Words, images, color combinations all evoke schemas

[coberst]

Words, images, color combinations all evoke schemas

Words have meaning for us only within a context that is meaningful. At some time in my life plants have become meaningful to me and thus the word “bloom” evokes that meaning; likewise “traveler” with journey and “ashes” with fire.

“Because words can evoke schemas, and metaphors map schemas into other schemas, words can prompt a metaphorical understanding.”

Poets use metaphor to convey meaning. Cognitive scientists study metaphor to comprehend the hidden aspects of the human mind. To understand poetic metaphor one must understand conventional metaphor. To study metaphor is to discover that “one has a worldview, that one’s imagination is constrained, and that metaphor plays an enormous role in shaping one’s everyday understand of everyday events.”

As creatures we perceive our self as a container having an interior and exterior with a boundary between. We experience our bodies as structured wholes with identifiable parts. We move about in space to achieve our needs and desires; sometimes our path is obstructed by objects that we try to eliminate or move around.

“Each of these quite basic interactions with the world is generalizable, and each is in fact generalized across a series of other domains. Each of these generalizations is a recurring structure or repeatable pattern by which we are able to understand the world as a unified place that we can make a sense of.”

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality—Emily Dickinson

Without metaphors for death we could not comprehend this poem easily. Why do we know so many metaphors for death? Winter and other authors inform me that we have metaphors because without them we could not comprehend our world.


Quotes from “A Clearing in the Forest: Law, Life, and Mind” by Steven L. Winter

[HydrogenBond]

I think it has to do with the right brain. The left side of the brain is more logical and analytical. The right side of the brain is more spatial. Metaphors evoke a sense of spatial awareness. The metaphor is not trying to generate a one-to-one connection i.e., a=b, but evokes an expansion connection, where a=b=c=d=e=f, etc.. This fuzziness is not as useful for the left brain since it would prefer something more distinct like a=b. But the right brain uses an extrapolation of associations.

For example, an integrated ecosystem is a 3-D structure. It may not be obvious how fox droppings benefits the birds, since they don't eat it. One has to trace all the steps from dung, to plant, to flowers, to bugs to birds. The metaphor sort of uses the right brain to process this train of connections within the 3-D memory. One doesn't even have to be fully conscious of all the steps but it can occur intuitively. Reading a poem at a normal pace does not allow enough time to rationally extrapolate each step. It has to occur in a faster way using the 3-D memory processing. The left brain prefers 1 to 1. It will focus on the bug to bird connection because this is far more logical and can be addressed in or out of the context of 3-D.

Metaphors often contain common sense, which is the intuitive 3-D composite of experience and schema. An analogy are ten caucasians going to China. Each person will see 1000 different people. The final 3-D memories in each, will be the 3-D composite of each data set. When averaged in 3-D, they all will share an inner common sense. Bring in one additional chinese person and they all intuitively know without a long train of logic. The left brain does it differently. It will seek rational connections and then the group will try to create a consensus of opinion. We can end with two schools of thought such that 3-D common sense is replaced by either consensus/opinion.