Metaphorically speaking｜Dirt

She also shared that someone very close to her was losing their cognitive functions due to dementia and this was consuming her. She felt that it was the most horrible thing. She knew a bit about my work and so she asked what I thought about the whole thing—the fact that we could lose our minds as we aged. I didn’t know what to say exactly so I expl... See more

Neuroscientists are building a powerful case that metaphor is far more important to human cognition than has ever been imagined. Many argue it’s the fundamental way that brains understand abstract concepts, such as love, joy, society and economy. It’s simply not possible to comprehend these ideas in any useful sense, then, without attaching them to

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Neuroscientists are building a powerful case that metaphor is far more important to human cognition than has ever been imagined. Many argue it’s the fundamental way that brains understand abstract concepts, such as love, joy, society and economy. It’s simply not possible to comprehend these ideas in any useful sense, then, without attaching them to... See more

Life narrative inextricably links memory, subjectivity, and the materiality of the body. As Paul John Eakin argues in How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, "our lives in and as bodies profoundly shape our sense of identity" (xi). The ability to recover memories, in fact, depends upon the material body. There must be a body that per

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‘Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself. It is what links language to life.’ – Iain McGilchrist

The physical world and the cognitive worlds become linked through metaphors.

Human minds are not elusive, ghostly inner things. They are seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world . We should be careful what kinds of material, digital, and social worlds we build, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds too.