* Simon Lacey, Randall Stilla, K. Sathian, ‘Metaphorically feeling: Comprehending textural metaphors activates somatosensory cortex’, Brain and Language, 120 (2012), 416-421.
* Lisa Aziz-Zadeh and Antonio Damasio, ‘Embodied semantics for actions: Findings from functional brain imaging’, Journal of Physiology – Paris, 102 (2008), 35-39.
* R.H. Desai, L.L. Conant, J.R. Binder, H. Park, M.S. Seidenberg, ‘A piece of the action: modulation of sensory-motor regions by action idioms and metaphors’, Neuroimage, 83 (2013), 862-9.
As soon as I published a book which addressed the topic of metaphor (Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition) I quickly started learning more things about it – things I might have included. I suppose that’s the nature of a topic like that. Still, since then I have spent a fair bit of time thinking about metaphor in the context of Relevance Theory, a branch of cognitive pragmatics. I recently attended a brilliant workshop in Oslo (details here) where I found yet more reasons to like the way that Deirdre Wilson, Robyn Carston, and the other speakers, all thought about the topic.
*
I feel less guilt about the work on metaphor that has come out since my book, and which has helped me see the significance of other, earlier work. The three articles listed at the top all show how scientists have been interested by the ways in which metaphor is embodied – how neurons which activate when we experience rough textures also activate when we hear or read a metaphor like ‘life is rough’. This is the outcome of Lacey et al., listed above.
Earlier Aziz-Zadeh and Damasio had explored the ways in which metaphor, like other language, creates sensori-motor responses, and suggested how the evolution of metaphors works. They think that ‘when first encountered, a metaphor like “grasping the situation” may have used hand representations [that is, hand-related neural areas would have activated in response] in order to be understood’. However, once the metaphor is familiar to the individual, and especially when it is culturally embedded (‘lexicalised’, or ‘dead’; I prefer ‘lexicalised’), there may be no need for such representations. Novel metaphors, then, excite more vivid sensory interactions – which isn’t that surprising in itself, but the way in which it is situated in sensorimotor parts of the brain is arresting.
*
Recently Desai, Conant et al. have taken this further with an analysis of the different brain activations associated with different kinds of language. They compared four categories as follows:
LITERAL: the instructor is grasping the steering wheel very tightly
METAPHOR: the congress is grasping the state of affairs
IDIOM: The congress is grasping at straws in the crisis
ABSTRACT: the congress is causing a big trade deficit again
They then tested the motor activation associated with a ‘grasp’. The results suggests an increasing level of motor activation from ABSTRACT at the bottom – effectively zero – to IDIOM (where the action-word is incorporated in a culturally-familiar form) to METAPHOR (where there is attention to the physical side of ‘grasping’) to LITERAL. Again, it is not all that surprising, but to find this degree of motor-tuning in language adds to the idea that our language and thought are interestingly embodied. They do express caution at the end: fMRI analysis is not time-sensitive (as I discussed here), so it is possible that a brief period of motor simulation could have occurred in the ‘idiom’ case, before the wider context impinged.
We know more and more about what happens in the brain when we do this, see that, feel something else. Even without leaping to conclusions, and even with plentiful scruples (electrical activity in neurons is not thought itself; and these distinctions between, say, literal and metaphorical are not always stable in literary language, which may suggest useful further lines of investigation), some compelling patterns are emerging. The ‘embodied metaphor’ I mentioned in my book in relatively general terms is increasingly being pursued, and enriched, in experiments.