Download or read book Speaking about the Brain Metaphors in popular scientific texts written by Mihail Sotkov and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Master's Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, TU Dortmund (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: This paper deals with metaphorical representations of the human brain (i.e. brain metaphors) in popular scientific texts. A corpus consisting of forty (newspaper) articles is analysed by applying Fauconnier and Turner's Conceptual Integration Networks (1998, 2002). The work is embedded in the field of Cognitive Linguistics and tries to offer some insights in how we conceptualise the human brain in popular science, revealing the nature of meaning creation as well as sketching the reciprocal interdependence of the human brain and machines as the predominant popular scientific paradigm of conceptualising human nature.

Download or read book How Metaphors Guide Teach and Popularize Science written by Anke Beger and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2020-04-22 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphors are essential to scientists themselves and strongly influence science communication. Through careful analyses of metaphors actually used in science texts, recordings, and videos, this book explores the essential functions of conceptual metaphor in the conduct of science, teaching of science, and how scientific ideas are promoted and popularized. With an accessible introduction to theory and method this book prepares scientists, science teachers, and science writers to take advantage of recent shifts in metaphor theories and methods. Metaphor specialists will find theoretical issues explored in studies of bacteriology, cell reproduction, marine biology, physics, brain function and social psychology. We see the degree of conscious or intentional use of metaphor in shaping our conceptual systems and constraining inferences. Metaphor sources include social structure, embodied experience, abstract or mathematical formulations. The results are sometimes innovative hypotheses and robust conclusions; other times pedagogically useful, if inaccurate, stepping stones or, at worst, misleading fictions. As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

Download or read book The Metaphorical Brain written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphor has been an issue of intense research and debate for decades (see, for example [1]). Researchers in various disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, computer science, education, and philosophy have developed a variety of theories, and much progress has been made [2]. For one, metaphor is no longer considered a rhetorical flourish that is found mainly in literary texts. Rather, linguists have shown that metaphor is a pervasive phenomenon in everyday language, a major force in the development of new word meanings, and the source of at least some grammatical function words [3]. Indeed, one of the most influential theories of metaphor involves the suggestion that the frequency of metaphoric language results because cross-domain mappings are a major determinant in the organization of semantic memory, as cognitive and neural resources for dealing with concrete domains are recruited for the conceptualization of more abstract ones [4]. Researchers in cognitive neuroscience have explored whether particular kinds of brain damage are associated with metaphor production and comprehension deficits, and whether similar brain regions are recruited when healthy adults understand the literal and metaphorical meanings of the same words (see [5] for a review). Whereas early research on this topic focused on the issue of the role of hemispheric asymmetry in the comprehension and production of metaphors [6], in recent years cognitive neuroscientists have argued that metaphor is not a monolithic category, and that metaphor processing varies as a function of numerous factors, including the novelty or conventionality of a particular metaphoric expression, its part of speech, and the extent of contextual support for the metaphoric meaning (see, e.g., [7], [8], [9]). Moreover, recent developments in cognitive neuroscience point to a sensorimotor basis for many concrete concepts, and raise the issue of whether these mechanisms are ever recruited to process more abstract concepts [10]. This Frontiers Research Topic brings together contributions from researchers in cognitive neuroscience whose work involves the study of metaphor in language and thought in order to promote the development of the neuroscientific investigation of metaphor. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, it synthesizes current findings on the cognitive neuroscience of metaphor, provides a forum for voicing novel perspectives, and promotes avenues for new research on the metaphorical brain.

Download or read book The Spider s Thread written by Keith J. Holyoak and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of metaphor in poetry as a microcosm of the human imagination—a way to understand the mechanisms of creativity. In The Spider's Thread, Keith Holyoak looks at metaphor as a microcosm of the creative imagination. Holyoak, a psychologist and poet, draws on the perspectives of thinkers from the humanities—poets, philosophers, and critics—and from the sciences—psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, and computer scientists. He begins each chapter with a poem—by poets including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Du Fu, William Butler Yeats, and Pablo Neruda—and then widens the discussion to broader notions of metaphor and mind. Holyoak uses Whitman's poem “A Noiseless Patient Spider” to illustrate the process of interpreting a poem, and explains the relevance of two psychological mechanisms, analogy and conceptual combination, to metaphor. He outlines ideas first sketched by Coleridge—who called poetry “the best words in their best order”—and links them to modern research on the interplay between cognition and emotion, controlled and associative thinking, memory and creativity. Building on Emily Dickinson's declaration “the brain is wider than the sky,” Holyoak suggests that the control and default networks in the brain may combine to support creativity. He also considers, among other things, the interplay of sound and meaning in poetry; symbolism in the work of Yeats, Jung, and others; indirect communication in poems; the mixture of active and passive processes in creativity; and whether artificial intelligence could ever achieve poetic authenticity. Guided by Holyoak, we can begin to trace the outlines of creativity through the mechanisms of metaphor.

Download or read book The Metaphorical Brain written by Seana Coulson and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphor has been an issue of intense research and debate for decades (see, for example [1]). Researchers in various disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, computer science, education, and philosophy have developed a variety of theories, and much progress has been made [2]. For one, metaphor is no longer considered a rhetorical flourish that is found mainly in literary texts. Rather, linguists have shown that metaphor is a pervasive phenomenon in everyday language, a major force in the development of new word meanings, and the source of at least some grammatical function words [3]. Indeed, one of the most influential theories of metaphor involves the suggestion that the commonality of metaphoric language results because cross-domain mappings are a major determinant in the organization of semantic memory, as cognitive and neural resources for dealing with concrete domains are recruited for the conceptualization of more abstract ones [4]. Researchers in cognitive neuroscience have explored whether particular kinds of brain damage are associated with metaphor production and comprehension deficits, and whether similar brain regions are recruited when healthy adults understand the literal and metaphorical meanings of the same words (see [5] for a review) . Whereas early research on this topic focused on the issue of the role of hemispheric asymmetry in the comprehension and production of metaphors [6], in recent years cognitive neuroscientists have argued that metaphor is not a monolithic category, and that metaphor processing varies as a function of numerous factors, including the novelty or conventionality of a particular metaphoric expression, its part of speech, and the extent of contextual support for the metaphoric meaning (see, e.g., [7], [8], [9]). Moreover, recent developments in cognitive neuroscience point to a sensorimotor basis for many concrete concepts, and raise the issue of whether these mechanisms are ever recruited to process more abstract domains [10]. This Frontiers Research Topic brings together contributions from researchers in cognitive neuroscience whose work involves the study of metaphor in language and thought in order to promote the development of the neuroscientific investigation of metaphor. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, it synthesizes current findings on the cognitive neuroscience of metaphor, provides a forum for voicing novel perspectives, and promotes avenues for new research on the metaphorical brain. [1] Arbib, M. A. (1989). The metaphorical brain 2: Neural networks and beyond. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [2] Gibbs Jr, R. W. (Ed.). (2008). The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought. Cambridge University Press. [3] Sweetser, Eve E. "Grammaticalization and semantic bleaching." Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Vol. 14. 2011. [4] Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. Basic books. [5] Coulson, S. (2008). Metaphor comprehension and the brain. The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought, 177-194. [6] Winner, E., & Gardner, H. (1977). The comprehension of metaphor in brain-damaged patients. Brain, 100(4), 717-729. [7] Coulson, S., & Van Petten, C. (2007). A special role for the right hemisphere in metaphor comprehension?: ERP evidence from hemifield presentation. Brain Research, 1146, 128-145. [8] Lai, V. T., Curran, T., & Menn, L. (2009). Comprehending conventional and novel metaphors: An ERP study. Brain Research, 1284, 145-155. [9] Schmidt, G. L., Kranjec, A., Cardillo, E. R., & Chatterjee, A. (2010). Beyond laterality: a critical assessment of research on the neural basis of metaphor. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 16(01), 1-5. [10] Desai, R. H., Binder, J. R., Conant, L. L., Mano, Q. R., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2011). The neural career of sensory-motor metaphors. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(9), 2376-2386.

Download or read book From Molecule to Metaphor written by Jerome Feldman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-01-25 with total page 758 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In From Molecule to Metaphor, Jerome Feldman proposes a theory of language and thought that treats language not as an abstract symbol system but as a human biological ability that can be studied as a function of the brain, as vision and motor control are studied. This theory, he writes, is a "bridging theory" that works from extensive knowledge at two ends of a causal chain to explicate the links between. Although the cognitive sciences are revealing much about how our brains produce language and thought, we do not yet know exactly how words are understood or have any methodology for finding out. Feldman develops his theory in computer simulations—formal models that suggest ways that language and thought may be realized in the brain. Combining key findings and theories from biology, computer science, linguistics, and psychology, Feldman synthesizes a theory by exhibiting programs that demonstrate the required behavior while remaining consistent with the findings from all disciplines. After presenting the essential results on language, learning, neural computation, the biology of neurons and neural circuits, and the mind/brain, Feldman introduces specific demonstrations and formal models of such topics as how children learn their first words, words for abstract and metaphorical concepts, understanding stories, and grammar (including "hot-button" issues surrounding the innateness of human grammar). With this accessible, comprehensive book Feldman offers readers who want to understand how our brains create thought and language a theory of language that is intuitively plausible and also consistent with existing scientific data at all levels.

Download or read book Metaphor in Communication Science and Education written by Francesca Ervas and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of papers presents some recent trends in metaphor studies that propose new directions of research on the embodied cognition perspective. The overall volume, in particular, shows how the embodied cognition still remains a relevant approach in a multidisciplinary research on the communicative side of metaphors, by focusing on both comprehension processes in science as well as learning processes in education.

Download or read book Understanding Metaphors in the Life Sciences written by Andrew S. Reynolds and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-28 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces the diverse roles metaphors play in the life sciences and highlights their significance for theory, communication, and education.

Download or read book God Human Animal Machine written by Meghan O'Gieblyn and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A strikingly original exploration of what it might mean to be authentically human in the age of artificial intelligence, from the author of the critically-acclaimed Interior States. • "At times personal, at times philosophical, with a bracing mixture of openness and skepticism, it speaks thoughtfully and articulately to the most crucial issues awaiting our future." —Phillip Lopate “[A] truly fantastic book.”—Ezra Klein For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes's division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness—i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking. Meghan O'Gieblyn tackles this challenge with philosophical rigor, intellectual reach, essayistic verve, refreshing originality, and an ironic sense of contradiction. She draws deeply and sometimes humorously from her own personal experience as a formerly religious believer still haunted by questions of faith, and she serves as the best possible guide to navigating the territory we are all entering.

Download or read book The Idea of the Brain written by Matthew Cobb and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An "elegant", "engrossing" (Carol Tavris, Wall Street Journal) examination of what we think we know about the brain and why -- despite technological advances -- the workings of our most essential organ remain a mystery. "I cannot recommend this book strongly enough."--Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm For thousands of years, thinkers and scientists have tried to understand what the brain does. Yet, despite the astonishing discoveries of science, we still have only the vaguest idea of how the brain works. In The Idea of the Brain, scientist and historian Matthew Cobb traces how our conception of the brain has evolved over the centuries. Although it might seem to be a story of ever-increasing knowledge of biology, Cobb shows how our ideas about the brain have been shaped by each era's most significant technologies. Today we might think the brain is like a supercomputer. In the past, it has been compared to a telegraph, a telephone exchange, or some kind of hydraulic system. What will we think the brain is like tomorrow, when new technology arises? The result is an essential read for anyone interested in the complex processes that drive science and the forces that have shaped our marvelous brains.

Download or read book The Metaphorical Brain 2 written by Michael A. Arbib and published by . This book was released on 1989-08-14 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This was begun as a revision of the 1972 classic The Metaphorical Brain, but quickly grew into an independent work. This new volume offers readers a timely, in-depth exploration of exciting research into the interplay between brain modeling, computer design and artificial intelligence.

Download or read book Writing the Brain written by Stefan Schöberlein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-19 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth century, American and British culture experienced an explosion of interest in writings about the brain. The years between 1800 and 1880 are often described as the emergence of modern neuroscience, with new areas of the brain being discovered and named. Naming was quickly followed by a drive to hypothesize functioning, a process that suggested thinking itself may be a mere physiological act. In Writing the Brain, Stefan Schöberlein tracks how literature encountered such novel, scientific theories of cognition-and how it, in turn, shaped scientific thinking. Before the era of modern psychology, a heterogeneous group of alienists, self-help gurus, and anatomists proposed that the structure of the brain could be used to explain how the mind worked. Suddenly, nineteenth-century readers and writers had to contend with the idea that qualities once ascribed to disembodied souls may arise from a mere lump of cranial matter. In a period when scientists and literary writers frequently published in the same periodicals, the ensuing debate over the material mind was a public one. Writing the Brain demonstrates, by examining several canonical works and textual rediscoveries, that these exchanges not only influenced how poets and novelists fictionalized the mind but also how scientists thought and talked about their discoveries. From George Combe to Charles Dickens, from Emily Dickinson to Pliny Earle, from Benjamin Rush to Alfred Tennyson, 1800s debated what it means to have or, rather, be a brain.

Download or read book Metaphor Wars written by Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-04 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of metaphor is now firmly established as a central topic within cognitive science and the humanities. We marvel at the creative dexterity of gifted speakers and writers for their special talents in both thinking about certain ideas in new ways, and communicating these thoughts in vivid, poetic forms. Yet metaphors may not only be special communicative devices, but a fundamental part of everyday cognition in the form of 'conceptual metaphors'. An enormous body of empirical evidence from cognitive linguistics and related disciplines has emerged detailing how conceptual metaphors underlie significant aspects of language, thought, cultural and expressive action. Despite its influence and popularity, there have been major criticisms of conceptual metaphor. This book offers an evaluation of the arguments and empirical evidence for and against conceptual metaphors, much of which scholars on both sides of the wars fail to properly acknowledge.

Download or read book Metaphors of Mind written by Brad Pasanek and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pathbreaking introduction to eighteenth-century metaphors of the mind that recasts the grand narrative of the Enlightenment in terms of its tropes and figures. An encyclopedic dictionary along the lines of Voltaire’s classic Dictionnaire Philosophique, Metaphors of Mind provides an in-depth look at the myriad ways in which Enlightenment writers used figures of speech to characterize the mind. Drawn from Brad Pasanek’s massive online archive, http://metaphorized.net, this volume constitutes a veritable treasury of mental metaphorics. Dividing the book into eleven broad metaphorical categories—Animals, Coinage, Court, Empire, Fetters, Impressions, Inhabitants, Metal, Mirror, Rooms, and Writing—Pasanek maps out constellations of metaphors. He frames his collection of literary excerpts in each section with a more descriptive and theoretical discussion of what he calls “desultory reading,” a form of unsystematic perusal of writing frequently employed by Enlightenment thinkers. By surveying the printed past alongside the digital present, the book treats eighteenth-century writing as its topic while essentially exemplifying its rhetorical approach. More than an exercise in quotation, this intellectual history offers illuminating readings of fragmentary literary works and confrontations with neoclassical and contemporary theories of metaphor. The book’s entries complicate received ideas about Locke’s blank slate, question M. H. Abrams’ claims about mirrors and lamps, and chart changing frequencies of metal metaphors in a moment of industrial revolution. The book also responds to current anxieties about reading and the mass digitization of literature, touching on recent discussions of “distant reading,” “shallow reading,” and “surface reading.” Promoting critical and creative anachronism, Metaphors of Mind redefines the notion of an archive in the age of Amazon and Google Books.

Download or read book A Companion to British Literature Volume 4 written by Robert DeMaria, Jr. and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-12-13 with total page 663 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to British Literature, Victorian and Twentieth-Century Literature, 1837 - 2000

Download or read book The Poetics of Science Fiction written by Peter Stockwell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Poetics of Science Fiction uniquely uses the science of linguistics to explore the literary universe of science fiction. Developing arguments about specific texts and movements throughout the twentieth-century, the book is a readable discussion of this most popular of genres. It also uses the extreme conditions offered by science fiction to develop new insights into the language of the literary context. The discussion ranges from a detailed investigation of new words and metaphors, to the exploration of new worlds, from pulp science fiction to the genre's literary masterpieces, its special effects and poetic expression. Speculations and extrapolations throughout the book engage the reader in thought-experiments and discussion points, with selected further reading making it a useful source book for classroom and seminar.

Download or read book The Natural philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg written by David Duner and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) is commonly known for his spiritual philosophy, his early career was focused unnatural science. During this period, Swedenborg thought of the world was like a gigantic machine, following the laws of mechanics and geometry. This volume analyzes this mechanistic worldview from the cognitive perspective, by means of a study of the metaphors in Swedenborg’s texts. The author argues that these conceptual metaphors are vital skills of the creative mind and scientific thinking, used to create visual analogies and abstract ideas. This means that Swedenborg’s mechanistic and geometrical worldview, allowed him to perceive the world as mechanical and geometrical. Swedenborg thought ”with” books and pens. The reading gave him associations and clues, forced him to interpret, and gave him material for his intellectual development.