and the influence of these associations prompts us into behavior that is largely outside our control or awareness. Advertising uses metaphor to create clouds of connotation designed to put us in a buying frame of mind.

  The associations conjured up by advertisements can’t be screened out. They start to work as soon as they are perceived, whether we want them to or not. “Representations of objects and events124 in people’s minds are tagged to varying degrees with affect,” Slovic and his coauthors concluded. “People consult or refer to an ‘affective pool’ (containing all the positive and negative tags associated with the presentations consciously or unconsciously) in the process of making judgments.”

  Gerald Zaltman of the research and consulting firm Olson Zaltman Associates has spent the past few decades plumbing the depths of this affective pool. He has surfaced with what he calls “deep metaphors125,” universal orientations that structure and guide consumer attitudes toward products. He’s even patented a method—the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET)—for identifying these metaphors. Though the ZMET sounds as if it might require participants to don electrode-studded helmets, it is actually a rather gentle process, kind of like taking a Rorschach test administered by Carl Jung.

  Both Jung and Hermann Rorschach studied with Eugen Bleuler, an early supporter of Freud’s ideas. Bleuler encouraged staff at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, where he was director, to investigate the unconscious. Jung and Rorschach were fascinated by Freud’s technique of “free association” and they both created new ways to use free association in their own practices.

  During a psychoanalytic session, Freud often asked patients to say the first thing that popped into their minds—to free-associate—and then follow the trail of associations, which Freud believed would eventually lead to insights about issues that patients could not otherwise consciously access. While Freud worked with words, Rorschach asked his patients to free-associate with inkblots.

  As a child, Rorschach played a lot of “klecksography,” an activity popular among Swiss children at the time that involved dripping ink onto a sheet of paper and then folding the paper so that the ink smudges produced a recognizable shape, like a flower, a bird, or a butterfly. Rorschach, a talented artist, was so good at this that he was nicknamed Klecks, Swiss German for “inkblot.”

  Rorschach retained his fascination for inkblots well into adulthood, developing a set of images that worked as a visual variation on Freud’s verbal technique. The process is simple. Individuals look at Rorschach’s inkblots and tell researchers what they see. Different people see different things, and researchers analyze the significance of the different associations.

  Rorschach’s method is a form of physiognomic perception, yet another example of the human brain’s determination to find patterns in absolutely everything. Even when presented with images with few or no recognizable features126, we still find patterns in them—animal shapes in cloud formations, human faces in Martian craters, figures of the Virgin Mary in grilled cheese sandwiches, and butterflies in inkblots.

  Jung also devised a visual free-associative technique, “active imagination,” that involved mental rather than inkblot images. Active imagination evolved from Jung’s work with dreams. He often asked patients to embellish a dream image or association through drama, dance, drawing, writing, or talking. In this way, Jung believed, archetypes—innate, universal prototypes of human experience lurking in the collective unconscious—could be coaxed to the surface. “When we concentrate on an inner picture127 and when we are careful not to interrupt the natural flow of events,” he wrote, “our unconscious will produce a series of images which make a
complete story.”

  A ZMET study combines a Rorschach-like analysis of imagery with a Jungian search for archetypes to help advertisers construct the most complete—and the most effective—commercial stories.

  A full-blown ZMET study involves about a dozen people and focuses on a specific product or sector such as, say, kitchenware. Participants each have an individual ZMET session, but before attending they spend about a week collecting eight to ten images that in some way represent their thoughts and attitudes about the product or service under investigation. The only instruction: the images should be metaphorical rather than literal depictions.

  So if the topic is kitchenware, participants are discouraged from bringing in pictures of knives and forks or pots and pans. Instead, ZMETicians want people to free-associate, to bring in pictures that illustrate their ideas, feelings, and other semiconscious associations about kitchenware. If you associate kitchenware with domestic life, for example, images of happy families would be appropriate; if you associate kitchenware with fine food, then pictures of succulent cuts of meat would fit.

  After collecting his or her images, the subject attends a two-and-a-half-hour interview with a ZMET practitioner. During this session, the interviewer asks detailed questions about each picture. Why did you select this picture? What feelings do you associate with the picture? How do the different pictures relate to one another?