The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In (...) this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language. (shrink)

This paper is part of an ongoing project devoted to the investigation of the psychotropic brew Ayahuasca from a cognitive-psychological perspective. This perspective contrasts with those of practically all investigations of Ayahuasca which pertain either to the natural sciences-notably botany, pharmacology, brain science and clinical medicine-or to anthropology. Here, I discuss the visualizations induced by Ayahuasca from a structural, as opposed to contentual, point of view. A typology of the structural forms in which visualizations may appear is drawn. Also examined (...) are the various types of interaction a person can have with his/her visions and aspects pertaining to the semantics of visions and their narrative structure. The distinctions drawn are readily applicable to hallucinatory and visionary experiences induced by other agents and in other contexts. Thus, the present typology may be regarded as presenting the foundations for the cognitive-psychological study of such experiences at large. (shrink)

In a synesthetic metaphor, a certain perceptual mode is initially specified, but the imagery is linguistically related in terms belonging to one or more differing perceptual modes. Commonplace examples of synesthetic metaphors in English include phrases such as "loud colors", "dark sounds", and "sweet smells". Tabulations of the frequency of types of synesthesia and synesthetic metaphors in English reveals that for physiological synesthesia, colored sounds are most common; in English literature, synesthetic metaphors employed for descriptions of tactile sound predominate. Of (...) the various senses, hearing is most frequently expanded and elaborated upon by both synesthetic sensory perceptions and synesthetic metaphors. Synesthetic "visual hearing", which antedates language, may have influenced language development. (shrink)

(1) The induced colours led to perceptual grouping and pop-out, (2) a grapheme rendered invisible through ‘crowding’ or lateral masking induced synaesthetic colours — a form of blindsight — and (3) peripherally presented graphemes did not induce colours even when they were clearly visible. Taken collectively, these and other experiments prove conclusively that synaesthesia is a genuine percep- tual phenomenon, not an effect based on memory associations from childhood or on vague metaphorical speech. We identify different subtypes of number–colour synaesthesia (...) and propose that they are caused by hyperconnectivity between col- our and number areas at different stages in processing; lower synaesthetes may have cross-wiring (or cross-activation) within the fusiform gyrus, whereas higher synaesthetes may have cross-activation in the angular gyrus. This hyperconnec- tivity might be caused by a genetic mutation that causes defective pruning of con- nections between brain maps. The mutation may further be expressed selectively (due to transcription factors) in the fusiform or angular gyri, and this may explain the existence of different forms of synaesthesia. If expressed very diffusely, there may be extensive cross-wiring between brain regions that represent abstract concepts, which would explain the link between creativity, metaphor and synaesthesia (and the higher incidence of synaesthesia among artists and poets). Also, hyperconnectivity between the sensory cortex and amygdala would explain the heightened aversion synaesthetes experience when seeing numbers printed in the ‘wrong’ colour. Lastly, kindling (induced hyperconnectivity in the temporal lobes of temporal lobe epilepsy [TLE] patients) may explain the purported higher incidence of synaesthesia in these patients. We conclude with a synaesthesia-based theory. (shrink)