A simple sip of water is actually a complex neurological action.
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Neural Mind
George Lakoff and Srini Narayanan, University of Chicago Press
This is a book review in two parts. First of all, we are talking about the ideas presented in Neural Mind: How the Brain Thinkswhich are fascinating. The second is about the actual reading experience.
The book addresses one of the most important questions in neuroscience: how do neurons carry out all possible types of human thought, from planning motor actions to composing sentences and thinking about philosophy?
The authors have completely different points of view. George Lakoff This linguist and cognitive scientistworked until his retirement at the University of California, Berkeley. He studied the role of metaphors in thinking. Srini Narayanan is Senior Director of Research at Google DeepMind artificial intelligence company in Zurich, Switzerland. His work focuses on how artificial intelligence learns language.
The main idea of the book is that the brain uses the same processes for motor functions, language, and abstract thinking. Lakoff and Narayanan argue that similar neural circuits and pathways were used by evolution to enable all of these types of thinking, which at first glance seem radically different but have profound commonalities.
This is most easily understood if we think about human babies or other animals that do not have language. Although every animal's experience is different, there are concepts that they will almost inevitably learn: concepts such as up and down, motion and rest, force and resistance. Somehow they must be represented in the brain.
In books such as Metaphors we live by (co-authored with his then-colleague Mark Johnson in 1980) Lakoff argued that these concepts recur in the metaphors we use to convey ideas. Figuratively speaking, happiness and success are “above”, and sadness and failure are “below”. We use this up-down construction to describe musical notes, although pitch is determined by the frequency of sound waves and has nothing to do with pitch. Likewise, communication is often described as a physical transmission, using phrases such as “getting through to you.”
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In the first animals, the brain was primarily responsible for motor control. Things like language are recent innovations.
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A trivial reading of this is that physical metaphors help us understand complex abstract concepts. But Lakoff and Narayanan argue for something deeper: these physical metaphors literally reflect the way we think. This makes sense, they write, given how the brain evolved. In the first animals they were intended mainly for motor control. Things like language and abstract thinking are recent innovations. Because evolution is frugal in nature and often reuses existing structures in new ways, it is reasonable to assume that the neural circuits that evolved for motor control were adapted for language and thought.
Let's say you want to drink from a glass of water. Most of us can do this without much difficulty, but it is a surprisingly difficult activity. You have to reach out and then grab the glass with your hand. Next, you need to bring the glass to your mouth and drink. You must decide how many sips or gulps to take, repeating until your thirst is quenched. Finally, you must put the glass back in place.
This, say Lakoff and Narayanan, mirror in our language and grammar. We break complex behavior and language into pieces. Think about the sentences, their words and syllables, nouns and verbs. The subject performs an action on the object. Or think about past, present and future tenses, wondering whether we have done something, are doing something, or will do something.
These physical metaphors also shape abstract thoughts. The lovers “break up”; modes are falling. If we apply the same metaphorical structure to a phenomenon, we can get stuck—and often do make a creative leap by applying a new metaphor. Instead of the “fall” of this regime, perhaps it will be “demolished” to make way for something new.
It's hard to know how to test all this. Lakoff and Narayanan propose models of circuits that may exist in the brain that underlie these thought patterns. But we are a long way from the neural map of the human brain, so I think the real tests of their hypothesis will be many years away.
Still, Lakoff and Narayanan do enough to convince me that their ideas should be taken seriously. However, they did not write a readable book. Neural MindUnfortunately, it's painful to read. It is repetitive and incoherent, jumping from one thought to another, which is tiring. Ideas that require careful development are presented in paragraphs, and trivial concepts are explained in detail. And there's no excuse for ending Chapter 2 with a 130-word sentence. Basically, I read this so you don't have to.
Michael Marshall writer from Devon, UK.
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