Obama, Lakoff, and Conceptual Metaphor

Follow commentary on the 2008 US elections via George Lakoff's commentary and conceptual metaphor discussions. Other interests:

• TalkLeft: What Lakoff and Obama Do Not Understand (Jul 2006)


• AlterNet: The Secret of Obama's Success, He Listens to Lakoff (Feb 2008)


• Lakoff's Buzzflash Interview (Apr 2008)


• Obama in a Bind (Jul 2008): Christopher Lyndon talks to Lakoff

Neuro-Liberalism is William Saletan's NYT review (Jun 2008) of Lakoff's The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st Century Politics with an 18th Century Brain:

Lakoff is a puzzle. No one has more brilliantly dissected conservative spin. "My goal as a scientist and a citizen is to make the cognitive unconscious as conscious as possible," he writes. But each time Lakoff the scientist exposes a right-wing frame, Lakoff the citizen substitutes a left-wing frame. First he shreds Bush's depiction of Iraq as a "war" that can end in "victory" over a united "enemy". Then he repeats each of Bush’s fallacies, oversimplifying the conflict as an "occupation" in which the United States is "losing" to a united "resistance". It's as though Lakoff were lobotomized.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's 'Flow'

'Flow' and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1999) discussed by David Farmer.

Flow with Soul (2002): Interview by Elizabeth Debold where Csikzentmihalyi talks about evolution and greater complexity.

My hunch is—and, of course, there is no proof of this—that if an organism, a species, learns to find a positive experience in doing something that stretches its ability; in other words, if you enjoy sticking your neck out and trying to operate at your best or even beyond your best, if you're lucky enough to get that combination, then you're more likely to learn new things, to become better at what you're doing, to invent new things, to discover new things. We seem to be a species that has been blessed by this kind of thirst for pushing the envelope. Most other species seem to be very content when their basic needs are taken care of and their homeostatic level has been restored. They have eaten; they can rest now. That's it. But in our nervous system, maybe by chance or at random, an association has been made between pleasure and challenge, or looking for new challenges.

The Creative Personality: Ten Paradoxical Traits

Alliteration and Memory Performance

Sweet Silent Thought: Alliteration and Resonance in Poetry Comprehension (2008) by R Brooke Lea, et. al.:

We used current theories of language comprehension as a framework for understanding how alliteration affects comprehension processes. Across three experiments, alliterative cues reactivated readers' memories for previous information when it was phonologically similar to the cue. These effects were obtained when participants read aloud and when they read silently, and with poetry and prose. The results support everyday intuitions about the effects of poetry and aesthetics, and explain the nature of such effects. These findings extend the scope of general memory models by indicating their capacity to explain the influence of nonsemantic discourse features.

Discussion by Dave Munger here.

Jonah Lehrer on Porn

The Neuroscience of Porn:

Porn does not cause us to think about sex. Rather, porn causes to think we are having sex. From the perspective of the brain, the act of arousal is not preceded by a separate idea, which we absorb via the television screen. The act itself is the idea. In other words, porn works by convincing us that we are not watching porn. We think we are inside the screen, doing the deed.

Further information: Mirror neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind 'the great leap forward' in human evolution by V.S. Ramachandran

The STANDUP Project

The STANDUP project (System To Augment Non-speakers' Dialogue Using Puns): Collaborative project between the School of Computing at the University of Dundee, the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and the Department of Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen, funded by EPSRC (the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council). The project began in October 2003 and ran until March 2007.

Oliver Sacks on iPods

'Brainworms, Sticky Music, and Catchy Tunes' in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks (2007):

Half of us are plugged into iPods, immersed in daylong concerns of our own choosing, virtually oblivious to the environment--and for those who are not plugged in, there is nonstop music, unavoidable and often of deafening intensity, in restaurants, bars, shops, and gyms. This barrage of music puts a certain strain on our exquisitely sensitive auditory systems, which cannot be overloaded without dire consequences. One such consequence is the ever-increasing prevalence of serious hearing loss, even among young people, and particularly among musicians. Another is the omnipresence of annoyingly catchy tunes, the brainworms that arrive unbidden and leave only in their own time--catchy tunes that may, in fact, be nothing more than advertisements for toothpaste but are, neurologically, completely irresistible.

Roger Caillois on Schizophrenia

Mimicry and Legendary Psycasthenia (1935):

I will [...] briefly describe some personal experiences, but which are wholly in accord with observations published in the medical literature, for example with the invariable response of schizophrenics to the question: where are you? I know where I am, but I do not feel as though I'm at the spot where I find myself. To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is "the convulsive possession." All these expressions shed light on a single process: depersonalization by assimilation to space, i.e., what mimicry achieves morphologically in certain animal species.

The Gay Brain

The Ivanka Savic and Per Lindström research on cerebral asymmetry and functional connectivity between homo- and heterosexual subjects has been generating a lot of online discussion.

Neuroanthropology has more extensive links and discussion:

Trying to shoehorn sexuality into one socially and politically charged box just does not work well from an anthropological point of view. As one example, men in some cultures go through different life stages, and in some of those stages homosexuality is the normal way of being, whereas at other times heterosexual relations are the norm. .... On the neuroplasticity and experience/behavior side, this type of approach generally leaves out something every consenting adult knows. Sex matters! The experience of a sexual encounter helps shape our desires, our pleasures, our associations.

Reviewing Cognitive Enhancers

Which Cognitive Enhancers Really Work: Brain Training, Drugs, Vitamins, Meditation or Exercise?: Brilliant entry that discusses in brief current research in cognitive enhancement techniques such as the popular Nintendo DS brain training softwares, drugs, nutritional supplements, meditation and exercise.

Reuven Tsur on the Heart Conceit

[old] What is Cognitive Poetics? (1982) by Reuven Tsur:

According to migratory theory, someone at the dawn of the history of literature happily 'hit' upon this heart-conceit; from this point on, the conceit migrated until it reached the Arab poets in Spain, who transmitted it to the Hebrew poets of the eleventh century in Spain, as well as to the Provençal poets, who are known to have influenced the poets of the dolce stil nuovo in Italy, who are known to have influenced English Metaphysical poetry. The geographical proximity of Provençe to Paris may account for the appearance of the conceit in Villon's poetry. This explanation is not without geographical or chronological plausibility; but it appears to be too concrete, too uneconomical, and to leave too much to chance. Above all, it does not explain how poets and readers of poetry handle novel conceits. it fails to explain why an earlier poet should be more likely to 'hit' upon a certain conceit than a later one. In addition, the above explanation is counter-intuitive from the point of view of what we seem to know about the inventiveness and ingenuity of the Metaphysical poets.

Reuven Tsur Interview

Interview with Reuven Tsur by Beth Bradburn:

When I was a teenager, at high school, studying Hungarian poetry, I was very much annoyed by the fact that our literary studies concerned mainly the idea contents of poetry. I had very strong intuitions that the most important things in poetry were not conceptual, but something of the kind that, now I know, was 'perceptual'. I spent the ensuing decades in a pursuit of that 'perceptual' something. One of the main problems appeared to be this: language by its very nature is conceptual; but it is an observational fact that poetry sometimes conveys emotional, perceptual, or mystical qualities. At the university, in Israel, I was exposed to 'New Criticism', and was committed to close-reading of poems as the only worthy critical activity. But I always felt that there was that important something which I later called the 'perceived effect' of the poem, and I soon realized that this could not be accounted for merely by appealing to the structure of the text; one had to assume a perceiving consciousness. Wellek and Warren along with Wimsatt and Beardsley provided the theoretical constraints within which I attempted to solve the problem. The latter warned against the 'affective fallacy', while the former conceived of a poem as of 'a stratified system of norms that is a potential source of experience', but categorically rejected all psychologization of the literary endeavour. I thought, therefore, that I must eschew what is individual and idiosyncratic in poetic experience, and pursue the intersubjective foundations of the 'perceived quality'. Eventually I found the redeeming formula in a noncognitive context, in L.C. Knights' Notes on Comedy...

The End Doesn't Justify the Memes

Mind Hacks lists two TED talks on memes:

• Daniel C Dennett on 'the awesome power of memes'.


• Susan Blackmore on 'memes and temes'.

Months ago, reading up on this area of study, memetics seemed worth considering (especially Blackmore's passionate explanations). But after reading Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science (2000), a collection of essays by experts from different fields on this new discipline, edited by Richard Aunger. I was quite disappointed that in Dennett's foreword he says 'I am not entirely persuaded by any of the chapters in this book'. (vii)

Of the nine contributors to the collection five object to the idea forwarded by memeticists:

• Rosaria Conte makes a most polite assessment of meme literature using the social cognitive perspective. She praises advantages of the field and describes some disadvantages but focuses on one unsatisfactory aspect: the conceptualization of the requirements of memetic processes.



• Robert Boyd and Peter J Richerson conclude that memes are not 'a universal acid' (one of Dennett's metaphors in Darwin's
  Dangerous Idea) and assert that 'population thinking is a better mousetrap'. (161)



• Dan Sperber's objection has to do with memeticists not having empirical evidence to support their claims that '...in the micro-processes of cultural transmission, elements of culture inherit all or nearly all their relevant properties for other elements of culture that they replicate.' (173) He ends by saying 'imitation, even if not ubiquitous, is of course well worth investigating. The grand project of memetics, on the other hand, is misguided'. (173) But there's hope in studying imitation.



• Maurice Bloch puts forward the previous arguments against the diffusionists by American and British critics:
  
  
  1. Memes like traits don't spread like a virus but are 'continually and completely made and unmade during communication' (I still have to read more on this) and;
  
  
  2. Culture is not a single isolable type which means that transmission of it is of many types. (201)
  
  
  He simply thinks that memes don't exist and Blackmore (whose 'The meme's eye view' essay argues strongly for memes) hasn't presented convincingly her case.



• To this Adam Kuper agrees by concluding that '[memetecists have] yet to deliver a single original and plausible analysis of any cultural or social process'. (187)

Coriana Six provides a more thorough assessment of the collection (December 2007).

In Blackmore's The Meme Machine and most of her articles found online, it is easy to take Bloch's side. Blackmore is quite passionate about her study but most of her research is speculative. She has an article in Aesthetica Magazine (July 2006) called Memes, creativity and consciousness:

We are the meme machines that culture is using for its own propagation. No wonder the planet is in such dire straights; we have unwittingly taken on this parasitic new replication system and it is spreading all over the globe, using up all the natural resources. This is how I became interested in the role of art and creativity. We may think that human consciousness is what makes us creative, but on this new view, all creativity is an evolutionary process. Just as elephants and the AIDS virus were novel creations of genetic evolution, so all of music, literature, and art are novel creations of memetic evolution. We human meme machines copy old memes, mix them up in our heads, and spew out new combinations--the most creative of us being the best copiers and recombiners of memes.

Reading this should convince any artist that memeticists like Blackmore 'overstand' the creative processes. In his recent Enlightenment lecture at the University of Edinburgh, Steven Pinker was asked his opinion of memes. His reply: after 32 years, the study of memes has yielded no great progress. In How the Mind Works (1997) he says: '...a complex meme does not arise from the retention of copying errors...[but] because some person knuckles down, racks his brain, musters his ingenuity, and composes or writes or paints of invents something'. (209)

---

Mind Hacks also reports that in 2006 Dennett had a falling out with fellow Darwinian Michael Ruse.

Some of the exchange can be found in When evolutionists attack, where Ruse says:

'I am a hardline Darwinian and always have been very publicly when it cost me status and respect--in fact, I am more hardline than you [Dennett] are, because I don't buy into this meme bullshit but put everything--especially including ethics--in the language of genes.'

The Study of Memory

The origins of the study of memory: Focusing on the work of Hermann Ebbinghaus. This begins Cognitive Daily's History Week entries (inspired by this fun challenge for science bloggers).

[other History Week entries] A baby's psychological development at six months | Gestalt-o-mania

Famous People and Their Contributions to the Study of Memory: Featuring Ivan Pavlov and his famous dog, Karl Lashley, Donald Hebb, and William James.

Pride and Prejudice...and Autism

So Odd a Mixture: Along the Autistic Spectrum in Pride and Prejudice (2007):

[This book] looks at eight seemingly diverse characters in Austen's classic novel, Pride and Prejudice, who display autistic traits. These characters--five in the Bennet family and three in the extended family of the Fitzwilliams--have fundamental difficulties with communication, empathy and theory of mind. Perhaps it is high-functioning autism or Asperger's Syndrome that provides an explanation for some characters' awkward behaviour at crowded balls, their frequent silences or their tendency to lapse into monologues rather than truly converse with others.

Book review by Michael Giffen: There's a danger when we apply clinical disorders to persons or characters we don't understand or don't like. Look at what critics who never knew Patrick White did to him and his novels.

High among the frontier problems between psychoanalysis and criticism, C.S. Lewis notices some critics use psychoanalysis to infer the pathology of an author from his or her work, which results not in literary criticism but in pathological biography.

Dan Sperber on Cultural Transmissions

An Epidemiology of Representations (July 2005): A talk with Dan Sperber.

Just as the human mind is not a blank slate on which culture would somehow imprint its content, the communication process is not a xerox machine copying contents from one mind to another. This is where I part company not just from your standard semiologists or social scientists who take communication to be a coding-decoding system, a transmission system, biased only by social interests, by power, by intentional or unconscious distortions, but that otherwise could deliver a kind of smooth flow of undistorted information. I also part company from Richard Dawkins who sees cultural transmission as based on a process of replication, and who assume that imitation and communication provide a robust replication system.

Neurology of the Arts

Neurology of the Arts: Painting, Music, Literature (April 2004) edited by F Clifford Rose: This book is the first attempt to provide a basis for the interaction of the brain and nervous system with painting, music and literature....The section on literature relates to Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Conan Doyle, James Joyce, and the poetry of one of England's most famous neurologists, Henry Head.

[pdf] The Neurology of Art--The Example of Giorgio de Chirico by Julien Bogousslavsky:

Blanke and Landis emphasize how a neurological condition undoubtedly influenced the work of one of the greatest modern artists. Since a disease may help understand artistic features, and art may help understand the manifestations of diseases, further studies in the 'neurology of art' would certainly be interesting and useful.

Style follows content: On the microgenesis of art perception (November 2007) by M Dorothee Augustin, Helmut Leder, Florian Hutzler, and Claus-Christian Carbon: While effects of content were present at all presentation times, effects of style were traceable from 50 ms onwards. The results show clear differences in the microgenesis of style and content, suggesting that in art perception style follows content.

Pinker in Edinburgh

Steven Pinker at the University of Edinburgh's Enlightenment lecture series: In his lecture, Prof Steven Pinker will explore an example of each: everyday metaphor as a window into human cognition; swearing and taboo words as a window into human emotion; and indirect speech-veiled threats and bribes, polite requests, and sexual come-ons as a window into human relationships. 6 June at McEwan Hall.

[video] Pinker's TED Talks lecture on The Stuff of Thought (July 2005): In an exclusive preview of his book The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker looks at language and how it expresses what goes on in our minds--and how the words we choose communicate much more than we realize.

(Thanks to aliiis for the announcement.)

The Most Important Six Seconds of 1969

The Amen Break (2006): In the year [1969], an American soul group called The Winstons released a seven-inch single called 'Amen, Brother'. Little did drummer GC Coleman know that the eight-bar drum 'break' in the middle of the track would far surpass him in fame and acquire an identity of its own.

The Amen Break and the Golden Ratio by Michael S Schneider: I became intrigued when I saw an image of the audio waves themselves because I immediately recognized the Golden Ratio in the structure of its timing. And I was surprised to find an even deeper relationship to the structure of the human body.

[via gerunding]
Nate Harrison explains the world's most important 6-sec drum loop (2004): This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the 'Amen Break. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music--a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures.

[video] Compelling 'Amen Break' variation is Vic Acid, a Squarepusher and Aphex Twin collaboration--the music of This is hell (2006), an animated video clip by Paco Rico.

The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure

The Orgasmic Mind: The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure by Martin Portner. The key principles:

Sexual desire and orgasm are subject to various influences on the brain and nervous system, which controls the sex glands and genitals. The ingredients of desire may differ for men and women, but researchers have revealed some surprising similarities. For example, visual stimuli spur sexual stirrings in women, as they do in men. Achieving orgasm, brain imaging studies show, involves more than heightened arousal. It requires a release of inhibitions engineered by shutdown of the brain’s center of vigilance in both sexes and a widespread neural power failure in females.

The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure

The Orgasmic Mind: The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure by Martin Portner. The key principles:

Sexual desire and orgasm are subject to various influences on the brain and nervous system, which controls the sex glands and genitals. The ingredients of desire may differ for men and women, but researchers have revealed some surprising similarities. For example, visual stimuli spur sexual stirrings in women, as they do in men. Achieving orgasm, brain imaging studies show, involves more than heightened arousal. It requires a release of inhibitions engineered by shutdown of the brain’s center of vigilance in both sexes and a widespread neural power failure in females.