Nerves turned into wires and brains into telegraphs. In the time of Shelley's Frankenstein, Galvani, and Volta explored the role of electricity in animal bodies. Leibniz objected: entering a brain as one enters a mill would reveal mechanical parts but nothing mind-like whatsoever. Nicolas Steno cast the brain as a machine. Four centuries ago, Descartes suggested that cerebral hydraulic automata produced behavior by powering “animal spirits” thought the nerves. Here, rather than poking the brain-as-computer blister again, I would like to walk through the very brief history of the metaphorical brain, and then mention an alternative class of metaphors that could offer fresh, offbeat, and even rebellious perspectives on our conception of that mushy little thing called “the brain.”īrains have been many things indeed. Of course, some will deem the exchange as useless, while others will insist that, until we figure out what we mean by what we say, a proper scientific discussion is defective or cannot even start. The debate about the appropriateness and obsolescence of the brain-computer analogy and its pervading metaphorical use is alive and ticking. Today, neuroscientists remain ensnared in disputes about whether brains are computers or not. Furthermore, Lakoff and Johnson remarked that metaphors are natural phenomena, not mere arbitrary historical contingencies or cultural constructions they are grounded in the very bodily nature of our daily cognitive pursuits.

Such a fallacy is related to the belief that metaphors are mainly “a matter of definition ” “it is just semantics” is stupid as a conversation stopper. Especially relevant to scientists is the mistaken idea that metaphors are just “a matter of words,” namely, a way of speaking that can be shielded from rational thinking, and ultimately innocuous to it. Two decades ago, in the afterword of the updated edition of their classic book, the authors insisted on some persistent fallacies that contribute to a false view of what metaphors are and do. Despite the popular acclaim of the book and its impact across academic disciplines, their claims met resistance as they challenged objectivist views of meaning and language. In Metaphors We Live By they argued that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical (having a literal core extended by mutually inconsistent metaphors and therefore incomplete without them), that metaphors are fundamentally conceptual (while metaphorical language is secondary), and that metaphorical thought is ubiquitous, unavoidable, largely unconscious, and grounded in everyday life. Four decades ago, linguists and philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published an influential book on the nature of metaphors.

The metaphors we live by