James Geary, metaphorically speaking

We turn facts into similes and metaphors, and even fantasies.

This is the mathematics of metaphor.

Sadly, it's metaphorically true.

Professor, afraid is Freudian lingo...

So let's return from the heights of metaphor and return to science.

But metaphor is a way of thought before it is a way with words.

Stroop tests have been done with metaphor as well.

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

Now, to assist me in explaining this, I've enlisted the help of one of our greatest philosophers, the reigning king of the metaphorians, a man whose contributions to the field are so great that he himself has become a metaphor.

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us.

But this is how metaphor misleads.

So, how do we make and understand metaphors?

This formula works wherever metaphor is present.

Now metaphor is ubiquitous, yet it's hidden.

So I think we have to change metaphors.

Aphorism enthusiast and author James Geary waxes on a fascinating fixture of human language the metaphor. Friend of scribes from Aristotle to Elvis, metaphor can subtly influence the decisions we make, Geary says.

Metaphor matters because it's around us every day, all the time.

Metaphor is not just the detection of patterns it is the creation of patterns.

And many of the metaphors we use everyday are synesthetic.

Metaphor matters because it opens the door to discovery.

We utter about six metaphors a minute.

It's also a great example of how whenever we deal with anything abstract ideas, emotions, feelings, concepts, thoughts we inevitably resort to metaphor.

Metaphor also matters because it influences decisions by activating analogies.

But before it was fossil poetry language was fossil metaphor.

Those exposed to agent metaphors had higher expectations that price trends would continue.

They took longer to reject metaphors as false than they did to reject literally false sentences.

Why? Because we cannot ignore the metaphorical meaning of words either.

The participants had to identify, as quickly as possible, the literally false sentences.

Metaphor shakes things up, giving us everything from Shakespeare to scientific discovery in the process.

And with the stream, I would like to propose a metaphor for the relationship between neural activity and connectivity.

And the metaphorical truth interferes with our ability to identify it as literally false.

Object metaphors describe price movements as non living things, as in, The Dow fell like a brick.

And they had those expectations because agent metaphors imply the deliberate action of a living thing pursuing a goal.

Just as we cannot ignore the literal meaning of words, we cannot ignore the analogies that are triggered by metaphor.

And metaphor keeps the mind shaking, rattling and rolling, long after Elvis has left the building.

Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others, how we communicate, learn, discover and invent.

By bringing together what we know and what we don't know through analogy, metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery.

And metaphor gives us a much more vivid understanding of Juliet than if Shakespeare had literally described what she looks like.

Agent metaphors describe price movements as the deliberate action of a living thing, as in, The NASDAQ climbed higher.

Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which we understand one concept in the context of another.

Impossible!

Brandon, till this very moment, this world and the people in it have always been dark and incomprehensible to me.

In this, Elvis is following Aristotle's classic definition of metaphor as the process of giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.

That goes without saying.