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nat bas

Thinking literally - The Boston Globe - 0 views

www.boston.com/...thinking_literally

language psychology

shared by nat bas on 02 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people’s personalities to behave accordingly. What’s more, without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature--or position, texture, size, shape, or weight--abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us.
  • Put another way, metaphors reveal the extent to which we think with our bodies.
  • "The abstract way we think is really grounded in the concrete, bodily world much more than we thought,” says John Bargh, a psychology professor at Yale and leading researcher in this realm.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Friedrich Nietzsche scornfully described human understanding as nothing more than a web of expedient metaphors, stitched together from our shallow impressions of the world. In their ignorance, he charged, people mistake these familiar metaphors, deadened from overuse, for truths. "We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers,” he wrote, "and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things--metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”
  • people asked to recall a time when they were ostracized gave lower estimates of room temperature than those who recalled a social inclusion experience.
  • subjects who took the questionnaire on the heavier clipboards tended to ascribe more metaphorical weight to the questions they were asked
  • we actually unconsciously look upward when we think about power
  • subjects, after handling sandpaper-covered puzzle pieces, were less likely to describe a social situation as having gone smoothly
  • people who were told to move marbles from a lower tray up to a higher one while recounting a story told happier stories than people moving them down
  • subjects who recalled an unethical act acted less guilty after washing their hands.
  • something as simple as sitting on a hard chair makes people think of a task as harder
  • nat bas on 02 Oct 09
     
    this is a wonderful essay: how metaphors shape the world we see.
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