Most thought is unconscious, and the usual
estimate is around 98 percent. But if you believe the work that Stan Dehaene
talked about the other night, it is more than 98 percent. Consciousness is the tip of the iceberg of
thought. It is there that things are put together in
an interesting way and the interesting way is the following, that before consciousness,
what happens is that your brain unconsciously changes what you perceive or what you think. This is something remarkable. I think one of the best papers I heard on
this was by Shin Shimojo who is a vision scientist at the Caltech. He came to Berkeley a couple of months ago
and gave a truly remarkable overview of experiments that showed this, many of them which were
his. Let me give you a sense of this. Suppose you know that if there are flashing
lights and they are going along and they are going fast enough, they look like a single
stream. No problem. You all know that. But, if the same thing happens with touch,
say little machines that will touch you along your arm very closely, very quickly and it
will feel like someone’s stroking your arm. Fine, then they set the machine to hit you
here and then underneath the first one and then to the right of the first one. What you feel is the second one, not underneath
but in the middle. That is you don’t feel what was actually
done. You assimilated to a pattern you already know. That means not recognizing what was presented
to you on your arm through touch but only representing something and you feel on your
arm something that was not touched there. Okay. This is like the McGurk effect which I’m
sure you probably all know and if you don’t, you didn’t take a phonology course. Basically, it goes like this. You have a picture, a video of someone saying
ba and the same person saying ga. You show those and then you show the picture
of them saying ga while he sounds like ba. That’s what people are presented with and
what they hear is da with the D which is in the mouth in between. It’s the same thing. You’re creating something that was not either
presented to you visually or orally and you’re hearing something that wasn’t there. This is completely normal and it happens in
other kinds of cases. There’s a classic case where they present
you with a black dot and underneath the black dot is a flash that moves to the right. What people see always is next to the black
dot, the flash is to its right then moves to the right. It’s not underneath. If you tell them that, they still see it that
way. The same thing happens in another case. There will be a beep and a flash at the same
time. There will be two beeps and a flash with each
of the beeps, fine. Then there are two beeps with a flash with
the first beep and people see two flashes and then you tell them that this is the case
and they still see two flashes. This is perfectly normal and it happens in
politics which we’ll get to, I hope. But it happens all the time when you’re
thinking about things as well as when you’re perceiving things. This is normal. It’s just the kind of thing that Stan Dehaene
was talking about when he talked about the difference between what’s unconscious and
what’s conscious. We’ll try to explain what’s going on in
these cases and there’s a reason for it. The next thing is that all meaningful thought
is embodied. Now, there’s a very simple way to think
about this. First of all, you have connections to your
body and all parts of your brain, but more on the periphery sort of below and above and
around within connections going front toward the prefrontal part where there are more generalizations
toward the front. That is there’s a result that’s very cool. If you learn two rules, one of which is more
general than the other, it’s more to the front for reasons we will talk about in a
while. It follows from other principles and that’s
why they studied it. They knew it follows from other principles. This was done at Berkeley. Go Berkeley. The idea is this. Imagine that you had a complete brain map
of all of the connections in the brain that were not connected to the body. They’re just connected to each other. Could you have meaningful thought? No. There will be nothing to think about. Think about that. There will be nothing to think about. You can only have meaningful thought through
connections to the body. That is absolutely necessary. There’s no chance that it could just be
connections among themselves. The next thing to realize of course is that
when you see brain maps and they show you all of these networks connected to each other
that of course is a computer model because nothing in the brain touches like that. There are synapses and everything is going
across the synapse. There are occasional cases of touching on
the side. There are a few cases like that but they’re
rare. The real cases are you’re going across a
synapse. So all the pictures where things are, quote,
connected are not connected. They’re working through chemistry and physics. It’s very important to know that for reasons
we’ll talk about, because those models of networks actually are interesting for a number
of reasons that we’re going to get to. Then there’s another part that we will get
to which is that all the circuitry we’re going to be talking about is there in animals. We’re going to point out that the circuitry
needed to run thought and language is all there in animals too and it has been what
is called exapted or repurposed for thought and language. That’s cool. I like that. I like knowing that this is a case and that
this is an important part, an important feature of what our thinking is. Of course, it suggests animals think, which
they do. That’s the next part. Then there are a few basics to know about. The first is this. We’re born, as you probably know, with about
100 billion neurons. Each connects to between 1,000 and 10,000
to others so if you multiply that out, it’s about a quadrillion connections. That’s a lot of connections and they’re
all over the brain. Now, the other part is that we’re born with
all sorts of embodied structures in place. When we’re born, we have topographic maps
of the visual field. That’s there. It’s there as you’re developing in the
womb. You have topographic maps of the visual field. You have all sorts of other things. For example, a fetus in the womb will move
its arms, will move its legs, will put its thumb in its mouth, will turn over. In order to do that, it has to have a neural
system that enables him to put his thumb in his mouth, to move his arms, to move his legs. That means there have to be some neural connections
that allow that to happen. Every time they move their arms in the same
way, those neural connections get strengthened via Hebbian learning. Every time they put their thumb in their mouth,
those connections get strengthened by Hebbian learning. Every time they turn over, that is in the
womb, the child is developing something rather important. Developing - starting probably in the sixth
month or so, if Dehaene’s work is right and other people’s work is right - developing
those connections that allow the baby when born to have already all sorts of neural structures
in the brain ready to go. That’s quite remarkable. These are embodied structures. They’re there in the body. Now, the way they get there is called neural
recruitment. That is if in the womb, you can put your thumb
in your mouth and you do it over and over, what happens? The neurons for doing that have to be used
over and over and strengthened and then they at birth, you can put your thumb in your mouth. The neural structure has to be there and it
is, quote, recruited. That is it’s strengthened because it’s
used. This happens whenever you learn anything. What happens is it already has to be there
in order to be recruited, if it isn’t already there and firing, nothing can get strengthened. That’s a remarkable fact. Everything you have learned depends upon both
the structure that’s there that you’re born with. Things like topographic maps of the visual
field and other parts of things that you’re born with. Things like a motor cortex that allows you
to move your body, a somatosensory cortex that allows and connects you to everything
in your body that feels anything. All of those things are there and they structure
what you learn next. You don’t randomly learn anything. There’s a not very interesting paper that
was published recently that claim that all categories are all ad hoc categories because
everything you do changes. It doesn’t just change randomly. It changes relative to what you already have. That’s a big deal and you need to know that. The name for this is called Neural Darwinism. It says if your connections are in the right
place to be able to do it, they will be strengthened and then you’ll learn those. That’s what Neural Darwinism is about. It’s a very, very important principle. So next, basic, there are certain constraints
on the brain’s neural system so here are some. We have the embodiment before you’re born
and certain primitives for controlling force and space. We’ll go through a list of those primitives
in a while. You have synaptic changes and some of them
are Hebbian where you, you know, neurons that fire together, wire together as you know,
but some work by STDP. That is spike-time-dependent plasticity. What is that? You got a neuron with an axon, another one
with an axon. If they happen to come together like that,
the one that regularly fires first to strengthen in its direction, the other is weakened in
the opposite direction. That allows you to do things in sequence. You can’t do anything in sequence if it
doesn’t have an asymmetry. You can’t move anything if it doesn’t
have an asymmetry. Spike-time plasticity is allowing you to do
anything at all in sequence and you’ll see in a minute, it also permits metaphor. We’ll get to that in a while. But that is crucial. You need to know how synaptic changes work
and it’s not just Hebbian. These are sort of like an extension on Hebbian
learning. Then there’s the issue of energy maximization
which happens in two ways by either rate coding. Rate coding just means things fire at base
rate normally, but then they fire above or below. They get strengthened if they fire above and
weakened if they fire below, but that also is time coding because of spike-time-dependent
plasticity as well. So time coding also changes these things so
you have energy minimization. What happens is the least energy it takes
to fire the more likely the firing will take place, and that means the easier it is to
recruit. It’s easier to recruit things that can fire
more easily. That’s a very important principle for language
and thought which we’re going to get to. Next, there is the neural reward system. Dopamine, norepinephrine, good and bad rewards,
which are there and very, very important for the moral system which we’re going to get
to for understanding what morality is and we’ll talk about that after a while. That’s a very, very basic set of constraints. What that means is you don’t just acquire
any random circuitry. What is permanently acquired is constrained
by these mechanisms and these are commonalities that we all share. Now, they allow you to learn a certain set
of ideas that appear to be universal, that appear to be there, and then there are others
that combine differently in different cultures. You’ve seen lots of examples of cultural
difference in this conference and they’re real examples. This is a very important thing to understand. You don’t just learn anything at random. You learn things on the basis partly of what
is already there even at birth and partly of what’s used. Also, many of these cases are things that
you learn because everybody lives on earth. You live in a gravitational field. The sun rises every day. You’re born to parents, if you’re lucky. You have to eat. You have to excrete. You have to breathe. You have to do all these things and they shape
how you think. We’re going to talk about how that works. Now, one of the things that’s very important
has to do with generalizations. When you talk about framing, what is framing? A frame is a neural structure that allows
you to structure your experience and structure it either in some of the things you’re born
with like the notion of motion itself - where there’s a source, there’s a goal, an endpoint
to the motion. It is a course of motion. That is done in MT [phonetic] and it’s there
and you have parts of the brain that record that. You’re born with that. But there are other ones that are fit together
so you have a frame like a commercial event. A commercial event has four elements. It’s a whole event and it has a buyer, a
seller of goods, and money. There’s a structure to it, a little scenario. Before the event happens, you have a buyer
who wants some goods and has some money, hopefully, or can loan it, and borrow it, or whatever,
or convince people they have it. Then they exchange. The seller has the goods, hopefully, and wants
the money. They exchange and then the opposite is true. Then the seller has the money and the buyer
has the goods. That’s a scenario. We’ll talk about how scenarios develop and
how they work, but this is a major part of what a frame is. It has semantic roles - buyer, seller, goods
and money - and it has these things. Now, in addition to that, you can put these
together. If you’ll go to a restaurant, which you
all do, you will see that a restaurant is partly a business, partly a food service. If it’s a fancy enough restaurant, if it’s
not McDonald’s or something, you will go and it will be a host-guest relation. You’ll have a binding between the customer,
you, either you, you’re the same person, and the guest. What happens is you have put these frames
together but in the brain, you can’t mush them together. They don’t move. They’re in different places in the brain. How did they get together? The answer is this has a name. It’s called neural binding. What we have and we’ll talk about it in
a few minutes is a theory of how that works. What happens is that you have a neural connection
between the two roles. Now, these roles can apply separately. You can have businesses independent of restaurants,
and food service at your house independent of businesses and so on, or you can bring
them together. In order to bring them together, you have
to have connections that go in both directions and give you simultaneous firing. But in order for that to happen, these connections
have to be gated. There has to be something that gates it either
a group of neurons that say hey, this is a restaurant. What gating can be is you could have something
that connects and then the gate inhibits and then it can be disinhibited, or it can be
connecting but not strongly enough and it needs more. This is called modulation and gates modulate. That’s how gating works. Gates are all over the place because you need
to be bringing together the embodied ideas that you have in order to have any complex
idea at all and most of your ideas are very complex. We’re going to talk about how those things
get brought together and how this kind of gating works. Next, embodiment, for the first dozen years
of my work as a linguist, I did generative linguistics. I was in MIT and my senior year was the year
of Chomsky’s first year of his department. I learned all of that stuff as an undergraduate
but I was in mathematics and literature so I went off to graduate school in English literature. Then I wound up in linguistics which was interesting
because I got fired from my job as a TA. I was teaching freshmen composition. It is a true story. I was teaching freshmen composition and we
were assigned to read essays to the students, to go over certain essays. One of the essays was by George Orwell on
the Spanish Civil War. I had a group of students in Indiana who had
never heard of the Spanish Civil War. I had to explain what it was. It just so happened at that time, it was the
fall of 1962 which was the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis,
people were saying what’s the Spanish Civil War? And I was saying, well, here are the bad guys
and here are the good guys. Guess who the good guys were? They were the communists. So someone writes, someone says there’s
a communist teaching us and I get fired. I go up to the head of the linguistics department. I’ve been talking to him and I’ve gotten
to know him pretty well. I explained what happened. He said well, I’m an interim head. I’m here because last year, I got fired
from Ohio State for taking part in a civil rights demonstration. Interesting, then the phone rings. He picks it up, talks, puts it down and he
says oh, that’s somebody turning down a three-year fellowship to our department. Would you like to go into linguistics? It’s true. The best thing that ever happened to me was
getting fired. Now, this is interesting for a number for
reasons. Very often the best thing that ever happens
to you is that you learn a lot and you fail. What I did for the first dozen years of my
work as I found examples with Chomsky’s theory of grammar didn’t work because it
was purely formal not based on meaning. It just had symbols which were uninterpreted
symbols, independent of meaning and communication. That sounded pretty weird to me so I started
finding examples that didn’t work. I said well, how would you make up a theory
of meaning - and at that time which was 1962, 1963, around there - meaning meant logic. I was trained as a mathematician. I’ve learned logic so what I’ve done was
to try to fit them together with logic, but there isn’t one logic. There are hundreds of logics, maybe thousands
of logics. The job of a logician is to make up logic
to deal with some phenomenon. That’s what logicians do. They make up logics. If you go and read the Australasian Journal
of Logic or The Journal of Symbolic Logic, there are all these people making up logics. They have to make them up and they’re all
different. There are a lot of very smart people who make
up logics about particular individual issues and they don’t fit together. What I found was that they never fit together
very well. After a while, it got very frustrating. I worked on this between about 1963 and 1975. The whole idea of generative grammar fell
apart. There were things that you could not do with
it even if it was meaningless, you still couldn’t do certain sentences. I’ll be happy to go through with that if
anyone really cares but there are examples where there can’t be a deep structure, for
example. That was discovered in ‘74 and nobody has
found a way to do it since then. It fits together very well from a neural perspective
but not from a generative perspective. In 1975, I was teaching at Berkeley and I
happened to have a group of remarkable colleagues. People like Paul Kay, Eleanor Rosch, Leonard
Talmy and Charles Fillmore. I heard from them an amazing set of lectures
in 1975, all during a summer session when we had a group of people coming to an underground
linguistic institute. You know, this is Berkeley, right? You announce that you got a grant for eight
people who are going to come and do something interesting and 188 showed up. And so my research assistant gets a bunch
of sorority houses and forms communes, which was great. We had everybody giving talks on two days’
notice and so on. Among those talks were the following. There was a talk by Paul Kay who was studying
the terms for colors. It turns out that that was just after Russ
De Valois had figured the nature of the physiology of color vision. That depended on - not surprisingly now but
then it was news – on wavelengths in the world - which are not colors, which are reflectances
out in world - your color cones in your eye, and connections to the neural circuitry in
your brain which creates colors. It was discovered shortly after that the color
cones are dependent on X chromosomes. There are two versions of these for men and
16 for women. Women have a larger color vocabulary if they’re
going to talk to each other because there are different types. But then also since then it’s been discovered
that certain women have four color cones. I’m married to one of those women. She’s an artist. She sees colors that I can’t even imagine
are there. But this is important. If you’ve ever had an argument with someone
in the opposite gender about whether something is blue or green or orange or brown or something,
you’re both right because you don’t see the same thing, a very basic thing to know. What that means is there’s no color in the
world. Well, at that time, if you’re thinking about
logic, logic is defined in terms of truth conditions. If you have something that says the chair
is green, it means that that thing you’re referring to as a chair is in the set of green
things in the world, but if there is no descriptive green things in the world, this can’t work. Logic can’t work. I almost fell off my chair when I heard this. In the next few weeks, I heard Eleanor Rosch
give her first lecture on basic level categories and what she pointed out was if you have category
hierarchies like furniture, chair, rocking chair or a vehicle, car, sports car - the
one in the middle has special properties. Those properties are a car or a chair is defined
by three things: mental imagery, gestalt perception and motor programs. So you’re all sitting in a chair using those
motor programs. You can then close your eyes and imagine a
chair or imagine a car. You can’t get a mental image of a generalized
piece of furniture that’s neutral between chairs, beds, tables and so on. And you can’t get a mental image of something
that’s neutral between cars and airplanes and boats and motorcycles and so on. You can’t do it. Try it. The question is why does this happen. At the time we only knew that it happened. We now know why it happens. Part of this comes from the work of Martha
Farah who back in 1989 did a remarkable paper where she showed that mental imagery and visual
perception use the same structures in the brain, the neural structures. The second part has to do with the work on
mirror neurons circuitry. The mirror neurons circuitry, it’s not just
the neurons, you have circuits that connect from the premotor cortex to the motor cortex,
but they also connect to the parietal lobe behind that which integrates with vision. So that you have connections integrating the
motor system, your motor programs, with your gestalt perception, with your mental imagery
in a single loop. That is why you have basic level categories. Is that cool? There’s a reason for this and it doesn’t
apply up above because you can’t get the same things in those visual systems. That’s important. The next week, we heard a talk from Leonard
Talmy. Leonard Talmy was then a graduate student
finishing a dissertation on spatial terms in various languages. He was also at the time going blind. He knew he had tunnel vision and he would
eventually go blind. He prepared himself for this by becoming the
world’s expert on space, and he’s still the world’s expert on space. He does folk dancing, blind. He raises flowers, blind. He spent 20 years running a cognitive science
department at SUNY Buffalo blind and so on, an absolutely remarkable human being, a wonderful
human being, a sweet, sweet guy. There was something also Ron Langacker at
San Diego had pointed out is that if you look at spatial relations terms in different languages
like Dutch versus English, they’re all different but they have the same primitives. They can be broken down into the same primitives
like motion, a source-path-goal, containment, things like nearness, how close things are,
how tightly connected they are, whether they’re going around or not and so on. Various things he called force dynamics. Force dynamics include a long list of forces. I’ll come back to that in a minute but let’s
-- oh, I want to go one other thing that he pointed out is what is called fictive motion
and then we’ll get on to his list. Fictive motion is a sentence like the road
runs through the woods. The road is not moving. Now, this is basically a metaphor. It says the way you understand a line or a
curve is by motion tracing it. Now, Teenie Matlock took this and, quote,
ran with it. What she did was if you take something like
the road runs through the woods and the road meanders through the woods, guess which one
takes longer. Meander takes longer. Well, she then has done a series of experiments
over the years that show that all of the properties of motion come into this metaphor, a very
crucial metaphor. You get things like the wall curves or the
roof slopes downward and so on. I like Route 1 turns inland after Tomales
Bay as you’re going along it. It’s not moving, but, you know, and so on. We understand this all the time. Now, in this, you have a bunch of conceptual
primitives. The week after Len talked, we got a talk from
Charles Fillmore who observed that grammar is based in simple sentences and in the case
of languages like Finnish and Hungarian and so on, on notions like action and events in
the world. So you have an agent, you might have somebody
who is fighting against an agent. You have a patient who the agent works on. You have an experience or you experience something. Something happens to you. You have observers. You have beneficiaries. You have instruments, recipients, sources
and goal. You go from here to there. You have inhibitions. Things can stand in your way and stop you
and so a word like despite in a sentence has to do with an inhibition. You did this despite this happening. You have reference where you have pronouns
that refer to the same thing. You have accompaniment with words like with. You have resultant expressions and so on. Locations, directions, manner, measures, ranges
and so on, all of these are what are called basic semantic roles and actions and events
and grammars are structured around them. That’s what Chuck found. It’s very important. This is part of your everyday experience and
it’s the experience of the most basic actions and events that structure simple grammars
then things get more complicated. What Len pointed out was you have other things. You have deictic centers. Actually, Fillmore has the greatest book and
it’s called Deixis. What is deixis? It’s a location. It’s point of view from here. If I say come here, it’s come to here. Go is someplace else. But if you talk about here versus there, that’s
deixis and so on, or I can talk about home or your home which is you are now the deictic
center. You can shift deictic centers. What does this have to do with neuroscience? Think about who won the Nobel Prize in neuroscience
last year. The people discovered space cells and grid
cells which are responsible for deixis. It’s a neural thing. You also have the notion of cardinal directions
and you have that in the space cells. So you know that the sun rises in the east
and sets in the west and so on, if you live in certain places like Australia and you can
see them. You can actually also see them from Berkeley
but not from any other places. But there are some places in the world where
you can actually see the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. In many of those places, there are languages
where that’s the only thing you can say. Where you say something like he is sitting
to the west of her - and that’s all you can do. You can’t do it but you think about it and
you know all the time what is east and what is west. There are languages where that works that
way. But also as Len pointed out, you have all
these notions like part-whole, center-periphery, an axis. So if you’re going across the stream, you’re
going across an axis, along the axis. You have a front, a back. Now, in physics, there’s no notion of front
and back. You have to have a body to have a front and
a back. This is a little bit tricky for crabs because
you can see why. They move and see in different directions. But we move and see in the same directions
and that’s fronts and backs, and then we project them on to other things. You can put something in front of the tree
where the tree is understood as facing you. But there are some languages where the tree
is focused in the other direction. It depends on which language you’re in. You have notions like side, and left and right,
and top and bottom, adjacent regions, figure and ground, verticality, horizontality, regions,
links between things. What Len pointed out is that these ideas which
are called basic primitive image schemas structure thought in every language in the world. This is how you think in these terms and they’re
there and they’re there for everybody. The question is exactly how they’re embodied
but they have to be embodied. There’s more of course. Near, far, facing opposite, intermediate,
attached, separated and so on. There are a lot more even there, these additional
ones. Now, in addition, Len pointed that there is
what is called force dynamics, and so you have forces and counterforces and he got this
from muscles. Every muscle in your body has an opposite
muscle. A reflexor has an extensor, and they are connected
in mutual inhibition. If I move my arm like this, I’m flexing
this muscle and releasing the other one. If I’m banging you, I’m playing basketball
with my elbow and I’m pushing you out of the way, it’s the reverse. I’m giving force in that direction and releasing
it here. He pointed out basically there’s force dynamics
all over the place. You have things like compulsion where you’re
pushing or pulling or enabling something to move or supporting. I put this on here and this has three image
schemas and force dynamics. It is supporting it. It is in contact with it and it’s above
it. Those are its dimensions. In terms, you have pulling and pushing and
resisting and inertia and momentum and all of this show up in basic understandings of
how people function in the world. Balance, stasis, thrust, friction, compression,
tension, all of these are parts of your embodied structure that you are born with, that you
use every day and that you put together with other things. Let’s take a very simple case. Take into. You walk in the room. It’s not that simple because the room is
a container. There’s an interior and an exterior and
a boundary and a portal you can go in to. Then there is motion. There’s a place where it starts and a place
where it ends in a path. The place where it starts is outside; the
place where it ends is inside. The path goes through the portal. That is three neural bindings, three, and
they have to occur together. You have to have a circuit that says the into
circuit is what does it because you’re not pulling them together. They’re in different parts of the brain. They can occur separately. This is one of the things that Len contributed. If we go back to all of that, this is one
of the main things that we found out in 1975. It has now been 40 years since all of this
embodiment was discovered. Then in 1978, I happened to find out about
conceptual metaphor during an undergraduate class. I won’t go into the story. It’s a nice story but anyway, we discovered
that metaphor was in thought. How did you discover it? You discover it because one of the women in
the class was having a metaphor problem with her boyfriend. The boyfriend said that their relationship
had hit a dead-end street. We say, wait a minute. What’s going on here, she says. We all say okay, it’s 1978. We’re in Berkeley. Let’s help. We set up an instant support group. Everyone knew how to do this. We said okay, if it hit a dead-end street,
you can’t keep going the way you’ve been going. You may have to turn back. As the professor I said, hey, you have a bunch
of ways of talking about love in terms of travel. What are some of the others? Well, the marriage is on the rocks. It’s off the track. It’s been a long bumpy road. We’re going in different directions. We may have to bail out and so on. We got a nice long list of them. It’s okay. We got a long list. We’re linguists. That’s what we do but we do something else. We asked her, is there a generalization over
the list? We asked her that and people immediately pointed
out the lovers are always travelers. The relation is some kind of vehicle. It’s got to be either a boat, a train, a
car or something like that. If you’re spinning your wheels in a relationship,
it’s a car, and the wheels are on the car. What do you know about that? Well, it turns out that as a further generalization,
this is about long-term relationships and the problems of long-term relationships of
having common life goals which are reaching destinations. You have to understand that achieving a goal
is reaching a destination which is a general metaphor. If you have common life goals, you have to
have compatible destinations. Many of you will understand that that’s
not easy. This is a metaphor about it not being easy,
about the problem of spinning your wheels in a relationship which you’re not making
any progress. If you’re spinning your wheels in a relationship,
you have a mental image. The wheels are on a car. What do you know about it? It’s not moving. You want it to be moving. You’re putting energy into trying to get
the car to move and you feel how? Frustrated. If you’re spinning your wheels in a relationship,
the relationship isn’t going anywhere, you’re putting energy into it and you feel frustrated. That’s what it means to think in terms of
a metaphor. You take knowledge about a situation and you
apply a single mapping. Lovers are travelers, relationship is a vehicle,
purposes are destinations, and difficulties in achieving a purpose is difficulty in reaching
the destination. If you take those things and you apply it
to that, you get inferences and those inferences are what these metaphors mean. That’s how you think in terms of metaphors. Metaphors are about inferencing [sounds like],
taking inferences from a source domain and applying it to what is called a target domain. Well, when I started working with Mark Johnson
on this in 1980, actually we started in ’79, we noticed things like happy is up and sad
is down. But why is happy, up and sad, down? Think of your body. You’re smiling, you feel up. You’re down, you’re [indiscernible]. Happy is up. Sad is down. In 1983, I had a visitor named Zoltán Kövecses
from Hungary who had come to visit me because he was putting together an idiom dictionary. Under A, he had idioms for anger. He had like 400 of them, lots of them. I looked at these things and a lot of them
where about embodiment. I said okay, you have emotions and I have
a friend in Berkeley who studied the embodiment of emotion. His name is Paul Ekman. He is a noted psychologist who started studying
the embodiment of emotion. I went to visit Paul and he said hey, Kalsher
[phonetic] and I and others have done some work on this and here is what happens when
you get angry. Your skin temperature rises half a degree. Your blood pressure goes up. Your heartbeat rate goes up. You have interference with accurate perception
and interference with fine motor control, which is why you get boiling mad. It’s heat or all steamed up and so on. It is why you can explode under pressure. It is why you get blind with rage because
you have interference with accurate perception. Why you get hopping mad because your fine
motor control is gone and hundreds of other cases. I have a book called Women, Fire, and Dangerous
Things where I put in a chapter of the study that I did with Kövecses on anger and he
has since done books on other metaphors for emotions. They all worked on embodiment. They have to do it the way that emotion is
felt throughout the body and then in the corresponding parts of the brain. This is crucial. It’s the same across languages. It is not true that it’s just about English
or something. He has now got lots of books on this subject. Now, it’s very important because it says
yes, metaphor is about embodiment and embodied thought and in fact, it’s a major part of
all of that. Now, we then started looking at what is called
grammar, construction grammar and what Fillmore and I discovered was of course we knew that
meaning affected grammar so we set up to do a theory of how this work. The way it works is that you are learning
pairings of meanings and grammatical structures, surface grammatical structures. These pairings have to do with all kinds of
meanings like speech act meanings and the metaphor. That metaphor can enter in to these constructions. Let me give you a very simple case. One of the constructions is what is called
deictic there construction. There is Harry sitting on the porch. Here comes the bus. You’re pointing to something in the common
visual field about something that is moving either towards you or going somewhere and
you’re directing someone’s attention to a place where that thing is going to be. So you have a general principle for this and
then you can apply metaphor to this. You can be listening to a lecture. You may have heard this lecture before and
you can say, here comes an interesting argument or there goes the same boring point again
or something, and here it comes because you understand communication as sending things. Another metaphor called the conduit metaphor. That metaphor can be applied to this construction
and you can use that construction metaphorically. This happens in general throughout constructions. In general, grammar works via metaphor. There’s a remarkable student who got a PhD
at Berkeley about five years ago, now teaching in Australia. Her name is Karen Sullivan. What she discovered was that there are certain
places where the source and target of a construction can be distinguished, where you can tell which
is going to be the source, and which is the target of the metaphor. The way to do this is look at what is called
dependent and independent parts of constructions. If I say a thing like brilliant student, the
student is fixed and the brilliant is the metaphorical applying to the student. Well, in literal cases, this is also true. If I talk about a tall child, the child is
fixed and I’m changing the notion of tallness for the child. That’s a dependent case and dependent cases
can be sources of metaphors. If you go and look at this consistently across
dozens and dozens of constructions as Karen did, you can see where the source and targets
are in the grammar. That’s an important thing to have discovered. Grammar is based on metaphor because it’s
based on things that are fixed versus things that change with respect to them. That is a normal thing to happen, and metaphor
is right there in the middle of this. Then there are blends. Mark Turner and Gil Fauconnier discovered
blends in 1989 before we had a decent theory of how the neural system worked. They have a theory of it that doesn’t work
very well but they had beautiful observations which are very accurate. They’re good, very terrific linguists. What they’ve observed is something that
Mark Turner and I had discovered when we wrote a book on poetry. If you take a mythological figure, the figure
of death in European culture – there’s a knock on the door, you open the door and
there’s a skeleton staring you in the face with a black cowl and a scythe. He says, “You’re coming with me right
now,” and you can’t resist and you go. That’s the figure of death. What’s with the skeleton? What’s with the scythe? Why is the cowl black? What’s going on? Well, what you’re doing is you’re putting
together metaphors and metonymies altogether and binding them in a single unity. The skeleton is a metonymy. That’s what happens to you after death,
so the skeleton stands for death. There’s a metaphor that a phenomenon is
a person that causes that phenomenon. You can think of evil as there being an evil
out there or jealously as causing jealousy. If you go through the body of English poetry,
they have lots of cases where they will take some phenomenon or you can say look, aggression
causes war, where you understand aggression as doing something. It’s a phenomenon. You do this all the time, a general metaphor,
and death is what causes death. That’s the first thing. You have this cause of death. The next thing is what’s with the scythe? Well, in general, there’s a metaphor. People are plants with respect to the lifecycle. You have young saplings and you have sowing
the seeds and so on. You have a lifecycle. In terms of growing wheat, when do you cut
down the wheat - at the prime of its life when it’s standing up. That’s what the scythe is about. So you’re being cut down at the prime of
life with the scythe. This figure of death doesn’t come around
when you’re 95 and about to die naturally. It comes about in the prime of life. Then you have why the cowl is black? Because life is light and death is darkness
and you see this in metaphors all over the place. Why does he take you away? Being born is arrival and death is departure. He is the dear departed. He’s gone. He’s left us, et cetera. You have a combination of several metaphors
and a couple of metonymies and they are bound together in one integrated figure. You have what’s called integration of things
just as we saw with the visual cases. This is a very important thing to understand. You have to bring things together. How do you do that? You need neural bindings across many things,
across metaphors, across metonymies, across all of these things. You need to have neural bindings for that. The question is how does that work? Okay. That was 1989. 1992 is a big year for embodiment. We set up a group when Jerry Feldman came
to Berkeley on structured neural computation and not PDP computation. I learned it from Romuald Park [phonetic]
how parallel distributed processing neural networks worked. We’re trying to get it to be part of the
language for about eight years and it didn’t work at all. I learned all the stuff. I was in there. I taught in their summer schools. Nothing worked. Jerry had this idea that if you looked at
these actual structures in the brain and modeled those, you might get it to work. In 1992, we got a graduate student from the
Indian Institute of Technology called Srini Narayanan who’s the person I’m working
on this book with. Srini, a normal Indian graduate student, he
has studied mathematics, computer engineering, neurophysiology, robotics, economics, international
economics, seven classical languages, their literatures, a typical Indian graduate student
coming to Berkeley, and we get this all the time. But he shows up, he is in a cubicle next to
a guy named David Bailey who is a very good cognitive scientist and computer scientist. David had a problem. His job was to try to figure out how people
could name words for hand motions and what that had to do with the hand because it’s
done differently in different languages. Let’s say we push a button and we push a
baby carriage. It’s the same thing but in Spanish, you
use two different words. The question is does this have anything to
do with your hand? A reasonable question. To do that, he needed an online body. Luckily, one was available at the University
of Pennsylvania. It was named Jack and it was designed for
car crashes but the grant was over. They had every bone and muscle in its place
but there’s nothing moved because it was just for car crashes. They said, “You want Jack, here is Jack,”
and they sent them Jack. Jack arrives and you also have a picture of
the body. There was a line diagram of what Jack looks
like in the front and the side and so on and the top. You can see what the body is moving except
it doesn’t move. The question is how do you get it to move? Srini takes on this question. He said, “Well, I know how the motor system
works. It’s a hierarchical system. It works in the following way.” There happens to be a kind of neural computation
called stochastic Petri nets that is not based on timing but is based on inputs and outputs
and stuff like that. It looks kind of like a neural system. Then he goes into the guts and makes it more
like a neural system. And he says “Well, we also know that the
premotor cortex gives instructions to the motor cortex, so let’s model those instructions,
et cetera.” He sets this up and in a while, he gets Jack
to move. You get things like, words like push and pull,
and lift and drop, and run and walk, and stumble and fall, and so on. He takes these words and he shows what it
takes Jack to move and all of these. Cool, very nice. He comes to report to us and he says there’s
something strange. The top level of the system looks the same
for all of them. Just one structure and as you go down, it
changes but the top level looks the same. That is in each case, you have a precondition
that has to be met. You have a starting action then you go down
and do some other action. Then you have a center of the action and then
if it’s purposeful, you have to check to see if the purpose is met. If it isn’t, you repeat and iterate and
it’s just going to be long or short. Then after that, if the purpose is met or
if there is no purpose, you go on to the finishing action and then after it’s all done, you
have a conclusion. I said hey, that’s interesting. I know that structure. It’s in every language in the world. It’s called aspect. In fact, if you will add Ben Bergen’s talk
earlier this morning, he talked about experiments on this. In English, being is in the middle of the
action. About to is before it. I have done it is after it’s done and so
on. Every language in the world has a way to express
aspect either in words or morphemes or in idioms or something like that. Every language has some way to do this, every
place in the world. What that means is you are understanding the
structure of events and actions in the world in terms of what your body can do in motor
routines. You understand this in terms of the same kinds
of motor structures that animals have. This is exaptation. It is the repurposing of structures that are
there in animals for understating things and understanding how things work in the world. That’s pretty cool. The first question I asked them was can you
get a logic of aspect out of this because I knew that no logician had ever figured this
out because they didn’t do embodiment. They said well, it’s right there in the
program. If you’ve gone this far, you’ve done all
the things before and you haven’t the things after. That’s the logic of aspect. It’s very simple. I said well, that’s all very nice for physical
things but this applies to abstract things. Things that stock markets do, the governments
do and so on. He said aha, that’s my dissertation. He said, you have abstract things or metaphors. He took the abstract notion of international
economics, worked out the metaphors for it and then constructed a neural theory of metaphor
to show how that worked and fit it together and it worked. It’s very cool. By 1997, we had a neural theory of metaphor. Since then, what was shown was that there
are -- one thing we discovered along the way is that there are things called primary metaphors
versus complex ones. The primary ones are very simple things like
more is up, affection is warmth. They apply all over the place. Purposes are destinations. States are bounded regions in space so that
you can enter a state, leave a state, on the verge of entering a state, be deep in a state,
et cetera. And then you have things like change is motion
where you go from here to there, from one state to another. Causes are forces which Len Talmy pointed
out and so on. If you look at forces and motions and bounded
regions in space which put together all of Len Talmy’s idea in one group, in one integrated
group, you get these notions. Now, that’s a very powerful. We learned how that worked and those are primary
metaphors but you get groups of them. What Jean Mandler who studies child language
development pointed out in a paper published last June is that children learn these combinations. They learn about force changes of motion. They learn about these things. They learn about containment and moving things
from one container to another. I have the cutest picture of my two-year old
granddaughter. My son sent me a wonderful video of her at
the age of one. She had just learned to stand up, about to
learn to walk. But she was taking things out of a crayon
box and putting them in to a bowl, never missing, then going backwards, never missing. Then doing it again over and over, which she
mastered the bowl and the crayon box. Then she got into a box herself and out of
the box. Then she took her dolly and put it in the
carriage and out of the carriage and so on. She mastered motion and containment. This is something that Jean was talking about
in this paper and she goes through the stages at which children do this. They put these things together in integrated
holes. Now, that’s a very important thing for a
number of reasons and the reason for this is very important. I’m going to get to that in a few minutes
when we show how this works, but I want to point out what this all is leading to. It turns out that metaphor systems are the
basis of philosophical theories. They’re the basis of mathematics. We have a book called Where Mathematics Comes
From showing mathematics is embodied but you’ll get different forms from different metaphors
and so on. We have all of those things and then we have
stuff on moral systems and politics. Okay. Let’s move on. We did fictive motion. We did those. We did these. We did this. We did force dynamics. Okay. Now, what we have in the book called How Brains
Think that I’m doing with Narayanan and we’ve now worked on this for 22 years. It’s the following kind of notion that Jerry
Feldman first pointed out but it goes in the following way. What Narayanan did was he constructed a theory
that could model the neural system but also model the conceptual system, the metaphor
system, the framing system and all of these other things. He has it in such a way that you can map onto
this from this computational system onto the metaphor system and so on. You can map the other way onto the neural
system and it creates a bridge. And you can also show what happens in sequences
and so on and you can show how the functions work. This is what the bridging model is. You have center cases of a structured neurocomputational
model in the middle. You have on one side integrated, embodied,
conceptual systems and language way on the left. On the right, you have an embodied neural
system for thought and language. And then you have mappings, some of the neurals
from the central computational system onto both of those. That’s what the bridge is. That’s the bridging model. Okay, how does this work? Well to do this, you have to set up a toolkit
which you can do easily through the neurocomputational structure where it’s clear and then you
map it on to other things. And so you can have activation connections
where one thing activates something. In other words, it’s something that inhibits
it and modulation connections. And they’re all gated so that you can have
gates with activations that only happens when the gate applies, when it’s modulated. So you have that. Then every circuit can have a gate that modulates
it, that turns the circuit on and off, so in that, that’s part of what happens. And then there are structures called gestalt
circuits. Gestalt circuits are interesting. What they do is they have a whole structure. It’s a particle structure. It’s a whole and a number parts which is
what all frames have. We went through for example commercial events
or restaurants, all frames that have semantic roles which are parts and then you have a
whole in there. And then what you have is a scenario and the
scenario is what Srini made up which is for motion, which is called an executing network
or an X-net. It’s what does things in sequence and that
carries. So you have both one of these gestalt circuits
and the way is -- this works. If I say a word like waiter, you know you’re
in a restaurant. If I say a word like sell, you know you’re
in a commercial event. That is, the part activates the whole and
the whole activates all the parts. That’s what a gestalt is. That’s what it means to have a part-whole
structure that is a gestalt where things works like that. And then you add to that linear structures,
and you get the possibility for frames. And frames are the way you understand all
institutions, you understand all events in the world this way, you understand all complicated
cases in terms of these frames. That’s how you think in terms of circuits. And this is the kind of circuitry you need
for frames. That’s cool, so far so good. Then you need a binding circuit where you
have two nodes that activate each other with a gate. We mentioned that. So to get things like restaurants out of businesses
and foods services, you need binding circuits. Now the next one I want – before I get to
integrating circuits, I want go to Stanislas Dehaene who is one of my great heroes. Now, I’ve read his three major books. They’re all great. I’ve learned something important from each
of them. I read his last book on consciousness on the
way here, on the plane because I couldn’t get here for his talk. I hear he talked on chapter 4 which I read
very carefully because it was the center of this book, and the thing he was most proud
of for good reason. And what he said in Reading in the Brain,
which is a great book, he asked how can you recognize a letter or a word when we didn’t
evolve to read? And he’s very interesting. Then he does studies and he says, “Oh, this
is part of the brain which does objects structure,” which is next to the fusiform face region. And he says, “You know that is activated
whenever you’re reading but how does that work?” And he points out the following. He says in the primary visual area, V1, that’s
dedicated to detection of thin lines and object contours. By the secondary visual area, the neurons
are already sensitive to combinations of lines and well-defined inclinations and curves. Then further up in the posterior part of the
inferior temporal cortex called TEO, they’re tuned to simple combinations of curves and
the neuron-selective response to say the shape of an F can be reduced to the detection of
a simple conjunction of elementary curves and the way they’re connected. That is what is going on and you have to have
all of them there. Okay, well, he didn’t say what the circuitry
was. He just pointed that out. But the circuitry is fairly obvious if you
think about it. What is involved is an integrating circuit
that does the following. If you have a bunch of centers around receptive
fields and the centers are overlapping to form a line, what does that mean? It means there’s another layer in V2 where
they come together and a single node or a group of neurons are firing when they’re
all firing together. It goes in the opposite direction, if you’re
thinking about the F, so it’s the other line. We know the connections go in both the directions. So the idea is that is what it means to have
a line, those neurons are firing. Then you have another layer where you have
them intersecting. What happens there is you have a layer where
you get input from both lines at a single point where they intersect. The neuron fires if it gets input from two
at once but not if it only gets input from one, so that is the thing, the vision intersection. Then there’s a layer that looks at the patterns
of those intersections and that’s where you get an F. All of them have to be activated
at once to get an F. That is, it’s not located in one place. There’s a cascade effect and this is what
you need. You need exactly that kind of neural structure
with activations in both directions. That is an integrating structure, a simple
integrating structure. Well, how do you get the grim reaper where
you have a whole bunch of things, like five different things that are bound together,
three metaphors and two metonymies? How do you do that? You need something that has a number of binding
circuits which are gated and you have to control all the gates. You have to integrate all of those gates at
once. So one of these integrating circuits applying
to the gates of five binding circuits will do it, and that will create any blend at all. If you take a look at the works by Turner
and Fauconnier, they have thousands and thousands of examples of these, they’re everywhere. I could go on for the rest of the lecture
just talking about blends but that’s the mechanism. And that’s how this stuff works. And so if you continue, then the question
is what kind of circuitry do you have and what -- in addition to that, what Narayanan
did was he said, “What do you need to do motor control?” He said, “Well, you need conjunctive circuits
where you’re doing two things at once, like you’re reaching for something, trying to
grasp it and as you’re going, you’re opening your hand and then closing it. You have to coordinate them as you’re going.” And he figured out how to do coordinating
circuits which are actually very simple to set up. Then you have conditional circuits. If then, have you achieved your purpose? If you have, move on; if you haven’t, iterate
and take another drink, which I think I’ll do right now because I haven’t achieved
my purpose. Here, I go. I need more caffeine. I just did one of those executing schemas. Now, the point is then you have sequential
circuits which allow you to do things in sequence. You have embedding circuits as you go along
and doing something. Like if I wanted to take this drink, I have
to unscrew the cap. Then I have to go through a routine like this,
and that’s in the center of taking the drink. And afterwards, I put it down because I’m
done, like that. Now, that is what these embedding circuits
do at a certain point. There’s a nice way of characterizing that. In the book it takes about a paragraph to
describe. It’s very simple. And then there is substitution circuits where
you do something basic and then you substitute something else for it and that happens all
the time. For example, suppose you want to plug something
in the wall. You have something standing in its way like
a table, you have to go around it. You have to substitute this and then plug
it in the wall, okay? That’s the substitution circuit. There’s a winner-take-all circuit where
you are comparing things and you want to say, who’s going to win here, if you have a competition. What happens is either the one that has the
most activation goes in and you have mutual inhibition. The one that has the most activation is going
to inhibit the other or the one that gets there first is going to inhibit it. That’s a winner-take-all circuit, especially
you can work with many of these things. There’s a metonymic circuit where you have
part of a frame that maps to another, and a metaphor circuit where you’re mapping
frames onto other frames and you’re controlling all of them at once via one of these things
that controls the bindings all at once. Then comes simple combinations and that’s
it. We believe that with all of that apparatus
and no more and maybe that there is some more, you can do all of thought and language. Now, we may be wrong. There may be some more. But so far, all the things that we wanted
to do, we can do. And a lot of these form sequences called cascades. A cascade is a circuit across brain regions
that integrate one thing after another, after another in sequence because you’re learning
a lot of stuff that you do in sequence. And an active cascade is just the flow of
activation across the brain. This is the kind of thing where Dehaene talks
about his workspace, and the workspace so far as I can see has to do with binding circuits
across various embodied parts of the brain. A lot of it is binding circuits and sequences
of these binding circuits one contained within the other. We’ve done a lot of work in cascade analysis
as well. Now, I want to finish up with a few cases
and do it quickly because we’ve talked about many of these already. Primary metaphor works like this. How do you get affection is warmth? You’re held affectionately by your parents. You feel their bodily warmth. There’s a correlation in your brain between
temperature and affection in different places in the brain. Well, how do you get more is up? You have quantity and verticality in different
–- you pour water in a glass; the level goes up every time. You’re a baby, you see this and the brain
picks it up, you might not be conscious of it but the brain registers it in different
parts of the brain. If it happens over and over, you get Hebbian
learning, that is, it gets stronger and spreads along existing pathways and they get stronger. And eventually, the shortest pathway is found
and you formed a circuit. But when you formed that circuit, you have
the situation where things are going like this. Spike-time-dependent plasticity comes in and
whichever has the most input first, you know, strengthened in this [indiscernible] direction
and weakened in the other. That is why you have a source and target domain
of a metaphor. So why is it that more is up not up is more? Because your brain is always computing verticality,
but not always computing quantity. Why is that affection is warmth and not warmth
is affection? Your brain is always computing temperature
but not always affection. You go through 400 cases, they all work like
that. STDP predicts we believe - we can’t prove
this - we believe that it predicts the source and target domains of primary metaphors, and
they structure the entire system which is then put together by bindings. That is how the system gets set-up. Your entire conceptual system is set-up via
primitive concepts, force dynamics, image schemas, executing schemas, basic frames for
functioning in the world every day and primary metaphors. That gives enormous universal structure to
a conceptual system, and then your culture goes to work to give you the rest of the hundreds
of thousands of concepts that you have which are complicated and different in culture and
in different languages. So this is what we’ve done. We’ve talked about schemas and frames. I want to say a little bit about complex metaphorical
thought and linear scales which is a very important thing to do. Take the metaphor of the glass ceiling. What’s involved in that? A lot. So first of all, you have a metaphor that
says purposes are destinations and what is the purpose? It has to do with some desire, some goal,
some means and resources that you have and possible impediments to getting there. You have to get there to this goal. Fine, purposes are destinations say it’s
motion. And what you’re doing, the means is going
along a path and there can be things that blocked you, standing in your way that you
have to get over and so on to reach a goal. Those fit together and form a universal metaphor. Language after language has this metaphor. Then there are linear scales where you have
someone is better than someone else, and you get expressions like John’s intelligence
goes beyond Bill’s. John is far more intelligent than Bill. What they’re doing is using the logic of
motion to a destination to structure a linear scale. And the logic is very clear. For example, I was sitting on a plane next
to someone going to Moscow through Amsterdam. You know that if he was in Amsterdam, he hadn’t
made it to Moscow. If he was in Moscow, he had made it to Amsterdam
by then, right? It’s like saying, okay, if you have 75 bucks
in the bank, and that’s all you have, you don’t have a 100 bucks but you have 50. It’s the same logic applied from the metaphor
from motion to linear scales. So that is part of this and then you put those
two together with purposes or destinations and you have the notion of trying to incrementally
get to some place and competing with someone else in terms of who’s going to succeed,
because you can then do one of these winner-take-all circuits to see who’s gotten further. Fine. And that can be horizontal or vertical but
then you add more is up and it makes it vertical. But since it’s going up, you can add something
you know about verticality which is gravity. So if you’re climbing a ladder, you know
it’s hard and gravity is pulling you down. So what happens? Imagine the following situation. You’re climbing the ladder of success which
is reaching the goal of succeeding. You’re trying to get to this goal and you
start to slip and you fall back and you’re going backwards, down. And then you grasp onto the whole and you
pull yourself up and you start to climb again. You slip again and you fall down and you fail. Failing is falling. Success is getting to the top. Well, what’s the glass ceiling? A ceiling is something that you can’t get
beyond. It’s an impediment that keeps you from reaching
the goal. Why glass? Because it’s a metaphor that knowing is
seeing. You can see that there’s a goal you can
get that you’re not allowed to get to. That’s what the glass ceiling is about. It takes all of those metaphors bound together
to understand the glass ceiling. That is what a complex metaphor system is,
you’re integrating the whole thing. You’re putting them together and forming
a single, unified understanding of each of these metaphors that apply independently. And each has logic and their logics are integrated,
and it’s by putting all their logics together that you understand what the glass ceiling
is. That’s cool. That’s how it works. That’s what complex metaphorical thought
is about. Now, one of the things that’s really crucial
is embodied cognition experiments which we’ve had discussions on. Ben Bergen talked about them this morning. I’ll just give you the simplest kind of
case. You give someone a list of words and you say,
“Is this a sentence of English?” And instead of pressing a button to say -- as
you can press a button that goes forward if it is, and backward if it’s not, or the
reverse. Or you can have a lever that pushes forward
and pulls back. Yes for forward, no for back or the reverse. So I’ll give you the sentence - I gave him
a book. Faster if you’re going forward than if you’re
pulling back, or pressing forward, than if you’re pressing back. It’s the same direction as your hand. It’s embodied. Then you say something like I got a book from
him faster if you’re going back. Fine. Then you say, I told him a story faster if
you’re going forward. I heard a story faster if you’re going in
the other direction because the conduit metaphor says that your communicating is sending messages. So what’s happening is that that metaphor
is embodied and shows it in that example. Well, that’s the simplest kind of case. Then there are the cases of moral metaphors. Now, how does morality come out of this and
this is a very cool thing. I have seven books on morality and politics. And what we found out was something very important. Mark Johnson and I, when we did Philosophy
in the Flesh, observed that morality is about well-being, the well-being of others and your
own well-being. That’s the subject matter of morality. And what is well-being in the brain? Dopamine and norepinephrine that is they are
hormones that are also neurotransmitters. That’s what they do. You get a bunch of dopamine, you feel good;
you get norepinephrine, you feel bad. Okay, fine. And there are other things that are lot like
that as well. It’s more complicated than just that. But the point is that you have a well-being
system and an ill-being system in your brain. And then the question is what experiences
make you feel good and make you feel bad? Are there experiences in your brain that go
along with well-being and ill-being in your brain? And the answer is there’s a couple of dozen
and they give rise to all the metaphors for morality in the world. They give rise to moral systems in the following
way. You eat pure food, you feel good. You eat rotten you feel bad. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” That was a rotten thing to do. You have purification rituals in every culture
in the world. This is a normal thing. Okay, you have things like you’re better
off if you can stand up and walk than if you have to crawl on the ground. So, somebody who has to crawl on the ground
is a low down snake. He’s underhanded as opposed to being upright. So you have metaphors from morality there. You have those -- there’s one that’s important
which is you’re better off if you have the things you need than if you don’t. This gives rise together with the notion of
trading and comparing what you have with what is called moral accounting. So if I do you a favor that helps you then
you say, “I’m in your debt, how can I ever repay you?” And that’s a very important part of this. Now, if I do something that harms you, you
can settle the debt either by making up for it which is compensation; or you can harm
someone back which is retribution; or you can take something good away from them which
is revenge. You have different cultures that do this one
way or the other. So moral accounting based on that metaphor
for well-being, they’re all over the world in one form or another. You see it every day in the newspapers. Then you have two that have to do with the
family. One that has to do with the fact, are you
obeying your parents or not? And if you assume that parents are there to
take care of you, then obedience to a good authority is morality. So obedience to an appropriate authority is
morality. Or if your parents are nurturing you then
morality is nurturance. They give rise to two different family models
and those are the models that are the basis of progressive and conservative thought. And I’ve now written seven books on the
details of how that works. There’s one called Whose Freedom? that goes
to the conservative and progressive use of freedom in each domain, freedom of religion,
freedom of speech, et cetera. There are like a dozen different domains and
these metaphors apply across the board. The first book was called Moral Politics that
goes in the details of how this works because it’s complicated friendly systems, but they
have to do with empathy. Empathy is the basis of progressive democracy. What does that mean? It says, citizens care about each other and
they act through their government to provide public resources to make life better for everybody,
including businesses. You can’t run a business if you don’t
have sewers. You don’t have roads, you don’t have airports,
you don’t have an Internet, you don’t have electric grids, things provided for everybody. And similarly for individual life, you cannot
have a decent individual life if you don’t have healthcare, if you don’t have education,
if you don’t have all those other important public resources. And if you don’t have a planet, it’s pretty
hard. It’s nice to have a planet. Now, the idea is these are public resources
and then you have another view, the authoritarian strict father view that says, the person who
knows best, who knows what’s moral should be in charge. The strict father knows right from wrong and
therefore he should be in charge. And not only that, you should do what he says. And what that means is you have to have respect
for authority, you have to follow authority and most importantly, you have individual
responsibility, not social responsibility. So what is democracy in that point of view? Democracy says that democracy gives you the
liberty to do what you want for your well-being, to not take anything else from anyone else
which would make you dependent on them, or to do anything for anybody else which would
create their dependency, and that would make the world worse. And then you have a conservative worldview
and a conservative view of democracy. In the American government, they’re right
there. You can see it right out there and it’s
all over Europe and it’s spreading and it’s so on. And then this has to do with the fact how
is it spreading? It’s spreading through language, why? Because in frame semantics, what Fillmore
discovered is that every word in every language fits a frame. It’s defined in terms of rolls and a frame,
every word in every language fits some frame. It could be a metaphorical frame. It could be a simple image schema frame. It could be a complex frame but every single
word fits a frame. So if you say a word that fits a conservative
frame, you’re activating that frame and making it stronger. So conservatives try to get their language
into public discourse. They learned how to do this because when they
went to school and studied business, they took a marketing course, and they learned
how people really think. The people who are liberals tend not to do
that. They usually don’t take marketing courses. They usually take political science, sociology,
public policy, economics or law. They work by enlightenment reason which is
does no frames, no metaphors, none of this stuff like repetition that says if you say
something once, people should reason to the right conclusion. Right? It never works. But they keep on doing it because it is part
of their brains. They assimilate - in both conservatives and
progressives - assimilate things to what’s already there in their brains. That is one of the problems with progressives
who have learned enlightenment reason and who can’t assimilate things like metaphor
and frames and the kind of use of language into their brains, and the same with conservatives
who cannot see global warming. It doesn’t make any sense to them. Okay? And this is a very important thing to understand
because these ideas come up in business, they come up in education, they come up in every
area of life. That’s what the book on Whose Freedom? is
about. It shows any domain of life you pick, these
things will come into it. And they’re everywhere and they’re there
because this is how brains really work. I want to finish with one cool example. I won’t go into the last grammar example. But I want to go into a sound, symbolism example. This is an experiment done by Shin Shimojo
at Caltech. And he’s using what’s called a grid. A grid is a case where you take a sine wave
and you move it one way at a certain speed. Then you take a same sine wave and you move
it the another way. Then you superimpose them at the same speed
and you get a sense of motion but there’s no direction. You can do it either horizontally or vertically
or at any angle. He takes this and does it vertically then
he gives a sound. A sound might be a cough or a pop and he gives
a force to his answer, is it moving up or down? And the answer is random. Not surprising. Then he does something else. He gives a tone and the question is does the
tone increase in frequency or decrease in frequency? It turns out if it increases in frequency,
people see it moving up. It’s called the rising tone. There’s a reason why it’s called rising,
or otherwise it’s moving down. Well, what is going on here? Ask any phonetician, they’ll say, what’s
going on is your glottis moves up when you make a rising intonation. That’s why it’s called rising and when
it goes down. But why should it be called rising in the
first place? How does that work? Okay, to do that, you have to study sound
symbolism which was Ben Bergen’s dissertation topic, where he showed it was real. It was figured out first by Rich Rhodes and
John Lawler at the University of Michigan back in ‘83. Rich is now across the hall for me in Berkeley. John has retired after a distinguished career
as a linguist. And what they figured out was this. They pointed out that there are sounds like
“ip.” “Ip” is a short path to a single stop
so there is drip, clip, snip, et cetera, nip it in the bud, et cetera. What you’re doing is your mouth is forming
a short path to a single stop. Ap words, ap is going to something that is
flat. So it’s a wrap, tap, clap, et cetera. Those have to do with the mouth being broader
which is what happens when you say up, the mouth gets broader. Then what about clap? Or other sounds of C-L words have to do with
things coming together, class, for example. Those have to do with things coming together. So clap is coming together with two pairs,
two things like that. So your mouth is shaped in a certain way. If you have things like S-T-R words, like
straw and stream and a strip of something and so on. There are dozens of these S-T-R words; they
have to do with long thin things. So a strap is a long thin thing that comes
against something else. What they discovered is there are no Indo-European
roots for these. These arise from sound symbolism and they’re
made up all the time. One that came in when I was a kid from radar
was a concept of blip. B-L goes outward and it’s a short path to
a sudden stop. That’s what a blip is. That’s why it called a blip. There’s no Indo-European root for blip or
strap or any of those things. They don’t go back that far and that’s
very interesting. They’re sound symbolic words and they have
a pattern. It’s not like you can predict from the sound
to the meaning or the meaning to the sound. There are things that fit together. What you’re doing is using image schemas
to structure your mouth. You’re taking Talmy’s image schemas about
long thin things and whether things are coming together or not. You’re applying it to the structure of your
mouth. That is why in the Shimojo experiment where
you have a tone that increases in its tone, it has a so-called rising tone, that’s why
you see it moving upward with a rising tone and you see it moving downward with a falling
tone. What you see depends on what you hear and
that depends on the structuring of your mouth. Is that cool? I love that result. Thank you very much.
