by Mark Turner
MANY SPACES Q. 109
Invariance is a global constraint to be satisfied in building and projecting target, generic, and source spaces.
One corollary of the invariance principle is this: Once the projection is com- pleted, the most abstract generic space, the one that contains just the image- schematic structure taken to apply to both source and target, shall not contain an image-schematic clash.
There are many ways to avoid such a clash. We have choice in what we recruit to the source, what we recruit to the target, and what we project to the generic space. We can vary all of these choices in order to meet the constraint. For example, “Italian is the mother of Latin” can be interpreted as meeting the con- straint so long as we recruit to the target not the space of historical derivation of Romance languages but rather the space of order of learn in g languages in a particu- lar 5!.‘}_)00l.
There is one way to meet the constraint that may not be obvious. Suppose a (crackpot) professor of Romance languages says, “Italian is the mother of Latin,” and we respond, “You can’t mean what I think you mean, you can’t mean that Latin as a language derives from Italian as a language,” and the professor responds, “Oh, yes, I do. Originally there was a small tribe of Etruscans who developed a new language, and it was Italian. Latin really derived from that language, although nobody recognizes this since the original speakers of Italian couldn’t write-—they just carved wooden sarcophagus lids all the time, and this took up such a ton of energy every day that they were always too tired to get around to learning the alphabet—so they left no documents. Later on, of course, Latin turned back into Italian, but in fact Italian never stopped being spoken up in the Apennines; it wasjust never written down. So you see, everyone thinks Latin is the mother of Italian, but as a matter of historical fact, Italian is the mother of Latin.” In this case, we are being directed to meet the constraint of the invariance principle not by changing projections to source, target, or generic space, but rather by erasing and re -forming the image-schematic structure in the conceptual domain bistorical derivation of Romance language: so that when its structure is recruited to the tar- get, the resultwill not clash with the image-schematic structure we hope to project from source to generic to target. We are unlikely to do this. Instead, we will build a separate space of what this professor believe: about Latin and Italian, and we will note that it does not agree with what we believe.
BLENDING AND THE BRAIN
The mental ability to combine and blend concepts has always seemed exception- ally literary and imaginative. Combining a horse with a horn to produce the impossible fantasy blend of a unicorn is a popular example of the literary imagi-
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nation at work. It may seem that this process of combination must be secondary and parasitic: surely stable and integrated concepts (horse, horn) and small spa- tial stories (horses run, horns impale) must be in place and must have arisen by elementary processes of perception and memory before second—order processes like integration and blending can work on them.
Only very recently—in the last few years—has neuroscience begun to sug- gest that the opposite might be true. It would be a mistake to hang too much at this stage on the specific details of the various neuroscientific theories that have arisen, but a general principle is emerging, and it is this: At the most basic levels of perception, of understanding, and of memory, blending is fundamental.
When we perceive or remember or think about a particular horse or horse in general, the horse seems to us whole. At the seemingly simple level of vision, a horse just looks like a visual whole. It is whole in our sight. Our recognition of it seems whole, not piecemeal or fragmented.
We expect our neurobiology to work at least loosely the way our perception seems to work, and we think (wrongly) that introspection reveals at least roughly how our perception works. We expect our phenomenology to indicate the nature of neurobiology. But it does not. It appears that there may be no anatomical site in the brain where a perception of a horse or a concept horse resides, and, even more interestingly, no point where the parts of the perception or concept are anatomi- cally brought together. The horse looks to us like obviously one thing; yet our visual perception of it is entirely fragmented across the brain. What the brain does is not at all what we might have expected. The visual perceptions of color, texture, movement, form, topological attributes, part-whole structure, and so on occur in a fragmentary fashion throughout the brain and are not assembled in any one place. This is a surprise, like the surprise of learning that although the visual field is projected upside—down onto the retina because of the simple optics of a lens, there is no place in the brain where that image is reassembled and turned right-side-up. The qualities we believe our perception to have are in many ways not at all the qualities that neuroscientists are finding in the neurobiological activity that underlies perception.
As Gerald Edelman writes, “Objects and many of their properties are per- ceived as having a unitary appearance; yet these unitary perceptions are the con- sequences of parallel activity in the brain of many dzflerent maps, each with dif- ferent degrees of functional segregation. Many examples could be cited; a striking case is the extra-striate visual cortex, with its different areas mediating color, motion, and form, each in different ways.”
How, then, do these fragments end up seeming to us like one perception or one concept—one horse? This is known in neuroscience as the “binding prob- lem.” The binding problem is part of a more general problem, integration. For
MANY SPACES (L111
example, given that form, color, and motion are all processed differently and at different places in the brain, and that no one place in the brain receives projec- tions from all the brain sites involved in this processing, how is it that the form, color, and motion of the horse are integrated?
Visual integration, although perhaps the archetype of integration, is only one aspect of integration. The concept of the horse, even the perception of a horse, may integrate the sound the horse makes, the way it feels to sit on a horse’s back, the way it feels to ride a horse, the dynamic image schema of mounting the horse, the convexity of the horse’s torso, and the sound its swishing tail makes. Nor are even these elements unitary—they also each require integration. The part-whole relational structure of the horse, its overall form, and its coloring, for example, which seem to us so unitary, also require integration.
The horse that seems one thing corresponds to a widely distributed frag- mentation in the brain. Mentally, the unitary horse is a fabulous blend.
Neuroscientific attempts to solve the general problem of perceptual and conceptual integration are speculative and interesting. All of them depend upon models of integration through close timing of related neuronal events, rather than gathering of information in an anatomical site. Antonio Damasio, for example, has proposed a model of “convergence” according to which the brain contains records of the combinatorial relations of fragmentary records; the recall of enti- ties or events arises from a re activation, very tightly bound in time, of fragmen- tary records contained in multiple sensory and motor regions. Mental evocations that seem to us so unitary and solid are instead always fleeting reblendings of reactivated fragments in a very tight and intricate interval of time.
Damasio sees his speculative proposal for explaining “convergence” as gen- erally compatible with the theory of Neuronal Group Selection proposed by Gerald Edelman and his associates, who have made an attempt to solve the bind- ing problem (and more generally the problem of integration) by invoking a con- jectural neurobiological process called “reentrant signaling.” Differing in detail from Damasio’s “convergence” model, reentrant signaling nonetheless also depends upon the coordination and integration of distributed fragmentary op- erations. In any chunk of time, reentry “involves parallel sampling from a geo- metric range of spatially extended maps made up of neuronal groups.” Vision and perceptual categorization supply Edelman’s most thoroughly worked ex-
amples. During response to the visual stimulus world, reentrant signaling
acts to coordinate inputs and resolve conflicts be tween the responses of different functionally segregated maps. Visual reentry allows each mapped region to use discriminations made by other regions (about borders, movement, etc.) for its own operations. This process allows
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the various responses to aspects of the stimulus world to remain segre- gated and distributed among multiple brain areas and still constitute a. unified representation. Reentrant integration obviates the need for a. higher—level command center, or a “sketch.”
Edelman generalizes this specific model of reentry for visual areas to “include func- tional correlations important to concept formation, consciousness, and speech.”
For our purposes here, the details of these proposals are not at issue. We must be prepared to see many future attempts to solve the problem of integra- tion. Nor, as the study of the mind and the study of the brain themselves attempt to blend and integrate, should we leap to facile connections, making assump- tions, for example, that the conceptual blending we see in the tale of the ox and the donkey must somehow be explained by simple models of integration in per- ception and recall.
But there is a general principle that may help to connect the study of the brain with the study of the mind: Blending is a basic process; meaning does not reside in one site but is typically a dynamic and variable pattern of connection over many elements. Our conscious experience seems to tell us that meanings are whole, localized, and unitary. But this is wrong. Blending is already involved in our most unitary and literal perception and conception of basic physical objects, such as horse and bow, and in our most unitary and literal perception and con- ception of small spatial stories, such as borse moves and born impales.
When we pay close attention, most mental events appear to involve blend- ing of one sort or another. Whenever we see something as something—when we look at the street and see a woman getting into a tar—we are blending our sensory experience with abstract conceptual structure. The sensory perception and the abstract conceptual structure do not look as if they are partitioned into two different components. The perception of someone getting into a car does not seem fragmentary, with one part corresponding to the visual experience and another part corresponding to the specific action and its status as an instance of a general action. These two very different things—the sensory activity and the conceptual activity—do not seem atall like separate parcels. When they do, some- thing has gone wrong. Perception and conception seem to us one unitary whole, but they involve blending.
Anytime we perceive something that we take to be part of a larger whole (part of a figure, part of an event, part of a small story, part of a melody, and so on), we are blending perceptual experience with the recall of that whole. When- ever we categorize new information, we are blending the new information and
the established category.
MANY SPACES Q. 113
When we recognize what looks like a simple event of force, we must blend together very abstract image schemas of force dynamics with parts of the specific perception. Blending abstract image schemas together is a basic conceptual oper- ation; blending abstract image schemas with specific perceptual experience is a basic conceptual operation. When we see a car go through an intersection, for example, we must blend very many things, including the image schema of path, the perception corresponding to the car’s movement, the image schema of con- tainer, and the perception corresponding to the bounded area of the intersection.
Temporality seems to be as dependent upon blending as is spatiality. Even a simple mental event like looking at a street and remembering the red car that went down it yesterday depends upon an impossible blend: today’s perceptual experience of the street and recall of yesterday’s perceptual experience of the street. This impossible blending of realities that belong to different temporal spaces is a routine part of understanding. Slightly highlighted, we can notice the impos- sibility and the blending, as when we are asked to blend temporal spaces to pro- duce the “race” between Greatflmerica II and Northern Light.
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There is one transcendent story of the mind that has appeared many times in many avatars. In its essential lines, it claims that there are certain basic, sober, and literal things the mind does; that imaginative and literary acts are parasitic, secondary, peripheral, exotic, or deviant; and that when neuroscience gets its act together, we will come to understand that the brain does things pretty much in the ways we always expected. On this logic, since imaginative and literary acts are peripheral and exotic, they can safely be ignored while, as serious scientists, we investigate the basics.
This story, which is itself just an imaginative story, has been the pretext for offering indefinitely many “first pass” scientific models of some of our suppos- edly basic mental operations. These models ignore what appear to be more sophisticated and exotic mental events, like blending, on the claim—usually taken for granted—that first we must explain a few basic operations, and then we can work on explaining the more imaginative operations that are parasitic upon the basic mind.
It is possible that this story is just wrong at its core. The brain does not seem to work at all in the ways we expected it to, based on our notion of stable and unitary concepts. On the contrary, our notion of concepts as stable and unitary seems to be a false guide to neurobiology. Blending may seem exotic to us, but in fact it may have a fundamental neurobiological analogue. It should not be surprising if blending turns out to be basic, not exotic, in the everyday mind.
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Certainly there is considerable evidence that blending is a mainstay of early child- hood thought.
A two-year-old child who is leading a balloon around on a string may say, pointing to the balloon, “This is my imagination dog.” VVhen asked how tall it is, she says, “This high,” holding her hand slightly higher than the top of the balloon. “These,” she says, pointing at two spots just above the balloon, “are its ears.” This is a complicated blend of attributes shared by a dog on a leash and a balloon on a string. It is dynamic, temporary, constructed for local purposes, formed on the basis of image schemas, and extraordinarily impressive. It is also just what two-year-old children do all day long. True, we relegate it to the realm of fantasy because it is an impossible blended space, but such spaces seem to be indispensable to thought generally and to be sites of the construction of mean- ings that bear on what we take to be reality.
A scientific model of thought frequently tries to begin with what is basic, on the claim that scientists must do first things first and second things second and exotic things sometime next century. This theoretical vehicle for getting an explanation of mind off the ground has crashed and burned often. It is not implausible that the concepts behind such models are wrong, that something like imaginative blending and integration are basic, and that an explanation that cannot handle “This is my imagination dog” has no hope of ever getting to even the mostbasic perceptions and meanings, like the perception of a dog or the mean- ing of “A dog has four legs,” or even what is involved in an infant’s pointing at a dog and saying “Doggie!”
In the hard sciences, which attract so much emulation and envy, unusual events are not dismissed as peripheral. On the contrary, unusual events often command the most attention, on the principle that they are the most likely to reveal general processes. The usual case can be accounted for as the result of general processes working in minimal particular conditions. A scientific experi- ment that tests for fundamental mechanisms is often elaborate and weird, some- thing not likely to occur on its own (particle accelerators, odd refractions of light involving specially engineered mirrors, chemical reactions in zero gravity, and so on). Physicists who noticed that the orbit of Mercury did not quite follow Newtonian theory did not ignore it as an exotic event. On the contrary, it became the central event, calling for new theories an
d extraordinary new experiments. One of these experiments, for example, involved waiting for a total eclipse of the sun, in order to measure the positions of stars around the outer edge of the eclipse, so as to compare these measurements with theoretically predicted positions, to see whether the light from the stars was being bent by the mass of the sun. A more unusual, exotic, and “marginal” astrophysical event can hardly be imag- ined, but such events often constitute the touchstones of the hard sciences. Physi-
MANY SPACES Q. 115
cists interested in the fundamental laws of the universe had to voyage to the tropics to get the most revealing data. Cognitive scientists might interpret this as a par- able for their research. The hard sciences do not lump apparently odd events into the category of what we don’t need to explain, but rather give them special attention. It is not clear that someone in the cognitive sciences who hopes her discipline will attain to the prestige of the hard sciences should behave any dif- ferently. In particular, the methods of the hard sciences give no legitimacy to the story that we can tell in advance what is basic and what is exotic and form our theories by ignoring what we think is exotic.
The processes of the literary mind are usually considered to be different from and secondary to the processes of the everyday mind. On that assumption, the everyday mind—with its stable concepts and literal reasoning—provides the beginnings for the (optional) literary mind. On the contrary, processes that we have always considered to be literary are at the foundation of the everyday mind. Literary processes like blending make the everyday mind possible.
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