I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World
By: M Ainsley Blackman
Tags: Thebookmark, Reading, Psychology, Creativity, Books

I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World

What do Aristotle, Elvis Presley, and Shakespeare have in common

Image by M Blackman

If you think of metaphor as merely a device used in literature, think again. James Geary delves into the realms of behavioural economics, psychology, and neuroscience to present a fascinating insight into metaphor’s role in our world. His book, I Is an Other, explores the role of metaphor in human language, creative thinking, and more. You will never look at a metaphor the same after reading this. You might start spying metaphors everywhere. Oh look, there’s one in the previous sentence!

I Is an Other is arranged in thirteen easily digestible chapters, each given a straightforward descriptive title with an intriguing subtitle (‘All Shook Up’’ accompanies the chapter ‘Metaphor and Thought’). The writing is authoritative but humorous and grounded in the real world. I am a former English teacher and so I loved it, but this book has a broad appeal.

Geary explains metaphorical thinking with the help of Aristotle, Elvis Presley, Rimbaud, and Shakespeare. Metaphors can be defined mathematically as X = Y, in the Aristotelian tradition of “giving the thing a name that belongs to something else”. This is evidenced in Elvis Presley’s song ‘All Shook Up’ when he describes his lover’s lips as a volcano (what a poet!), Rimbaud’s metaphor manifesto of I = other, and of course, Romeo’s famous line “Juliet is the sun”. Naturally, philosophers, songwriters, and playwrights will utilise metaphors to create comparisons with rich imagery, but this metaphorical thinking is also what enables creativity in the sciences. Scientists and inventors need to compare what they know about a subject with what they don’t know. For creative thinking to occur, we need to be able to see beyond the literal and metaphorical thinking allows that.

The world of finance and economics, which you might think of as being purely about numbers and statistics, is full of metaphorical description. Think of stocks soaring, surging, climbing, or, plummeting, sliding, plunging. Wall Street may be gripped by a bear market or a bull market. Geary cites psychologist Michael W. Morris’s research into financial commentary and identifies two primary market metaphors, agent and object metaphors. Agent metaphors describe price movements “as the deliberate action of a living thing”, whereas object metaphors describe price movements as “non-living things subject to external forces”. The way that we use agent and object metaphors to describe mostly random events feed into the human brain’s expectancy bias. We are programmed to recognise patterns where they might be none whatsoever. If stocks have gone up for six days in a row (as described by the agent metaphor of climbing), we expect them to continue to climb on day seven. Metaphors can be dangerous if unexamined — beware of your expectancy bias when looking at stock charts!

If you have ever been to a toddler’s tea party, you will know that young children’s pretend play is full of wonderful metaphors. Between the ages of 12–24 months, children develop the ability to pretend, which researchers call “double knowledge”. From the age of two years, children start to play make-believe games. When a child hands you a banana so that you can answer a phone call, there are now two bananas; the real one (held to your ear) and the copy (transformed in the imagination so that you can talk as if you are using a real phone). Young children are adept at this as their brains’ pattern recognition circuits are rapidly building and developing, although their understandings are mostly based on simple perceptual similarities. As they grow older, they have difficulty with more sophisticated metaphorical language, until they acquire enough experience to make sense of their world.

People with Aspergers Syndrome or other Autism Spectrum Disorders typically have difficulty with metaphorical thinking and Geary provides sound research into the ways ASD affects socialisation and communication. Although he writes sensitively about his subjects in ‘Metaphor and the Mind: Imagining an Apple in Someone’s Eye’, I wish he could have asked an actual person with ASD about these social difficulties, instead of referencing ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime’ by Mark Haddon (2004: Vintage). Haddon is a neurotypical author writing about a child with Aspergers, in ways that are often very ableist; Christopher, the main character, is treated terribly by his parents and others around him which is normalised as he has a disability. However, this is balanced by the inclusion of anecdotes from other people with Aspergers who discuss the challenges they face, but also their strengths.

There are so many topics touched on in this book and the research and examples are all highly interesting. Metaphorical thinking pervades every aspect of our lives, without us even realising it. When reading a work of literature we are attuned to the use of figurative language but our brains are also tuned into the metaphors that surround us in everyday life, satisfying our brain’s need to create patterns. As Geary states, “the logic of metaphor is the logic of our lives”.

As a former English teacher and an evergreen lover of literature, I expected to enjoy reading this book. I certainly did but I also found it intellectually stimulating, prompting me to examine some of the biases and assumptions I have about the world. In the words of the great Elvis Presley, I’m all shook up.