In the last two posts, I presented my theory of Spatial Language, which claims that humans’ unique thinking evolved as a survival tool for navigating the terrain. While many animals navigate using their sense of smell of hearing, humans’ superior sight enabled the development of a separate navigational language, of signs and symbols, that are ways of communicating visual imagery to each other. Our words, in any language, reflect this orientational logic. I also showed how this mechanism of creating language and thought3 is metaphorical, which means among other things, that we create new words and meaning from recombining existing words and meanings. This might mean that all of language unfolded out of a single, originating word.
-In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was with God.
John 1:1
This originating concept had to be the first time that humans ever separated something from the flux of reality, and put a boundary around it by naming it. Indeed, it was the first thing to be named. This was the first symbol; the first abstraction, and every other concept that we have was to be built on the basis of that word.
It is natural to ask then, “What could have been our first word?”
This question is easier to answer than we might assume. While there are more differences than similarities between the vocabularies of world languages – with some of them containing verbs, and a few do not; some do not have words for colors and others for honorifics, etc. – nevertheless they all share one word with a similar meaning. That word is the first person singular, “I”. All the languages of the world have a word to by which a person refers to themselves. The sheer universality of the term for referring to oneself means, I claim, that it must be a basic substrate for all of language. Referring to oneself is the first symbol created by people. Saying “I”, envisioning ourselves as a “thing”, an “object”, is the very first act in creating language.
In an earlier post, I speculated that humans’ discovery of language happened when humans started to stand upright, and could see more and more into the distance. The sights became baffling since they could not be touched, or smelled, or heard from the great distance. The result was a kind of negation, which created our ability to abstract (literally meaning to “pull from”) information and commit it to memory. The separation of faraway visuals from the flux or all other sensed phenomena, I believe, had to create the notion that they were objects, that they were being seen, and that there was a subject that did the seeing. Noticing untouchable things made humans want to touch them, and suddenly realize their limitations. Humans realized that they was a separation between them and their “surroundings”. They became aware of a “goal”, a “destination”, that they wanted to “reach” somewhere in the horizon. They became aware of their ability to see but at the same time of not being able to attain. They realized that they were not those things that they saw. They realized that they were.
The realizing of the self in humans must have been a gradual process, along with discovering the benefits of a seeing afar and freeing the hands due to walking upright. At any rate, the discovery of the self was ingrained in humans from the beginning and it facilitated the creation of language. After realizing that there is a “me” who is a separate object from the rest of the world, anything else around could be assessed, delineated and defined using ourselves as a standard. That is, we gave a meaning to the world through its relation to us. Our language is anthropocentric, of course, but it is also egocentric. We define things as “hard” or “soft”, as “hot” or “cold”, as “big” or “small”, only in relation to ourselves. The world is forever changing, yet we border it in a constant mirroring of our own selves. This is what I mean by “self discovery”. Human thought and language are an ever present act of reaffirming and rediscovering our egos.
The Garden of Eden
The finest story to convey this idea is the biblical story of the Garden of Eden.
In Genesis 2:25, Adam and Eve are said to be “both naked” and that they are “not ashamed” of their nakedness. In the subsequent sentence, Genesis 3:1, the snake is introduced, as being “more crafty” or “more subtil” than any other animal. Yet, in Hebrew, both words for “naked” and “crafty” are similarly written, as (arum/erom) written like this:
Most Jewish commentators of the Bible do not account for this similarity. Also, The Hebrew dictionary finds no etymological connection between them. Yet, I believe that they the biblical writer places them intentionally one after the other to suggest that they are one and the same. That eating the fruit of knowledge and having Adam’s and Eve’s “eyes opened” signified mankind’s developing of their unique craftiness, their ability for reflexive thinking, of knowing how others see them, of lying and deceiving. Eating from the tree of knowledge causes Adam and Eve both to realize that they are naked, making them ashamed, and to “know good and evil.” They are set apart from the rest of the animals by being ashamed of their nakedness. They also begin to hide and lie, as the snake does. Immediately after eating from the tree of knowledge, Adam hides so that God cannot see him.
The story can be seen as mankind straying from nature. As the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is followed by the stories about humanity disobeying god’s plans, such as with Cain killing Abel, while lying to god. Using the word “arum”/”erom” both for the snake’s supposed cunning and for highlighting Adam and Eve’s new formed knowledge of themselves and of each other, the biblical writer is expressing the strangeness of mankind’s knowledge. Humanity has many animal features, but has stolen a godly fruit, which has granted it with a unique ability. Becoming ashamed is a poignant expression for attaining reflexive thought. Knowing that you think and realizing that others also have that ability, means that you are always susceptible to others’ reviews and ponderings. It means that someone might be watching you. It creates the comparison of yourself with others, and the feared secrecy following. Could this fear cause primordial people to develop a tool to make sure that we think similarly?
The fact that the snake was described as being “more crafty” than any other animal in the Garden of Eden, also suggests that he was craftier than Adam and Eve. This might entail that it was used to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. The other surprising element is that it could talk! No other animal in the Garden of Eden was described as being able to talk. In fact, there is only one other animal in the whole bible that was described as talking.
As often as this image is used online, I could not find who painted it. If you are the painter, and would like me to remove it, please let me know.
Why was a snake chosen as the deceiver in the Garden of Eden story? Real live snakes can climb trees, yet they do not eat fruit. So, what in snakes made them the candidate for the part of tempter and remover? The reason that the snake was chosen, I suspect, is because of the hissing sound that its tongue creates. The use of the tongue is how humans create speech. In fact, the word for “language” in many world vocabularies, is derived from the word for “tongue” (“Language” in English, “Langue” in French, “Lingua” in Italian, and others all come from the Latin word for tongue “Lingua”. The Hebrew word for language “Lashon”, also means tongue). So, in the bible, the ability to deceive was attributed to being able to speak.
The eating of the Tree of Knowledge signifies Adam and Eve’s discovery of themselves. The snake promises them that when eating from its fruit, they will be “like gods”. And indeed, upon eating, they immediately feel self aware. This awareness is foreign to anything else in nature. It is the sole curse of mankind, and it dictates our inability to be at peace with ourselves. It might be that the discovery of the self also entails the realization that this self is temporary, and would die with us in due time. The invention of symbols and language by man could very well originate in our desire to leave an everlasting mark of ourselves.
John Martin / Eve in the Garden of Eden. Image source
As a side note, the story of Adam and Eve is reminiscent of the Mythological story of Prometheus. Prometheus stealing fire from the gods is another example of the gift of human ingenuity that is perceived in antiquity as taken from an otherworldly realm. Much like the ability for language and reflexive thought, fire is a device which humans, and no other animal, have under their control. And much like with Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise, Zeus punished Prometheus for all eternity for this theft.
The Garden of Eden story is loaded with such tremendously archetypal imagery, that it can be used to explain much of the human condition in the world. I believe it is particularly concerned with showing how human experience abruptly changed after they became self aware. The development of distinctions, the intellect with which we humans discriminate and codify reality into symbols, is all estranged from the natural order of the living world, that it must be an ability reserved for the gods. The realization of ourselves as distinct from the rest of creation, I believe, is the moral of the story of the Garden of Eden. And it squares precisely into the idea that our symbolic, discriminating language, could evolve only from a single, initial concept, of ourselves as a distinct being. Any use of language followed from that mirroring of nature upon the concept that man had of himself.
In the previous post, I presented the theory of Spatial Thinking. The theory argues that humans developed their unique symbolic language and thought out of navigating the physical terrain, codifying, and committing it to memory. All of our thoughts are in fact memories that originated as a tool for locating our position in space.
In the current post, I will attempt to describe the mechanics of the brain that enable us to symbolize and abstract reality in the first place. I suggest that our strange tendency to think in terms binary oppositions – that is, to believe in the existence of dichotomies, such as “black-white”, “up-down”, “right-left”, and so on – is based in the electric pulses which direct of thoughts. That is, our ability to think in opposites mimics the binary nature of the opposing electric nodes, and it clues us into the way that our memory translates impressions of reality into new thoughts and symbolic language.
Part 1
The Reason for Binary Thinking
My inquiry begins with the assumption that human thought is limited to thinking only of things that it has already encountered. As I wrote in this post, we cannot imagine something that we haven’t already seen. We can, however, recombine our previous impressions into something that does not yet exist; such are the legendary creatures with human heads and animal bodies, and vice versa, which mix and match in order to create things with the imagination. The logic of this idea is that we cannot think about or invent anything that does not in some way mimic the things already existing in nature. Our most outlandish human inventions can always be traced to some naturally recurring element.
However, there is one element of human thinking that seems to run counter to anything else in nature. That is our habit of thinking in binary oppositions.
The sign of duality in life, the Yin-Yang.
Binary oppositions are a way of grasping and delineating concepts of the world by mirroring them against each other. This system of creating relations between things allows us to solidify them as concepts; that is, we draw a clearer limit around their fluid form. For example, the opposition “Black-White” cannot be objectively delineated. Colors are a spectrum, and we can only perceive them in a relative way. We currently list as many as 16 shades of black.1 Additionally, there is no inherent opposition between the two colors. We perceive black as an absence of light, and perceive white as what reflects all wavelengths of light.2 In essence, what we do is an idealization of what we perceive, for the sake of simplification and ease of communication. In cultures where there is need for closer detailing, many binary oppositions are often dismantled for the sake of expanding the concept. For instance, in the US nowadays, the desire for diversity is breaking down many identifying binary oppositions, from “Black-White” as a previous ethnic identification, to “Male-Female” gendered identification. So, binary oppositions are not grounded in any inherent dichotomy between things in nature. Nevertheless, humans still utilize the binary mode of thinking throughout our process of conceptualizing. This raises the question, if there are no inherent oppositions around us, how and why have humans devised such a means of perception in the first place?
I would like to offer one explanation for the emergence of our thinking in terms of opposites. Often, the use of oppositions is explained due to their assisting with our perception. While true, this doesn’t give insight into how humans came up with binary oppositions to begin with. I believe that the answer lies in the fact the there actually are real oppositions existing in the natural world. Real binary oppositions appear in the electric current running all through nature and through our own body.
Electricity surging through the nerve system. Source.
Our body is electrically charged. Humans can hold up to 17 volts and from 100W for a resting adult, which is equal to the power of 100W light bulb, up to seven times greater.3 “Our cells”, in fact, “are specialized to conduct electrical currents. Electricity is required for the nervous system to send signals throughout the body and to the brain, making it possible for us to move, think and feel.”4
Thinking as an Electric Activity
Thoughts, then, are what happens when electric pulses, or signals, run through our chemically fabricated body. Electric currents travel through the nervous system and make their way around the brain. Would it not be reasonable to assume, then, that as electric signals, our thought would carry several other characteristics of an electric current?
An electric signal is motioned by a triggering of electrons between positive and negative terminals. I would venture to say that the thoughts in our brains delineate a pattern which is similar to that of an electric charge. The passage of electric pulses through the biological gray matter of the brain, in turn, is what creates the physical pathway structure of the neural system. This bears repeating – the passing of electricity through biological matter, creates the pattern that we find in our neural circuitry. The layout of our synaptic junctions closely resembles patterns made when electricity touches a living surface. For example, Lichtenberg Figures, which are patterns left on the skin as a result of a lightning strike.
Lichtenberg figures as a result of being struck by lightning, resemble the “forking” pattern of our nervous system.
As electricity does not have mass, thoughts themselves are weightless. The phenomenon of thinking is the traveling of an electric pulse through a number of synaptic junctions, that engages those synapses. Thoughts are the equivalent to a motion through space. In my previous post I argue that our thought developed in tandem with our survivalist need of navigating through space. What all this means, is that the electric pulse that is the carrier of thoughts, is both actively molded by us into reshaping our synaptic frame of concepts, and also passively goes through the same neural framework, and causes the “buzzing” sensation of unsolicited thinking happening at all times.
So, thoughts are the flow of electricity within our nervous system. This correlation of thoughts with electric pulses still does not tell us much about the content of those thoughts. But it can allow us to speculate that our thoughts really are binary in nature; since they are conveyed through an electric carrier.
Crossroads, forcing us to make a binary choice. Image source
I argue that this electric nature is what causes our thoughts to constantly move between sets of binary oppositions. Opposites correspond to the binary electric nodes through which an electric current must pass. So a thought is an electric signal. And, as my Spatial Language Theory assumes, a thought is the chain of memories which are physically coded upon a neural path in our neural circuitry. This means that, since this circuitry is constructed of synaptic nodes through which electricity flows, then each thought has a spatial location in the nervous system that is made of the path that it makes. A thought, thus, is a road that an electric pulse travels, consisting of the binary junctions which it passes on its way. A thought is not exactly a what, but a where. Most thoughts follow an already established path, yet new junctions are constantly being built as new impressions come to be recognized in our mind, or as new connections are made between existing neural junctions.
When we create concepts of the world, they physically translate to synaptic circuitry within the brain, most possibly in the Hippocampus, where our memories are stored. A thought is in fact the set of synaptic junctions through which an electric pulse passes. Thoughts are spatial, in the sense that they move through a physical frame existing in the physical brain. This framework is made of living matter, and is always changing. It has, what is often called, neuroplasticity. We can rewire different synapses by intentionally directing our thinking. We can make new connection between existing concepts, and this, I believe, in fact happens constantly when we create new meanings and metaphors.
This would explain, for example, the power of humor, and of jokes, on us humans. A joke is a long thought, a story, which sends us on a predetermined course through a common and expected, neural path, only to suddenly take a surprising and unexpected turn at the end. The joke takes us through a chin of memories that we recognize, and attaches them an unaccounted neural junction – which we are forced to accept as valid, and as one that we have overlooked. This is why a joke gets its funny reaction only once – when it is still a surprise. Once the connection between the concepts has been made, we usually will not laugh again, since the element of surprise is gone. Does laughter result from a kind of ‘short circuiting’ of the brain? I would argue yes.
Neuroplasticty vs. Trauma
Often enough, though, the rewiring of existing neural thought patterns comes from the outside in malevolent forms; in such cases, the experience of mental rewiring can be unpleasant, depending on the extent of the change that occurs. When our existing mental framework is unready for the new impression it encounters, the untangling of existing neural connections can be, and often is, traumatic. Such was the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. To many of us, the two towers were foreign from our everyday lives; and yet, for many of us, the impact of watching them attacked and collapse was incredible, if not devastating. Here is how George Lakoff describes it:
I grew up in Bayonne, N.J., across the bay from that skyline. The World Trade Center wasn’t there then, but over the years, as the major feature of the skyline, it became for me as for others the symbol of New York—not only of the business center of America, but also the cultural center and the communications center. As such, it became a symbol for America itself—a symbol for what it meant to be able go about your everyday life free of oppression and just do your job and live your life, whether as a secretary or an artist, a manager or a fireman, a salesman or a teacher or a TV star. I wasn’t consciously aware of it, but those images were intimately tied to my identity, both as me and as an American. And all that and so much more was there physically as part of my brain on the morning of September 11.5
Metaphors of Terror/ George Lakoff
So, the World Trade Center was a symbol, connected neurally to our concepts of a the USA as powerful, free, safe, indestructible, and possibly many other notions. The destruction of the towers, their disappearance in a matter of minutes, without preparation, meant that we had to mentally detach all of the connections we made to it, and reconnect them – now that they became untangled – to new safe grounds. Often with people who undergo trauma, it is often extremely hard to conceptualize and speak of what they go through. Trauma indicates that the mental connections have been untangled. Notice how hard it is for people who were attacked to refer, for instance, to their attackers. They often grasp hopelessly for an appropriate concept to help reconnect and ground their understanding of their pain. I see this now as people around me try to find the words to describe the attacks of 7/10/23.
A memorial in Tel-Aviv for the 7/10/2023 massacre victims. The sign says: “Out of words”. Image source.
To return the matters to the idea of the binary way of thinking, I can say that people are trying to find some concept of the attackers which would be the opposite of how they perceive themselves. The 7/10 attackers are often called “animals”. This concept wishes to negate the inhumanity of their actions with the humanity of the victims. As I sadly overlook the horrid content and focus on the formalizing of new concepts, I see that again, our minds turn to opposites in order to create new concepts of reality.
To summarize, the mind has remarkable neuroplasticity. When we encounter a completely new impression, we try to fit it within our existing conceptual framework. To create a new concept, we must codify the new information. Our mind limits the data through opposing it with other things that we are already assured of. This reveals the limits of our own conscious thinking. Whenever we fail to internalize new impressions and experiences, we might shrug it off, or, in case we cannot disregard them and they persist to bother us, they can lead to trauma.
By now, you might already argue that I have given too much emphasis to the notion of binary concepts. You will be right to say that many, if not most of our concepts have no perceived opposites; for instance ‘history’, ‘cellphone’, ‘chair’ and many nouns, are self standing and do not have a counterpart. I will now argue that, regardless of having no perceivable opposite, humans still use thinking in terms of binary oppositions in order to refer to any concept in their world. That binary thinking is our only way of codifying reality into symbolic language.
Part 2
Our language’s Binary logic
As systems for categorizing and ordering thoughts, human languages have a particular logic. It is easy to identify the analogue part of language. We yell with anger or joy, shriek with fear, grunt with despair and sound out many nuances which reveal our physical condition without any preconceived representation. The digital component of language is also clear. We use letters to compose words, kind of like numerical digits, in order to represent, arbitrarily, actual things in the world. This representation has caused many to consider our own mind, as reflected by this ability to think digitally, as closer to how mathematics views the world. That is, some people believe that the mind orders its categories of the world using exact distinctions and by giving each thought its equal place in the scheme of things.
I argue, however, that the basic rules of mathematical logic do not apply to our mind’s categorizing of concepts. The mind, instead, uses an echoing, negating logic. In order to refer to any single cogent item our mind assigns to any concept a kind of non-mathematical value. This value is given by transference, from other, related concepts, but is by no means a constant. This unveiling of the mind’s mechanics in creating and systematizing concepts will shed light on the driving force behind our unique ability to create language in the first place. This force, as I would tirelessly claim, is mankind’s mapping of space, using stories – which is the key to our survival and dominance as a species.
(A≠A)
The basic tenet of mathematical logic is that a thing is equal to itself. The idea is titled as ‘equality’, but really should be regarded as ‘constancy’. A thing is itself when it perseveres through change, which is another aspect of idealization since nothing in the world remains itself forever. But, since we are talking about the nature of the mind, I argue that mental concepts themselves do not comply with the rule of equality, and for a different reason.
When you hear the word ” apple”, what do you see?
The assumption that a thing (A) is itself reveals an underlying assumption of a system of many things, or of other systems of things, to which that thing (A) belongs. The example used by De Saussure is of a tree, so I will also use it here. Thinking of a tree apart from other knowledge relating to trees (from ‘leaves’ to ‘outside’ to ‘blossoming’) would make the concept of the tree unintelligible. A knowledge of a concept can only arise, as Derrida pointed out, by placing that concept within the free play of all other concepts. That is, we can know what a tree is only from knowing what are leaves, roots, flowers and vegetation; and we can only know those by knowing other concepts, and by extension all concepts engage in a kind of constant reforming where they give meaning to each other. All of our concepts echo each other all the time. And so, mentally speaking, we cannot grasp any concept in and of itself. To put it in the terms of formal mathematics, we perceive A as that which is negating everything other than A, or A=-1/A.
In other words, no concept is born into our minds and remains that way. It is involved in a “play”, as Derrida put it. To think of a concept, then, is to choose it, from out of the assortment of all the other concepts. The consequences of this logic are numerous, yet it first and foremost articulates a certain path, or action taking place when we think. The act of thinking is the same as following a trajectory, into relevant semantic fields, and locating the appropriate clusters of ideas. Notice the spatial language that we commonly use when referring to thinking. We follow a line of thought, reach a point, and take steps to get to a conclusion. The key takeaway here is that thinking is an act of course-setting, not of tallying, such as with numbers. The mind’s logic sees conceptual items and thoughts as physical landmarks in space, and in thinking we journey up, down, on, in, toward and though them.
Metaphoric logic (A=B; B=C; A≠C)
Another point of straying from mathematical logic that our mind utilizes is its non-syllogistic logic. Syllogisms are ways of drawing conclusions based on premises. For example, if all crows are black; and John is a crow. It follows that John is black. I wish to claim that this rule does not apply when regarding the creation of concepts in our language.
To prove this, we’ll recall George Lakoff and the notion that metaphorical thinking is how we create meaning within our language. That is, we equate one thing with another to assign one, or several meanings, from the source concept to the target concept. As with the metaphor “love is a battlefield”, we’ve assigned those qualities of a battlefield to love in order to infuse the latter with meaning. The borrowable features simply lend themselves while the others are discarded. Lakoff presumes that all of language is metaphoric. This would fall in line with Derrida’s logic, that no single concept is concretely embedded, and that meaning is assigned by the free play of all concepts. In other words, we bounce concepts off one another in order to give, alter and enrich their meanings.
The logic of metaphorical thinking assumes that things have some equal features as others, yet are not entirety similar. We say that a thing is another thing, in order to shed light on the target concept. That is, the metaphor uses the more concrete concept of the two, as a magnet to draw in the more abstract concept and reveal its nature by highlighting similar attributes among the two.
This type of metaphorical transference of meaning creates the non-syllogistic logic of our thinking. Take for example the conceptual, extended metaphor TIME=MONEY. This metaphor is evident in how we talk about the more abstract of the concepts, time – in monetary terms: we “spend” time; we “save” time, it “costs” hours of our time, “losing” time, “burrowed” time, etc. And tale also the metaphor MONEY=LIQUID. This is evident in such terms as cash “flow”, “pooling” money, “trickle down” economy, “liquidating” assets, etc. If we wish to use the premises to assert now that Time is a liquid, we would be stressed to find many phrases to show this correspondence. The idea is that concepts get their meaning through any act of bringing them next to other concepts. The mechanism resembles the physical phenomenon of large-mass bodies attracting smaller bodies, where the clearer concepts give meaning by attracting the more abstract ones. Or better yet, of clusters of germs, or amoeba on a petri dish, that can lend some of their items to others and take in some of the others.
To conclude the last two points, we sometimes refer to our concepts and ideas as if they were set in stone. The word “ideal”, of course comes from the word “idea’, and lost its meaning of being fleeting and transitory (as ideas really are), to mean something lofty and singular. The fact is that we do not think digitally, as with mathematics. We think in analog fashion. We are a mimicking organism, and make sense of things by echoing them off of other things that we already know. The human mind is able to translate this ability of equating separate things, and use it to to limit and define so called concepts from out of the flux of ever-changing reality. What our use of binary oppositions revels is not so much how the world works, as how we have come to perceive it.
Human thinking is riddled with categorizing things as oppositions. Up-Down, Light-Darkness, Hot-Cold, Big-Small, Happy-Sad, etc. While we perceive all of these as sets of opposites, they in fact have no inherent contradiction. They are merely different states, or attributes. They are only opposed when we view them in relation to ourselves, to our sensations, stature, or needs. Being alive or dead can be considered as different stages of life. And yet, humans are uniquely capable of viewing the stages as contrasting ideals. The tendency to categorize things as opposites is the one ability that helps humans in every other act of classifying and categorizing.
Death as the opposite of life. A binary perception. Source.
Samsara. The perception of Life and Death as stations in a larger cycle. Source.
Abstracting things is the first condition to assigning meaning to impressions. Seeing things as separate and distinct, as our memory does, they still exist in a vacuum, and have nothing to assign them with qualities. That is, until we realize what they are not. When seeing a deer running in the pasture, we can know that it is not a predator. We see it eating grass, and animated in such a way to reveal it is no threat to us humans. When we see a tiger, we notice it animated much differently than a deer, not eating the grass. We assume the two have a unique difference. The binary tendency allows us create categories, since it frames one set of impressions and then connects it to another. It is the origin of all systematic knowledge, including science and the law. We tend to forget that those distinctions exist only in relation to humans.
Part 3
While reality is in a state of constant change, human thinking does the incredible task of solidifying it and committing reality into constants, such as symbols and words. This ‘digitizing’ of our impressions happens by limiting them using binary thinking. While Mathematics no doubt idealizes, and thus limits, the natural world, it does work as a language for creation and communication information. Let’s take a final look at our binary thinking and uncover the reason for its becoming such a fruitful generator of human language.
The Mind as a Computer
Binary thinking is embedded in our mental function. Analyzing our language reveals the operational aspects of our mind, and similarly does observing the technologies that mankind invents. Marshall McLuhan famously referred to the media that man creates as “extensions”. By ‘media’ he included not only newspapers and television, but man-made items, such as light bulbs, cars, etc. Media are created organically, by us, to satisfy an inner need for expression. McLuhan thus called them “extensions” of ourselves. He concluded that all these humanly founded things serve as our extension, as originating in our need to expand and fulfill ourselves, and as a continuation of our own bodily limbs. The creation of media is thus a work of mimicry. We devise the things we wish to be in the world.
Marshall McLuhan
McLuhan’s notion of extensions offers a clue to the workings of the human mind. The man-made artifacts that surround us mirror the mechanics and limits of our own thought. When we look at our inventions, our media, we see our desires incarnated. Yet we also notice the intentions, and direction that our mind allows us at any given moment. This was McLuhan’s idea by the maxim “The Medium is the Message”. Our artifacts reveal more about us than they do about them.
We can therefore use McLuhan’s views of devised “extensions” in order to reveal things about our own memory, which might be unconscious in our everyday thought. One such memory-based human invention is the computer. The computer extensively mimics human thinking. We demand of it to remember and to retrieve information at our disposal. A computer’s memory is binary. It can be represented by a set of 0s and 1s. The electric current that runs through the computer allow us to create a code made of a sequence of electric pulses and respites, which is translated into the computer’s operations. The computer stores and retrieves units of data through assigning to them a physical space This operation greatly mimic, I argue, the mechanics of our own memory.
Envisioning the computer’s memory as a human realm, and vice versa. From top to bottom: Tron (1982); Hackers (1995); The Matrix (1999).
As I have written in the previous post, our thoughts are in fact memories, stringed together. What comprises a thought is the road that it passes between synaptic junctions. We should think about thoughts as similar to a binary code, where a piece of computer language translates to a series of 0’s and 1’s, of Off’s and On’s. A single thought should be looked at according to its particular voyage through neural junctions, and the path of turns that it has taken. Again, thoughts are not a what, but a where.
The comparison of our living biological brain contents and the inanimate computer, should be met with several caveats. First, our neural network is constantly remolding itself. Old synapses are decaying and giving way to new synapses to be generated.6 Second, the location of various memories is arbitrary and differs, not only between different persons, but between the same person over time. This means that a human thought will change over time, be given a greater or smaller emphasis, and in general, be less static than that of a computer. Third, our own thinking is less trustworthy than the computer’s memory. Since human memories rest on the ever decaying biological matter of the brain, we tend to distort, exaggerate, forget and invent memories based on the ceaseless activity of our memories. In short, our thinking is untrustworthy.
Nevertheless, our thinking and the memory of a computer are closely similar in the way that we retrieve both of them. Our memory stores our impressions and experiences by giving them a mental space within our neural network. Like a file in a computer, our memories have a location. They correspond to a string of nodes, of binary turns, that we can take in order to retrieve these memories. So our binary thinking is not just thinking in terms of opposites. It allows complexity and depth by memorizing a chain of binary choices. We create a path which can be retraced and re-collected. We don’t think like a computer so much as a computer is designed as mimicry of our own thought.
Our thinking is a spatial tool. We code our impressions of the world around as if they were coordinates in space, so that we might be able to arrive to them at a later time. The fact that our memory has this spatial bias originates from the times where early humans had to memorize their surroundings in order to survive. For more on this, see my previous post. Like Ariadne’s thread that helped Theseus through the maze, our memory serves as a way to venture far out of our known territory, only to arrive safely back. Thoughts are often equated to threads (as in the saying “string of thought”). Human memory codifies spatial landmarks into abstract symbols, by creating concepts for them. And our concepts of the world are themselves spatial, since they rely on the coding of living moving reality upon the grid of our neural network.
In the previous post, I claimed that when early Hominids’ started to stand upright on two legs, it made the sense of seeing our primary mode of experience, which in turn formed our sense of self – as a location behind our eyes. It creates the spatial “I”, as man first perceived a space from which to “look out” at the world. The first binary opposition was created, then, being ‘me vs. not me’. From this original opposition unfold every distinction and distancing that we perform. Notice that a word for “I”, the first person pronoun, exists in every human language.
In the previous post I also argued that the first metaphors to shape our perception were Orientational Metaphors. That is, that our ability to mentally symbolize space came before we could symbolize objects within that space. In this, I slightly contradict Lakoff and Johnson’s idea that we symbolize and codify objects by using a different metaphoric design, namely Ontological Metaphors, which perceive things, and not space. I think that our habit of thinking in binary oppositions would have to grow in tandem with navigating in space, and only then could it be assigned to objects. Proof of this is that we still our use sets of binary oppositions to categorize the space around us. We refer to space in terms of pairs, such as UP-DOWN, LEFT-RIGHT, FORWARD-BACKWARD, and so on.
A visitor’s map with listed landmarks resembles how we codify the space around us. Image Source.
I think that we were able to grow our memory and symbolic language from venturing further and further into unseen space, and creating a memory-path in order to return home. We codified space using binary signs, for the turns we made. These helped retrace our steps back to the cave, and allowed us to later find the same spots, like vegetation, shade and waterholes. We grew our memory for symbols, which led to the birth of language, out of this codifying and memorizing of space. The thoughts that we think are memories traveling through the neural pathways that were created from the navigational requirement of surviving outside. I speculate that these abilities situate within the Hippocampus of our brain, which governs the “consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory, and spatial memory that enables navigation.”7 And, interestingly enough, we have two hippocampi. Could they contribute to our ability to think in binary terms?
As Barbara Tverski writes in her bookMind in Motion:
“…the same neural foundation that serves spatial thought serves abstract thought. It’s as though the hippocampus created checkers or tokens for places or memories … I repeat: the brain mechanisms in humans that represent actual places in real spaces also represent ideas in conceptual spaces. Spatial thinking enables abstract thinking.”
The language we use to talk about our thoughts indicates our awareness to their connection with moving through space.
“Thoughts live. They travel far.”
Vivekananda
“The mind moves in the direction of our currently dominant thoughts.
Earl Nightingale
“Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?”
Sigmund Freud
“Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letterbox”
The Beatles, Across The Universe
This post was a kind of addendum to the previous post. I have tried to flesh out the mental workings of the Spatial Thinking Theory. I tried to offer more proof to the theory based on the existence of binary oppositions in our thought process. I concluded by relating the binary oppositions back to the navigational influence on our thought and language, claiming that these ideal electric oppositions were the source for our Orientational Metaphors, and as a consequence, to all of language.
In the next posts, I will start using the theory as a given tool, in order to analyze works of fiction, like various myths and ancient stories, on the one hand, and human behavior, like the historic expansion of civilizations, on the other.
Influences:
Marshall McLuhan / Understanding Media; The Medium is the Message.
Barbara Tversky / Mind in Motion (2019)
Ferdinand De Saussure/ A Course in General Linguistics
Jacques Derrida/ Sign, Structure, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
In this article, I combine several ideas concerning language and conclude that mankind developed symbolic language as a navigational tool.
Part 1
Symbols: The Wonders of Human Language
Have you ever stopped and thought about how strange it is to be able to read what someone has written? How weird it is to look at these static squiggles in front of you and see them as words? Or hear a voice in your head, uttering these words? Or to understand these signs and symbols as composing a statement, that has its own meaning? How unlike anything else in nature these symbols are? And how quickly and naturally we perform this process?
Human language is unlike anything else in the natural world. The manifold process involved in carrying meaning from one person to another has no counterpart in any other species. It is bewildering how we ever got to communicate using words and letters.
Written and spoken language seems natural to us, yet it requires learning on our part. Without being immersed in a language speaking human environment, we would probably not develop language on our own. Researcher Michael Tomasello succinctly suggested we think of a child who was brought up on a deserted island. That child, we can safely assume, would not develop any language. They would instead communicate using grunts and sighs. Several reports about feral children – kids raised in the wild by animals, such as wolves and monkeys – revealed that they in fact communicated similarly to the animals that raised them. The key difference between our language and those of other animals is the use of symbolic thinking.
Symbols and Standing Upright
Only humans have the capacity to use signs and symbols. Symbolic thinking allows us to substitute a thing with a common mark, an illustration. The words you are now reading are made of signs and symbols. They substitute the words we say with an agreed upon set of signs. We all study these signs and teach them to our own children to maintain human communication in perpetuity.
Symbolic language differs from animal communication in how remote it allows us to be from the things we are communicating. Animals, in as much certainty we can have, express themselves using immediate bodily reactions. Some of these reactions might become elaborate, as in with bees “dancing” to indicate to one another the location of flower beds. Yet their language is still in direct correspondence with their sensing of what they perceive.
common symbols found in cavemen drawings, according to Gennevieve von Petzinger
While animal communication is analogue, human symbolic communication is digital. Symbolic thinking allows us humans to abstract the words we use from the things that we perceive. As linguist Ferdinand De Saussure defined it, human language detaches the “signifiers” from the “signified”. We mostly select words, or “signifiers”, and randomly assign them to their “signified” meanings. There is no inherent connection between a sign and the meaning to which it refers. For example, a tree has nothing about it that would necessitate us using the word “tree” for its naming.
Symbols and the abstracting mechanism behind them have enabled rapid human advancement. Devising tools is often said to be what propelled Homo Habilis forward. Yet, the ability for making tools could only take place once humans could abstract things from their original meanings. Seeing a rock as anything but a dormant part of the surroundings, required abstraction. Fashioning a flint, or a knife, or a spearhead, out of that same rock, required humans to perceive it using substitutive, symbolic thinking; seeing how that rock could become many other things. This means that the creation of tools, around 2.6 millions years ago, also reveals the natal stages of symbolic thinking. From then on, humans were able to abstract anything in nature and devise countless tools, machines, and also stories, language, and science. The symbolic tool propelled mankind to dominating the natural kingdom.
How, then, has humanity achieved its unique ability for abstraction and thinking in symbols?
The key lies, I believe, in early humans’ standing upright. Much like symbolic language, standing upright is a unique human feature in the animal world. The change from ape-like crouching to our fully erect stance, enabled at least two unique human capabilities:
It freed the hands to carry, reach and create things.
It transferred the sense of perceiving the world from the nose to the eyes.
Scientist have discussed the first ability at length. Yet to my knowledge not many explored the shift that standing upright inflicted on our main sense of perceiving our surroundings. The change from an apish gait to a human erect stance, enabled early humans to see farther than ever before. We could see places beyond the reach of any of our other senses. Sight became the primary source of perception. We could see predators before they came within earshot; we could see vegetation in the distant horizon, signalling water and food; and we could see the limit drawn by the distant horizon, dividing earth and sky and signalling when day and night would interchange.
Farsightedness and the Birth of the Self
This ability, to look at the distance, became our ability to abstract. Looking at animals from a distance, yet not smelling or hearing them, early humans faced a mystery. They recognized what was in front of them, yet only in sight. Devoid of any other sensory impressions, except for possible sound, they would use their memory to re-cognize the animals. Humans became distant, literally and figuratively, from the rest of the natural world.
Relying on sight birthed our unique ability to abstract. We first abstracted ourselves from anything else that we saw. Since that thing was far away from us, it was not available to smell or touch; yet it was there. And so, over time, humans began to form the sense of self. We grew an ego. Out of the notion that there exists a separate realm of existence, which is unrelated to us, grew a mental detachment. Humans began thinking of themselves as the subject that perceives the world, and their surroundings as objects meant for observation, and then utilization.
The abstraction that standing upright had facilitated, also generated the creation of visual symbols. Humans had probably communicated before the invention of signs, through mimicking the sounds and appearances of the various animals and natural elements that they encountered. However, using visual signs, such as drawing on sand or on a cave wall, now enabled them to portray and communicate nearly any thing that their eyes perceived.
The upright stance, in summary, led to the dominance of the visual mode of sensing; from it emerged our capability of communicating our perceptions and impressions better than ever before. It made for a wealth of expression that surpassed that of any other animal. While humans to this day still need to be taught this symbolic ability anew, we now have an innate ease for acquiring symbolic language.
It is now apparent how we create signs such as words and drawings that symbolically replace the things we perceive. We now need to see what drove humans to connect these symbols to form sentences. How did written and spoken language string its symbols together to form statements, paragraphs and stories?
Human Language is Made of Metaphors
The biggest clue to the essence and motivation of language appears in George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s 1980 book Metaphors we Live By. In it, they illustrate how metaphors are the mechanism for creating conceptual language and thought.
Dali’s visual metaphor in The Persistence of Memory
Metaphors are the equating of two different things, to reveal and highlight a feature. “Sea of trouble” is a known metaphor, in which “sea” becomes synonymous with “plenitude”. While most think of metaphors as strictly a poetic device, they are in fact our main source of creating concepts. The two parts of a metaphor are called a ‘source’, and a ‘target’. The first, being the concept which lends its attributes , and the second, being the concept to which these attributes are ascribed.
Lakoff and Johnson revealed that we construct much, if not most, of our thinking, using metaphoric constructs. That is, we equate between sets of targets and sources, sometimes unconsciously, in order to create the concepts we use to navigate our everyday lives.
They found this by seeing how metaphors reveal our conceptual equation between pairs of things like “argument=war”, or “thoughts=food”, or “time=money”. Some of these equations become apparent only when taking a close look at our way of speaking. That is, we regard the Here are just a few examples out of dozens, in English, for the conceptual equating of ‘time’ and ‘money’[1]:
TIME=MONEY
You’re wasting my time. This gadget will save you hours. I don’t have the time to give you. How do you spend your time these days? That flat tire cost me an hour. I’ve invested a lot of time in her. I don’t have enough time to spare for that. You’re running out of time. You need to budget your time. Put aside some time for ping pong. Is that worth your while? Do you have much time left? He’s living on borrowed time. You don’t use your time profitably. I lost a lot of time when I got sick.
In all of these examples, we refer to time as if it was money.
Regularly in metaphors, the more abstract concept is the one to which we assign features from a more concrete concept.
While time and money are more obviously close to one another in our thought, looking at this metaphor for food is slightly more surprising:
IDEAS=FOOD
What he said left a had taste in my mouth. All this paper has in it are raw facts and half-baked ideas. Too many facts here for me to digest them all. I just can’t swallow that claim. That argument smells fishy. Let me stew over that for a while. Now there’s a theory you can really sink your teeth into. That’s food for thought.
All of these examples are taken from Metaphors we Live by. There are many other conceptual metaphors such as these, explained throughout the book. Start looking for metaphors in spoken and written language and you will notice them everywhere. Not all metaphors exist in every language. Moreover, people can naturally deliberately create surprising new metaphors. Yet the use of metaphors is ubiquitous and most their meaning is often consistent throughout a given culture.
Metaphoric Thinking: Creating New Concepts
What do all these metaphors prove, then?
The writers of Metaphors We Live by state that metaphors are the mechanism for all language. That is, the ability to conceive that one thing is like another, that X=Y, is what allows us to create concepts, words and sentences. The mere naming of things – as in saying “this here is a tree” – is a metaphoric act, since we equate a real-life object with its symbol. And I would add the obvious, that it is this ability for metaphoric thinking that separates human language and thinking from those of every other species.
George Lakoff
Equating different things using metaphors enables us to come up with new concepts. A concept can begin its life cycle by relating to something in the existing environment; and later, it can transform mentally into newer concepts, and do so over and over seemingly forever. For example, an ancestor human might discover that a rock can break into pieces that have sharp edges. Those pieces cause him to bleed. The discovery that a rock can be made into a weapon this way is an initial metaphor. The rock becomes a tool, and not just a feature in the landscape. Since rocks now have a purpose in the eyes of humans, they also become a category for recognizing and classifying other things. The available usage of rocks generates a mode of thinking about the world.
Later on, humans begin viewing things as “rock-like” or “not rock-like” based on the usages that they derive. Later still, our ancestors begin using sharp rocks for cutting things like plants and animal skins. A rock becomes synonymous with a type of human activity. The homo habilis’ mental concept of a rock expands. It becomes a thing of value, and along with it grows the understanding that other landscape features can have a value to humans. With value come degrees of helpfulness, efficiency, amount, and an array of human-centric attributes. Each concept carries an underlying assumption that the environment centers around humans.
ROCK=DIFFICULT
The metaphor of rock=difficult grew from our evolving concept and use of rocks. Making things with rocks requires pressure and the use of even harder substances. The first notion of rocks is that they are hard. They are stronger than anything that surrounds the early humans; they are used for the exact reason of this hardness. They become an idea, a concept epitomizing hardness itself. And since humans are in essence softer and more vulnerable than rocks, humans begin regarding them as a symbol for difficulty as well. A “rocky” road , or a relationship that is said to be “on the rocks” describe a rough terrain or experience.
Yet the conceptual metaphor rock=difficult lies solely as a value judgment in humans’ minds. It has no fundamental hold in reality. Nature does not judge. Only humans attribute so called meanings and assign value to elements in our surroundings. Those values are based solely on our own relation with those elements.
And so, language is metaphoric in nature, and metaphors allow creating new meanings, which humans think of as concepts. Lakoff and Johnson’s work enables us to peer into the inner workings not only of human language, but of human thinking. We can use their approach to dive even deeper, and ask one final question: “Why did human language evolve in the first place?”
Language is a Spatial Tool
We have seen that metaphors are the mechanism that creates new concepts, and as a result, drives human thinking. We abstract aspects of our surroundings using symbols. These allow us to codify, categorize, and commit our impressions to memory. The quickness in which we grab mental snapshots would have some believe that our mind is like a clear and endless canvas, displaying every impression placed upon it with directness and without bias. Yet I argue that through language we can uncover an underlying mental framework, which places all impressions within an existing framework, a spatial framework. We create a location for our impressions, and a route for retrieving their memory. I argue that our mind is not a blank slate, but a map.
Tourist maps such as this one shows how we remember space through landmarks. Source: mapsland
Here too, metaphors reveal the way.
As the previous part shows, metaphors can unfold and develop. However, we can still retrace the original metaphor, the initial replacive relation, the one that started the chain. It is possible to trace everyday metaphors to their primary conceptual metaphors. Luckily for us, we don’t need to go through thousands and thousands of metaphors in order to find correlating imagery and concepts and retrieve the original metaphors. In Metaphors We Live by, Lakoff and Johnson have already done so. They revealed that humans utilize four types of primary conceptual metaphors.
Primary Conceptual Metaphors
These are the four different types of metaphors[2]:
Structural
Orientational
Ontological
Metonymy
Structural Metaphors – One concept is metaphorically structured in terms of another. As in the example Time=Money, where time is thoroughly expressed using concepts that pertain to money. I see it as the overlaying of one concept on top of another.
Orientational Metaphors – Lakoff and Johnson describe them as a whole system of concepts that is organized in relation to one another. For example, up=happy and down=sad (as in “their feeling down”, or “he’s spirits are up”). These metaphors occur systematically through language. Other such systems are hot=sociable and cold=unsociable (as in “she’s a warm person”, or “he’s giving me a cold shoulder”). I am going to argue that these are the most fundamental metaphors, which unfold to create all other metaphors and concepts.
Ontological Metaphors – One concept is based on a physical object. As in man=car (“My boss put the breaks on the project”, or “they gave us the green light”).
Metonymy – One entity is used to relate to another that is related to it. There are many types of these substitutions, such as substituting the producer for the product (as in “He bought a Ford“); the object for the user (as in “the buses are on strike”); the part for the whole (as in “Get your butt over here”); the controller for the controlled (as in “Napoleon lost at Waterloo”), and many others. In a later book, Lakoff stated that all words are metonyms, since they “stand for the concepts they express.”
In my quest to find the origin of human language and symbolic thought, I see some of the metaphor types in this list as secondary, and some as tertiary. I believe that Orientational metaphors have primacy over other types of metaphors. The earliest human symbolic thinking, and the human language which ensued, I claim, emerged from our need to navigate using our eyes; a requirement that developed our spatial perception first, and from it all the others have unfolded.
Goya’s The Colossus, I think shows the discovery of the ego. The giant only appears that way because of perspective. Source
If we agree that metaphors are the mechanism for creating new concepts, these four types are the branches of the mechanism. However, I believe that not all of these types of metaphors appeared at the same time. That is, when the early humans began using abstraction to analyze their surroundings, they did not immediately perceive objects (ontological); neither did they perceive concepts that they could compare to one another (structural); and they also could not replace entities with other entities based on various relations (metonymy). What they could do at first, I believe, was to allocate themselves a certain relation to their physical environment. That is, at first, our ancestors used abstraction to distinct themselves from the space around them. The first abstraction was the belief that there was an “I” that perceived, and stood apart from, an “outside” world. Humans as the “center” and the rest of the world being the “surroundings”[3] was the first metaphoric concept; this metaphor of I=IN, and All Else=OUT gave birth to all other metaphors.
The significance of Orientational Metaphors does not escape Lakoff and Johnson. Here is what they write about them:
Most of our fundamental concepts are organized in terms of one or more spatialization metaphors
In some cases spatialization is so essential a part of a concept that it is difficult for us to imagine any alternative metaphor that might structure the concept.
Yet, the writers insist that metaphors rely both on cultural and physical experiences. They also insist that identifying objects are as important for creating metaphoric systems of thought, using ontological metaphors. I wish to argue that humans are capable of only using orientational metaphors, due to a limited spatial logic, which then unfold into creating newer perceptions, i.e. of objects, entities and relations between them.
I will explain the reasoning behind this assumption in the next post, which will deal with the logic of symbolic thinking and its mental framework. For now, I would like to show how orientational metaphors make up all of our perceptions of reality.
Orientational Metaphors are the Basis for Symbolic Thinking
Lakoff and Johnson have discovered that we regularly incorporate spatial words with a metaphoric meaning. Such a:
Up=More; Down=Less: The number of books printed each year keeps going up; His draft number is high; My income rose last year; The mount of artistic activity in this state has gone down in the past year; Turn the heat down if you’re hot. Up=Good; Down=Bad: Things are looking up; We hit peak last year, but it’s downhill ever since; Things are at an all-time low; He does high-quality work. Up=Happy; Down=Sad: I’m feeling up; My spirits rose; You’re in high spirits; I’m feeling down; I’m depressed; He’s really low these days; I fell into a depression. Up=Conscious; Down=Unconscious: Get up; Wake up; He rises early in the morning; He dropped off to sleep; He’s under hypnosis; He sank into a coma.
Other spatial words have the same metaphorical underlayer.
Consider the spatial words in these common phrases[5]:
ABOVE: as inabove all;above their own interests.
AFTER: as in trying to get after some food, get after a good time, get after more money, or he is named after the founder, a song after Bob Dylan.
AROUND: as in around 100 people, around 16.00 hours.
BEHIND: as in people behind a crime, motives behind a behaviour, a theory behind a policy; or a in falling behindschedule, behind the times, behind the leading team.
BELOW: as in below par, below expectation, below normal, below the limit.
BEYOND: as in beyond doubt, beyond redemption, beyond reproach, beyond repair, or in beyond expectation, beyond requirements.
OFF:as in off duty, off food, off travelling, or in off one’s best, off colour.
ON: as in on a case, on a problem, on business, or inon TV, on the phone, on a map, on film, on a screen.
OUT OF: as in out of position, out of alignment, out of bounds, out of sorts, out of touch, or in out of gratitude, out of ignorance.
OVER: as in over six hours, over 1000 people, over the limit, or as in arguing over money, disputes over procedures, or as in over the worst, over their illness, over a holiday, or in over a lifetime, over the course of many years.
THROUGH: as in through a friend, through local representatives.
UNDER: as in under the command of, under a manager, or in under the Republicans, under the … Dynasty, or in under pressure, under attack, under an illusion, under consideration, under the influence of, or in under an agreement, under the regulations.
These metaphoric usages are not accidental.
Metaphoric words originate in real life usage and have evolved into the many meanings which we attribute them today. Humans have developed language from the most basic spatial words. Through metaphoric unfolding, these words took on new and more elaborate possibilities for expression.
Yet I wish to claim that, quintessentially, we still to this day manipulate their original spatial essence in order to convey and express newer meanings. A mighty example is the spatial word ‘in’, which reflects one of our most basic mental tendencies – the need to compartmentalize, to put limits around things, and to control the contents of those things.
IN: Container metaphors
Lakoff and Johnson describe container metaphors with this striking passage:
We are physical beings, bounded and set off from the rest of the world by the surface of our skins, and we experience the rest of the world as outside us. Each of us is a container, with a bounding surface and an in-out orientation. We project our own in-out orientation onto other physical objects that are bounded by surfaces. Thus we also view them as containers with an inside and an outside. […] But even where there is no natural physical boundary that can be viewed as defining a container, we impose boundaries—marking off territory so that it has an inside and a bounding surface—whether a wall, a fence, or an abstract line or plane. There are few human instincts more basic than territoriality. And such defining of a territory, putting a boundary around it, is an act of quantification.
An example of the container metaphors is in saying “There’s a lot of land in Kansas”, or “We married in 2017”, where both the country and the year are seen as a receptacle which can hold various things.
Although the researchers categorize Container metaphors as Ontological Metaphors, which refer to objects, I see them as the natural unfolding of Orientational Metaphors.
The most amazing finding offered by Laoff and Johnson regards the concept of the visual field. The container metaphor, they suggest, holds true to how we perceive our own vision of reality. As they write in a passage about the visual field:
We conceptualize our visual field as a container and conceptualize what we see as being a field inside it. Even the term ‘visual field’ suggests this. The metaphor is a natural one that emerges from the fact that, when you look at some territory (land, floor space, etc.), your field of vision defines a boundary of the territory, namely, the part that you can see. Given that a bounded physical space is a CONTAINER and that our field of vision correlates with that bounded physical space, the metaphorical concept VISUAL FIELDS ARE CONTAINERS emerges naturally.
in Metaphors We Live by
In other words, we see the observable world as coming in and out of our visual perception. We categorize things as approaching us, as coming our way. Container metaphors, I believe, are as close as possible to the original language that humans spoke. The visual field metaphor might be the oldest metaphor in our usage. It dictates much of how we think of the world “around” us.
Unfolding the Container Metaphor: Substance and Conduit Metaphors
L & J elaborate and discuss other basic metaphors, which I believe to unfold from the container, namely the “Conduit Metaphor” and the “Substance Metaphor”. Clearly, if we limit things and view them as containers, there are other things that could be placed into these containers – serving as substances; other containers serve as ideal for transferring things through them, and they serve as conduits. And so, we often speak of language itself as a conduit (as in “it’s difficult to put my ideas into words”, or “his words carry little meaning”); and speak about various things as substances within a delineated container (as in “there was a lot of good running in the race”, or “she’s overflowing with vitality”).
It’s time to connect the dots.
Using metaphors reveals the way that our mind perceives much of reality. Orientational metaphors should be regarded as the first to come out of our original abstraction, when we first began contrasting ourselves with what was in front of our eyes. To recap, the first sign of symbolic thinking in humans was contrasting the seen visual field with ourselves; a perception that grew from using long distance sight as a replacement for smell, taste, sound and touch. The contrast of “I” and “everything else” unfolded into the spatial perception of In-Out. What we felt was “In”. What we did not was “Out”. Anything in space was given a value which flowed naturally from its relation to the human perceiver. “Up” began signifying “good”, and “down” coalesced with “bad”.
We see spatial language everywhere to this day. In English, for instance, proper nouns comprise of many orientational prefixes, that attach to roots, and create new words and meanings. Take, for example, the word “exterminate”. Its suffix, ‘ex-‘ means out of, and attaches to the Latin “terminus”, meaning goal, end, final point. The word thus means “to drive away something out of limits”. Using a different prefix with the same root, we can create a new word. So we could use “de-“, meaning down, away, off, and get “determine”, meaning “to mark the end of a boundary”. Using only spatiality, humans create multiple new concepts, building a rich systematic language.
Spatial, orientational metaphors, I argue, appeared as the first markers of human language. The rest of the metaphoric types, which Lakoff and Johnson delineate, came afterwards. The perception of other things as containers could only appear after humans perceived themselves as containers, and the other things in their surroundings as the substances that fit into the container. Meaning, only after creating the notion of themselves as “in” and anything else as “out” could any other metaphoric conception be instilled in our mind.
In my next post I will try to prove that there is another aspect of Orientational Metaphors, namely their binary nature (perceived as pairs of opposites, such as “up-down”, “behind-in front”, etc.) which leads me to believe that they are primary. I will argue that binary thinking is the foundation of our symbolic thinking.
Part 2
Now, it’s time to see how humans created their unique symbolic language out of their emerging need for navigating through space.
The Connection between Spatial Thinking and Language
We’ve hopefully seen how the metaphors that construct conceptual language reveal our fundamentally spatial thinking. I would like to show why our mind developed symbols as a tool to grasp space.
Our mind, as I previously wrote, is built like a map. We encounter the world and use our memory to assign a location to thoughts. Much like a computer, we allocate a route for specific memories by which to retrieve them later. We connect fresh memories to existing memories, of impressions that are proximate, although each of us does so a little differently, as can be gathered from word association games. Along with symbolizing and standing upright, humans differ from other species in the scope of their memory.
As mentioned before, the power of abstraction helps us symbolize and detach and delineate things in nature. Yet, merely abstracting things into symbols would not be enough to create a symbolic language. We also need to be able to memorize and retrieve those symbols. Human memory for symbols is unlike that of any other species. We are able to memorize not only letters, words and names, but also traffic signs, logos of countless companies, from clothing brands, to cars, to sport teams, to country flag colors, and the list goes on and on. The ability to combine abstracted memories into symbols and concepts, and to remember these concepts, is incredible and almost entirely uniquely found in humans.
Thoughts are Memories
The importance of our memory can be defined likewise: think of how your mind works, and how often. You are constantly thinking. Your mind, unless you have managed to achieve a meditative calmness, is always on the move. It is assessing, combining, recognizing, and, in a word ‘thinking’. Yet, what is thinking, if not remembering? Our thoughts are the product of assembling previous impressions, i.e., memories. Our conscious and subconscious worlds, our awake and dream materials, are comprised of memory-work. Since we can only divulge that which we have already encountered, all of our mental work is nothing but the interweaving of previous impressions, committed to memory.
And our memory is almost unbelievably powerful. Think of the number of different symbols you can immediately recognize. How quickly we can distinguish between various symbols, or categorize them as relating to different worlds, being car logos, Chinese language characters, military decorating, and so on. The memory of a grown human works quickly when classifying symbols. We are not born with those symbols but, as mentioned before, with the power of their recognition and classification.
The ability to memorize symbols, I argue, is the evolutionary tool that made humans the dominant species. With humans being physically inferior to most of the other animals, our superior memory carried our ancestors to learn from, and surpass, the rest of the natural world. We were not as quick as predators such as cheetahs and lions yet were able to recognize their spots and stripes from afar, and take cover. We do not have the fur of many mammals to fend from harsh colds but could fashion ourselves a coat from their skins. We do not have the claws of other mammals yet could fashion jagged rocks and spears to the same effect. Memorizing took our abstraction ability into the realm of creation. And much like with symbolic language, our memory is also based on spatial navigation.
Memories are stored in the part of the brain called the hippocampus. This is the part of the brain responsible for indexing and storing episodic memories – the memories of things that we have actually encountered, as opposed to secondary memories. The hippocampus regulates these mental processes: learning, memory encoding, memory consolidation, and spatial navigation. The same area of our brain where memories are regulated is also where “spatial navigation” takes place.
Language as a Survival Tool
Learning a language was an important survival tool. It was mandatory firstly for understanding the so-called autonomy of the self. It distinguished us from the rest of nature, animate and inanimate. Understanding that you exist no doubt made it clear that death was the termination of the entity that identifies itself as a self. Being in danger of dying became, I believe, a greater shock to humans than to any other species. Look at any wildlife documentary, where an animal is preyed upon and taken down to be eaten by predators. Despite trying to escape, at no point does it appear overly shocked. They often seem to accept the outcome in relative composure. With humans, this behavior is seldom the case. Most people would protest death even when there is no escaping it. The ego’s unbelief that it can die is another reason why humans were able to overcome being preyed upon, to the point of being the alpha predator in nature; the human predator is nowadays trying to overcome its own mortality.
Secondly, the development of language meant that humans could communicate their intentions through symbols, increasing their chances of survival by working together as a stronger unit. Being able to signal each other to the location of predators or prey, now meant that a human did not have to run and hide but could gather his friends and actually kill its adversary. The hunting plains were probably where spatial signs first originated. The first uses of turning abstracting language into symbols were probably pointing and gesturing, which later grew into the sounds signifying “here” and “there”. The fact that feral children – children raised by wild animals – are not able to learn much human symbolic language after being reinstated into civilization, shows that human language means more than just memorizing signs. The ability itself for sign memorization rests on a preexisting spatial communication between human beings. Among the first questions we pose to our babies is “where is this or that thing?”. It is my belief that this questions presupposes the possibility to answer all other open questions, i.e. “who”, “what” “when”, etc.
Technology as extension. Augmented Reality street view with added layers of navigational information, copying how humans layer data over spatial perceptions. Source
Thirdly, the fact that humans can command a territorial range larger than any other land mammal, spanning the entire world if given the chance, also entails the fact that they can memorize spatial features extremely well. Most other land mammals inhabit an average territory of less than a few miles. Only through signifying space can we remember such expanses of land. A group of early humans roams the land and stumbles upon bushes of edible berries. They make a mental mark of the spot as a place with sustenance. The bushes become a landmark in their minds’ map.
The capability of indexing and storing information about space becomes the ability to create memories in general. We create all memories upon a spatial mental infrastructure. We carry a spatial awareness with us constantly, classifying and remembering the things we encounter and using the location in which we stand at that moment. This is why people often say “I remember where I was when this or that happened…”.
Our conceptual scheme of our perceptions is a map. And language is the compass that allows us to find where we stand and where we are headed.
Memories have a Mental Location
Our memories have physical locations within our brain. To remember anything, we must retrace our steps of where it is situated within a network of other memories. They work much like a computer memory. In order to reach a file destination, a computer will locate its route folder. That is, it will go to the right order of placements in which that file is situated. The route can ultimately be described as achain of 0’s and 1’s, of On’s and Off’s. Similarly, a human memory, say of an impression that we registered a year ago, can be arrived at by tracing a chain of other memories; a series of steps or turns. To remember the name of a person I met at a party and have seen before, I must locate the memory of meeting him before. This memory will be resurfaced only if I situate the where in which I have encountered him.
Which turn to the memory of that party again? Neural pathways illustration. Source
As an animal limited by gravity, we carry with us a limited sense of space wherever we go. This is proven again and again in the spatial metaphors we use. We have seen how orientational metaphors conflate UP with ‘good’, ‘more’, happy’, and DOWN with ‘bad’, ‘less’, ‘sad’ and so on. Our use of metaphors reveals how our language is always coding reality in spatial terms. We are forever and constantly committing things to memory based on the space in which those things are located, and based on the space in which we are situated when encountering those things. The limits of our thought are the limits of our perception. And since our eyes can gaze at a seemingly infinite horizon, our thought aspires to infinity, always trying to reach the next destination.
The language we use, then, is spatial. Not because our minds are spatial and our symbolic language has developed to describe it. Symbolic language and our spatial perception grew simultaneously with the revolution of the upright stance. Memories coded reality as much as our mental maps allowed us to. Yet, the abstraction of symbols meant that we can grow out of the limitations of our physical space. The problem with abstraction is that enables us to grasp things by putting a false limitation on them; it never grasps them in and of themselves. I can describe a tree to you my whole life, yet it would not amount to you seeing that tree for yourself.
Our mental map is a disingenuous portrayal of reality. It distorts, falsely compares, and places unreal limits on things. A lovely example of this is found in the brief story by Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”. The Story tells of an empire in which the science of mapmaking was so precise and exact, “that the map of an entire province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the empire, the entirety of the province.” The map, possibly the ultimate symbol, abstracts the territory it is delineating in order to put it into scale. Yet, since the map abstracts, it inevitably neglects and disregards some portions. And so, seeking perfection in their maps, Borges’ cartographers eventually “struck a map whose size was that of the empire, and which coincided point for point with it.”[7] And so, we humans add memory to memory, creating a mental map of reality that is ever unfolding, and changing with our every move.
And yet, we try to bring cohesiveness and closure to these memories. Each of humanity’s bodies of knowledge attempt to be a closed system. Each of our mental mappings of reality tries to build a finite language. This attempt at closure wishes to produce a map which has spatial validity. We wish, in other words, to create maps of meaning that would take us from where we now stand, to the edge of all possible meanings, covering all possible grounds, and bring us back safely to where we started.
However, visual symbols did not serve as complete maps until much after spoken languages were invented. The first known map (called the ‘Imago Mundi’) dates to the 6th century BCE, from Babylon. More than two million years after symbolizing appeared. The first symbolic maps, I believe, were not maps at all. They were stories.
Stories as Maps
In order to remember the terrain around them, early humans would communicate the whereabouts of landmarks, trees, wild animals, water sources, and more, by inventing stories. All of our stories began as navigational tools. To this day, we can trace spatial elements in the countless plots overflowing our culture.
In a previous post, I argued that stories are an antidote against what Neil Postman called “newness”. We invent stories, that is, to prepare for an unknown fate. We create dangerous scenarios so that when the time comes, we will be ready for them, having “experienced” them in the form of a memory – a story. The basic need behind inventing and sharing stories stems from wanting to be prepared. Stories are a survival tool. A good story is one that confronts its listener with something new. That is, with something they have not yet designed a defense strategy against. A story that shows something familiar, that has already been encountered, i.e. mentally overcome, is boring, as it does not help in our survival.
So how do our stories serve as spatial mappings?
The stories we tell are the systematization of our memories. They create a closed structure out of symbolic representations. We expect stories to follow a set of rules. They must have characters. They must show, as mentioned before, change. Joseph Campbell found that all human mythologies reveal a proto-story structure, that he called “The Hero’s Journey”. In this structure, a story begins where a single protagonist sets out from his home on a voyage to an unknown territory. The voyage includes much hardship and new adventures. At the end of the journey, the hero comes back to his home a changed man, more knowledgeable, more capable, and ready to lead others.
The hero’s journey works perfectly as a structure for overcoming newness. The hero is the human who dares to venture onto the unknown and, through performing correctly, valiantly and attentively, survives to return and to reveal what he has seen. The hero’s journey is a story about conquering space. In order to survive, one needs to venture out of their place of rest, into the unknown. The hero’s journey is found in many myths and stories. It can be summarized in the Biblical God’s words to Abrham “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” (Genesis 12:1-3). This is a journey that each person is called to take, and still undergoes, as they leave their parents’ home in the quest of seeking fulfillment and survival on their own.
The question is, how have we gone from the basic spatial metaphors, of UP-DOWN, IN-OUT, etc., to structured stories about venturing into the great beyond? How did our spatial perception translate into the unfolding form we know from fabricated plots? I believe the answer is found in the oldest remainder of human storytelling, that is, the aboriginal songlines.
The Songlines
The songlines, or dreaming tracks, are story routes running across the Australian continent delineated by the aborigine tribes. Each tribe, or aborigine culture, has an ancestral creature-being, whom they believe is located within the geographical land where they dwell. The belief system is animistic, as it entails that objects and animals in the surrounding have a spiritual essence.
Upon birth, each tribe member is given a particular line of the many long stretches that crisscross the continent. This line is his own, as his inheritance from birth. Each such stretch of land has its own song, that describes the terrain along it. An Aboriginal Tribesman thus learns this songline from an early age. In other words, he is given a part of the memory of the earth around him.
Painting illustrating the “seven sisters” songlines, running across the Australian continent. Source
When reaching adolescence, tribesmen set off by foot on ritual voyages, or walkabouts. To help guide them along the long trails, they sing their part of the songline, which corresponds with the trail they have been given at birth. And the entirety of the tribe people’s different snglines complete a song-cycle, an expanse of the land around the tribespeople as well as their collective story:
On certain occasions, traditionally, the elders of a particular clan would decide that it was time to sing their song cycle in all of its intricacies from start to finish. Messages would be sent up and down the dreaming track, summoning all of the song-owners to gather up at one of the important water holes along the Dreaming. Once assembled, each clan member in turn would sing his stretch of the Ancestor’s footprints.
in David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
The songlines are, then, both the memory and the story of the surrounding space. Aborigines use the story as a navigational tool, a compass, to remember the terrain by. They are not written but sung. They describe the person but also his surroundings. Man’s personal memory is interspersed with the memory of the space around him. I believe that the songlines reveal how humans developed stories from their initial spatial symbolism. Going on walkabouts, or on hunting trips, or just leaving their known territory, early humans weaved the memories of the space they encountered into a string, a line, a chain, for them to remember later. Those lines, I believe, grew the physical framework for our thinking. They are evident in the metaphoric concept of Thoughts=String, as in with the phrases “weave a story”, “chain of events”, “line of thought”, and so on.
The songlines also suggest that we get our own identity from our surroundings, and that we can get a shared identity, as a community of people, from our share of the space. It is not just our own consciousness that is made up of stories, but our collective consciousness as well. We find our place in the vastness of space and our place within the society of our brothers and sisters, by comparing and sharing our stories. Our memories turn outwards using the plot we share, and we discover that our private experience is shared infinitely across all humans. Each of us has a hero’s journey coded into our mechanism of symbolizing reality.
Storytelling at its finest. Taken from Keith Johnstone’s Impro for Storytellers. Get it here
This explains not only why we have told stories since ancestral times, but why we have told the same stories repeatedly. While our symbolic language may and does distort reality, ultimately snapshotting a sliver of the infinite that surrounds us, it is through the common act of telling it to one another, that we create a sense of fate – a common meaning and purpose within the sheer unfathomability of the landscape.
Conclusion: The Wandering Mind
Human perception is spatial.
We grasp the world around us through metaphoric, symbolic language, by which we create concepts of the world. These concepts are themselves built upon a basis of primary, spatial ideas. The spatial language that we use grew from the early humans’ rise to an upright posture, which moved our sensory mode of perceiving the world from the nose to the eyes. Being able to look at a distance revolutionized how we engage with reality. It ushered in the first use of abstraction, that is, of detaching ourselves from the things that we see.
Rewiring our neural pathways, the use of the eyes and the ability to abstract, gave mankind a surprising advantage over the rest of the animals. It gave us the ability to mimic reality by symbolizing it, and to remember those symbols. As the symbolic ability grew in tandem with our ability to navigate greater territories than ever, our capability to create more survival tools developed as well. More than just applying abstraction to fashioning rocks into knives and spears, symbolizing enabled humans to create a navigational story and to share it with one another. Successful voyages into the unknown became common stories. Stories gave mankind the absolute mechanism for guaranteed future prosperity. They not only described actual victorious journeys, but later grew into imagined voyages. They took on the power to envision. They enabled humans to fortify themselves against perils that they have not even set out to face.
Uses of the Spatial Mind Theory
In this post, I have tried to explain how our thinking is based on spatial cues. The direction of my inquiry was back, in time and place. Now, after describing this notion, it is time to direct the theory forward, and see how it explains many of our beliefs and behaviors.
There are many uses for the understanding that spatial, survivalist language grounds most of our everyday thought. Here are a few examples:
Thinking of a story as a journey can explain, for example, the meaning of jokes. The impact of a joke lies in its surprise. The story within the narrative of a joke leads the listener on a road that is fairly expected, taking often known turns, only to sidestep into a surprising avenue at the punchline. Like a good story, the joke takes us into the unknown. Yet its power of generating laughter is in its surprise and suddenness of taking us there.
Another use is linguistic. While I have discussed symbols such as words, and cohesive systems such as stories, I have not talked about the structure of a sentence. Sentences are designed as statements, measured against their possibility to be right or wrong. Yet why do we choose to communicate using statements in the first place? I would not think it a stretch, to see that sentences are also a construct borrowed from the spatial landscape, whereby parts of speech correspond to navigational instructions.[9] Nouns are landmarks in the terrain; verbs describe a motion within the landscape; and every other part of speech most often acts as a spatial marker. Sentences are in fact a set of coordinates for assigning a path to reach the memory of that noun-landmark. That is why they appear as statements. They are in fact a set of “commands” of where in our mind, and in our listener’s mind, we can find the things we are referring to.
Memory techniques for remembering new words, numbers and data have been proven to work beautifully when we use a spatial mental image, and place new memories inside of it. Building a memory palace is an age-old technique for remembering an impressive mount of information.[10] Using existing mental images of places which one well knows also serve as a great instrument for lodging new information by corresponding it to the image, as with words in a new language.
The loss of our memory skills in the age of smartphones is worth exploring in this context. We might guess that by giving up much of our memory to devices that memorize it for us, is already generating great impact on our ability to articulate ourselves, as well as cause us to lose touch with our sense of space. The modern man is also more sedentary than ever before, having to remember much less spatial cues than before. People in modern westernized cities are almost stuck in pace now compared to the lives of men and women in previous decades. We can see the impact of this new lifestyle, which is confined to a big city, in art and media. Music nowadays, for example, compacts many more words than ever before into a much more rigid melody than before. This “crowding” of expression reflects the physical crowding of our lived spaces.
Spatiality is found in the very act of thinking. We try to locate the things already embedded in our minds and to constantly extend our maps. We move about as a set of eyes watching what comes into our view. The mind, the part of us that analyzes and impresses reality into our memory, is always navigating, trying to find the best position in space for survival.
In the next post I will try and offer a short theory of how our mind structures this spatial-linguistic connection. In the posts following that, I will make use of this theory to analyze various cultural phenomena, notable myths and biblical stories, and unexplained human behaviors, such as laughter, gestures and more.
Aboriginal art is a map of the terrain. Also reminds me of a neural pathway. Source
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Influences:
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 1996
Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, 1966
Harold Bloom, “Poetry, Revisionism, and Repression”, in K.M. Newton, 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader, 1997
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949
Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, 1987
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live by, 1980
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964 (not a book recommendation, since McLuhan’s writing is undecipherable, but definitely an influence).
[9] This pertains to the majority of world languages (around 80%) that make use of Subject, Object, and Verb parts of speech. Other languages, including several tribal languages, use different systems, but I believe in all of them a spatial basis is to be found.
[10] See Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory for a historic investigation of exactly how these palaces were used.
I have recently discovered a useful idea for understanding human behavior. The idea goes as follows: The way things are in the human world reveals their causes
This obscure maxim simply means that, things that exist in the human world yet not in the rest of nature – such as inventions, language, abstract thinking, and so on – can be extrapolated to give away their origins. If we look at the things around us we see they are mostly fabricated by humans. Tools, furniture, media, all these are manmade creations which could not be found elsewhere in the natural world. This idea states that by looking at any of these manmade creations reveals a unique mode of human thinking.
A relatively famous quip by Antonio Gaudi says that “there are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature.” And so, using this idea, we ask, ‘how did all these straight lines end up appearing in our world?’ After some thought, the answer leads us to understand that straight lines help humans to a.) direct themselves in space, and b.) sort things and remember their location. Our homes, for example, are made of straight lines. Think of your kitchen room. It is full of cabinets and drawers. You can probably remember with ease what is inside each drawer and cabinet, without having to look. You could probably draw, or make a list from memory of everything within your kitchen, just by mentally going over one cabinet after another. On the contrary, think of any natural element in your close surroundings, from a plant, a pet, a tree outside our window. Even after giving it a close look, how well do you think you could remember its size, shape, color, and all of its composing parts?
This is an extremely useful tool. No doubt, it is what Marshall McLuhan was talking about to when referring to all human creations as ‘media’, or as ‘extensions’, of ourselves. McLuhan believed humans create things out of a tendency to expand in space. Manmade creations are like appendages to our own bodies. The gun is an appendage of the hand; the camera an appendage of the eye; the car an appendage of the legs and feet, and so on. McLuhan also saw that every new media, or invention, incorporates older media within it. Television incorporated the sound of radio with the sight of theater; the pen incorporated the pencil and the inkstand.
What my tool adds on McLuhan’s thought is its relying on a simple philosophical realization, which states that we cannot conceive of anything that has not been encountered before. Humans’ brains are limited in this way. We can remember things we experienced, and rearrange them in our minds. We can move, resize, divide, and perform mental operations on the things that we have already seen. But we cannot invent something utterly unseen with our minds. Give it a try if you like. Take the time and think of something that does not exist. Notice how you can only do this by recombining the ideas and images already existing in your mind.
This is the real power and significance of this thinking tool. Since, if we cannot think of new things, how do new inventions come about? Are we simply mimicking the natural elements?
Mostly, humans do mimic natural elements, or indeed, as McLuhan put it, create ‘extensions’ of our natural abilities. But some creations do not seem to appear anywhere else in nature except in human ingenuity. So how did straight lines and sharp corners ever come to appear? Given both the limitation of our not being able to think of novel things, and the fact that we could not find these element in nature, what made us think them up?
Using the thinking tool with which we opened, that the way things are in the human world reveals their causes, it is tempting to conclude that the human mind is something outside the natural order. That we are in some way superior, a just different than the rest of the living world. I wish to write about this later and explain what I think is humans’ one unique ability that is responsible for all of our distinct creations, for our dominant place in the natural world, and for our unmatched brains. That one ability is namely ‘abstraction’, but I would like to reveal how it unfolds in humans, and also to prove its workings in many of our daily habits, and actions. For now though, I would like only to focus on using the tool I proposed in this article; and reveal a how humans see the world by looking at a few examples.
The Judging Frame
Our perception of the world is narrow. The physical bodies that we inhabit use slits to sense pieces of the surrounding flux of reality. As an animal who walks upright, the most dominant of our senses is our eyes, located at the top of our heads. While the eyes are capable of looking to great distances, to far reaching destinations, they are extremely limited in their peripheral scope. We cannot see, for instance, things arriving from the back. Our eyes are also good for noticing moving images, probably a result of our years of being both hunters and prey in the animal-rich plains; yet, they are not that great for noticing still images, and are prone to distortions of many sorts.
What you see is what you get. Binocular vision. Source: All About Vision
The visual field, as it is called, is a narrow frame of observation, which covers a range and depth which exclude the skies, the far sides, and all of the background. It is the tunnel which most humans identify with their perceived reality. The prominence of this frame is apparent through our use of language, with terms like “frame of reference”, “viewpoint”, “in plain sight” and so on. Language use, and particularly metaphoric language, revels that humans regard the world as somethings that they encounter seen through a frame. Things enter and exit this frame and by doing this they become apparent to our observing minds.
I will expand on metaphoric language in the next posts. For now, I would like to exemplify how we regard the world as a frame, using some examples from media, namely in the forms of television shows and of operating systems for various technological media. Let’s focus first on the curious form of many television formats – the panel shows.
Panel Shows on Television are a Mental Processing of Images
For some reason, the panel format has grown so popular it is become idiosyncratic for many gameshows, reality shows, talk shows and news media appearing on the small screen. The form is recurring. People are seated and tackle a topic, or a character, or an artistic creation. The goal, if we can imagine such, is to decide if the thing at hand is good or bad. That is, panel shows process what they see and announce if it is eligible to stay, or should be discarded.
This in an almost automatic natural thought process for humans. We perform this for almost everything we encounter with our eyes; evaluating and deciding whether that thing is hostile or benign, whether it is poisonous or edible, if it is bad or good. Panel shows, to be sure, mimic the selection process employed in everyday observance. They are extensions of the mind. Their form grew organically from the desire to show to audiences how to perform the task of mental sorting, on a grand scale.
Gameshows ritualize the visual process of assessment
Similarly to panel shows, many human inventions, particularly electronic media, come with a control panel for their operation. The mode of operating devices mimics our own mental operation. The ‘desktop’ display of many computer operating systems, is yet another example of the visual frame through which humans mentally tackle the world “in front” of them. Several operating systems have offered alternative displays, such as the discontinued “Microsoft Bob”, which presented files and data in a simulated living room that the user could click. Still, binocular vision panels reigns supreme in visual media.
Using the tool for identifying the causes of created human things, we can now understand the reason for much of the television shows that surround us, as well as for the interfaces of various electronic media. Panel shows mostly show us a screen that resembles an operating system’s homepage. It seems like that is how we see reality – as a visual ready for our judgement, scrutiny and evaluation, of acceptance vs deleting.
McLuhan’s saying “The Medium is the Message” works well to reveal our human needs behind many of our cultural artifacts. We can look at one more example from the world of the visual frame; that of the creations which point and click: the gun, the remote control, and the computer game.
The Interactive Frame
Another common extension in our world is the device which can point and click, thus affecting the perceived visual field in some way. Since the observed world is also where humans live and act, it is possible to influence the visual space and even control it to an extent.
Ever since walking upright, humans have cleared up their hands for carrying things. We became much more suited to grab and take things than most other species in nature. Since primordial times, humans have made progress in devising tools to further their reach into their surroundings. From replacing their hands with knives, then speres, through devising bows and arrows, a linear progression of distancing took place, with man stepping farther away from, but also having an easier time to get, his desired asset, be it food, shelter, etc. The bow and arrow gave way to the gun, which later became the button of the bomb. Each progression more powerful and more remote from the thing affected.
Evolution of the modern day hero. Gun, to remote, and back to gun.
Today, we see the primordial desire to interact and affect the natural surroundings again with our own simulative media. We move things around in our television frames with remote controls (an apt name if there ever was one); we control what is on our computer display using point-and-click mouses; and we play video games with controllers. All of these, as extensions, reveal our very prevalent needs for interacting with, and controlling, our surroundings. This would easily explain why so many men in particular are drawn to play computer games, where they can shoot, kill, and come out victorious. They are playing out their ancestors’ hero’s journey, just in a simulated environment.
To conclude, by viewing manmade things, we can see the hidden natural desires and mental operations that we employ for living in the world. These mental operations are still very similar to the ones used by our ancestors to survive as both hunters and prey.
I will later write about more of our unique inventions, and specifically about language, in order to explain through them how, and why, humans devised such mysterious artifacts. Much of the answers lie in the relation of man and physical space, through which he had to navigate using mostly his eyes and ears.
Writers and editors often depict using the passive voice in demeaning terms, claiming that it is less clear and direct than the active. The passive voice sounds, they would claim, as if the writer is not sure of the actions they are describing.
This leads me to think, that if someone was to overuse the passive in their writing, maybe it could reveal their own unsure, timid way of looking at things.
I got to guessing. Maybe there would be a difference between men and women in their use of the passive voice. Since women have been historically excluded, or at least did not participate as much as men in publishing in the English language, I expected it to show in their overuse of the passive voice. This, I thought would also reveal a point of view that is more uncertain and hesitant than the direct and decisive writings of men.
I ran a little experiment, checking 20 samples of female writings and 20 samples of male writings from internet posts, and put them through online ‘passive-voice checkers’ to see who has the most passive phrases in their writing, men or women.
In his famous essay, “Politics and the English Language”. George Orwell prescribed six rules for clear writing. The fourth rule strictly concerns the passive voice and states: “Never use the passive where you can use the active.”
The passive voice, as opposed to the active voice, is a description of an action taking place from the point of view of the one upon whom the action was done.
So, if I am describing my sending a letter using the passive voice, that description is: “The letter was sent”.
How is this such a cardinal sin, according to Orwell?
The passive action obstructs our understanding of what is happening. It forces us to think harder if we wish to fully envision the thing that is happening.
Conversely, the active phrase “I sent a letter” conveys a clear picture in mind immediately, whereas “The letter was sent (by me)” is more obscured and burdens us with the effort of having to concentrate to see it clearly.
Passive voice as a character trait
So why would someone use the passive voice to describe actions in the first place? What is the passive voice’s appeal, and could its use say something about the person who is utilizing it?
While some languages are more prone to it (English, for instance, is much more accepting of passive phrasings than my native Hebrew, for example), I had an inkling that there is a difference between men and women when it came to using the passive voice.
My preconceived idea was that women would have used more passive structures in their writing than men.
The reasoning behind this is that women, being historically subdued to an extent in English speaking societies, would therefore express themselves less openly and directly than men.
While the idea might be simplistic, it was powered by my thinking of the passive voice as an outlet for safely expressing actions as if they were impersonal and universal. Using the passive voice allows escaping the consequences of being the one doing an action.
In other words I had thought that by writing “the letter was sent”, instead of “I sent the letter”, the writer could potentially evade any criticism or retribution.
The source material
I first thought of using notable pieces of literature, basically prose writing, which are renowned today. For female writers I thought to check Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”, Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre”, Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar”, and many other classic works by English and American female authors. For the men I would use “Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”, Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, and, of course, George Orwell’s “1984”, although this might count as cheating.
The results?
I checked the opening passages of several popular works of literature and was immediately confronted with surprising results. The female authored works utilized significantly less instances of passive voice than the books written by men.
For instance, J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” utilized only a single passive voice sentence within its first four paragraphs. Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001 A Space Odyssey” featured double that amount. Where the first paragraphs of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” featured but one instance of passive voice, the first paragraphs of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” revealed three passive voice phrases.
After performing this examination on more novels, and coming up with similar results, I began thinking that checking the passive voice using works of fiction cannot give an accurate picture of things.
I thought of the fact that literary creations are seldom the work of one person. They are rewritten, edited and glossed over by several people before reaching their final printed form. This might also account for the passive voice so utterly lacking in literary works written by women.
This sent me searching for a different source, which would prove to be a more immediate and natural form of expressive language.
The internet offers plenty of examples for unedited, immediate, and direct use of language. Internet comments, such as those found on forums and chatrooms, are an adequate source for checking my theory. Facebook comments are the best, since they are not anonymous and so can be chosen based on the writer’s gender. They have to be long enough, as many as 200 words, to be able to secure a large enough sample of expressions and to expect the appearance of any passive voice.
I found these types of long comments in many literary groups, where people write long reviews, recommendations and are inspired by the written word to express themselves.
While I only used a small sample for my little research, the results were consistent, and completely contrary to my own previews notions.
Men were using twice as many passive voice structures as women.
These results mirrored the ones that turned up from my examination of the literary texts, and it seemed that they reflected that there was indeed a pattern – just a pattern opposite the one I had anticipated.
In writing, women displayed a more active voice than men did. Obviously, a more comprehensive examination is in place, testing not only works of literary fiction or FB posts, but also non fiction works, articles and written outlets of expression.
I urge more strident (and less lazy) people than me to do a more comprehensive examination than I did here and see whether these results persevere.
The reasons for men using more passive voice than women?
The results surprised me immensely, since I was certain that my timid-women hypothesis would manifest itself clearly in the use of the passive voice.
In contrast, it appears that my preconception was wrong and invalidated by the test.
Men were the more passive writes, using twice as many passive-voice phrasings as women. I was, and still am, a bit stumped by the result, and so offer some possible explanations that could shed light on this phenomenon.
Clarity – It might be that men are not as concerned with being direct and clear as I think. That they take the liberty of not being direct, perhaps for the sake of sounding more intelligent and less simple and cut to the chase.
Modernity – One problem, or feature, of choosing Facebook comments as my source, is that they are timelier, and more trend-based than classic literature.
Facebook comments represent a state of English that is here and now. It might skew the findings and suggest a common trend among men and women in expressing themselves. Women today might be experiencing a liberation of activeness, which manifests itself in their writing. A possible way of checking this would be to compare today’s FB posts to previous decades’ personal writings, such as letters and postcards.
Women are more active – Since the findings of my experiment baffled me, I thought I needed to consult with a woman in shedding more light and finding possible explanations.
When I asked my wife about the results of my research, she replied in complete earnestness that the reason for men utilizing more passive structures is because “women do more than men.”
While this might sound condescending, I think most women will honestly agree with this notion, and that, if true, it can very well offer an explanation for why men use twice as much more passive voice than women. It might just be because women do twice as much actions as men.
It is not that women produce twice as much results as men, but they perform many more different actions throughout their daily routine than men. Men are more likely to focus on several major things during their day, basically revolving around going to work at their job.
Women are concerned and occupied with many different chores and tasks, like cleaning, cooking, taking care of children. My wife has also directed my attention to the fact that women perform more micro-tasks within activities which men do with one fell swoop. Just think of the activities involved in cleaning and tending to your face daily. There are many more actions which women perform for that one macro-task.
This is all speculation so far, but might mean that women, being more detail oriented than men, also see and describe the world with more action driven writing.
The Wandering Mind 