 I'm Fox Terrell, I'm associate professor here of digital media. I run a lab called the Imagination Computation and Expression Laboratory focused on combining computer science, cognitive science and digital media arts for interactive narrative, gaming and social media related systems. And one of the things that we're excited to do this year is to start off a series which is called the Cognitive Dimensions of Media to bring in a series of people who are thinking about media from a cognitive perspective, but not just from a kind of older fashion, cognition is everything just in the head perspective, but really looking at cognition as embodied, as distributed amongst society and amongst artifacts and situated in particular social context. And today we're honored as I'll introduce in a moment to have Professor George Lekoff out here from UC Berkeley. The discussion will be moderated by Professor Heather Hendershot. She is a professor of film and media studies here, here in the front row. She is in the communication study, communication, compared to media studies department. She's written on right wing broadcasting on children's programming. She's the editor of cinema journal, also the author of multiple notable books. This talk series is also cosponsored by the communications forum. Today we're very pleased to introduce the distinguished speaker who is George Lekoff, as you know, who needs no introduction, but we'll get one anyway. So he graduated from here in 1962, so double major course 21 and mathematics, that's writing, mathematics, studied literature, luminary figures are here, Roman Jakobson, helped bridging poetics along with linguistics, one of the first people in students in the linguistics department here. And especially notably, who's a pioneer of incorporating logic-based approaches into linguistics, so using mathematics to express linguistics concepts. On the other hand, he's also notable for running up against not only the innovations of that approach, but also some of the challenges and limitations. So pioneered also the kind of embodied cognition approach that involves movement, emotions, affective disposition, perception, and much more within cognitive science. And what's even more exciting to me is that it's a particular kind of cognition that looks at the central role of poetic thinking, that's figurative thinking metaphor, and the way that these kinds of figurative and poetic and literary thought are the basis for everyday cognition. So most of you probably already know a lot of this work. He's segwayed into also work on moral politics using cognitive science foundation. His most recent book is a little blue book, you know, his classic books. I suspect you also already know. And so I want you to join me in welcoming very warmly Professor George Lakoff. I don't think that's, yes, it's there, great. All right, thank you all for coming. It's great to be back at MIT. I've been here a few times since I graduated 50 years ago, and it's changed a bit. This spot used to be the Neco factory from Neco Wafers and smelled all over campus. But this is a lot better. I want to begin by talking about metaphorical thought. And I'm going to break it down in three parts. First that, then the neural theory of thought and language, and then what the brain tells us about politics. And let me tell you a bit about how I got into the study of metaphorical thought. In 1978, in February, I was teaching a freshman, not a freshman, an undergraduate seminar at Berkeley with six students sitting around a table about this size. And I had given out various papers to read, and one of them was a paper on metaphor by a noted philosopher, which I didn't think was a very good paper, but we were going to read it. And it was raining, it's always raining in Berkeley in February. And on that day, one of the young women in the class came in a little bit late, drenched, and in tears. And she sat down across the table, she was about four feet away, and she was crying. And everybody tried not to notice that she was crying. So we went around the table. What is Professor So-and-So says this in this article? What do you think about that? We get to her, and she says, I'm sorry. I've got a metaphor problem with my boyfriend. Maybe you guys can help. Well, this is Berkeley in 1978. We all said, sure. And we all knew what to do. So we started an instant support group. And we said, well, you know, what did he say? And she said, well, he said that our relationship had hit a dead end street. And I don't know what he means by this. So we said, well, look, we started immediately doing linguistic fieldwork. What could he mean? If you can't keep going the way you've been going, you may have to turn back. And then we started noticing that there was certain expressions about love using a travel vocabulary. So this is a linguistics class. I say, hey, that's interesting. Let's make a list, linguists do this. How many expressions can we find about love from travel? Well, you know, there's lots of them. It's been a long bumpy road. The marriage is on the rocks. We're spinning our wheels in this relationship. The relationship is off the track. We're going in different directions. We may have to bail out and so on. And in fact, the young woman was at disc jockey and a local radio show on campus. And she said, oh, yeah, there's been a new rock song came out this week with the lyrics. We're driving in the fast lane on the freeway of love. And everybody understood this. Now, I'm a linguistics professor. And so I realized that there was a problem immediately. Aristotle, 2,500 years before. By all means, come on down. We have chairs. Don't be shy. Lots and lots of seats. Don't worry about it. Come on in. Lots of seats down here in the middle in front. Come on. So 2,500 years ago, Aristotle said that metaphor was a matter of language and of similarities. And it was all a matter of special language that occurred in poetry or in politics and things like that, but was the ordinary use of language. And I realized, first of all, that what was going on did not quite fit what Aristotle said. Because you had lots of different linguistic expressions, but they all had the same conceptual metaphor. They all understood in terms of love as a journey of a certain kind. And so I said, well, this is interesting. Well, we have a nice list. Is there any generalization about this list? So we sat down. We said, okay. Notice in each case, the lovers are travelers. In each case, the relationship is some kind of vehicle, a car, a train, a plane, a boat, whatever. And in each case, the difficulties are impediments to travel. And in each case, the lovers are trying to get to some common destination, which meant their common life goals. And every expression was a problem with getting there. So we write this down and it looks kind of like a mapping in math. You write it down. You have a little arrow. You go to that. There were little four little arrows. There was a little nice little mapping. And so I said, hey, isn't that cool? And the young woman said, I don't care about your mapping. My boyfriend is breaking up with me. He's thinking in terms of this metaphor. I said, well, that's interesting. How do you think in terms of a metaphor? How does this work? Let's take an example. We're spinning our wheels in this relationship. Well, what do we know? Is there a mental image here? Where are the wheels? Where are the wheels, guys? There. Are they on something? Or are they just wheels? A car. They're on a car or a little truck or whatever. Yeah, they're on a car. And they're spinning. Is the car moving? No. Do you want it to be moving? Yes. Are you putting any energy into it? How do you feel? How did you all know the right answer? Everybody knows the right answer. But now, if you take that mapping and you say, what happens? It says you're in a relationship. It's not going anywhere. You're not making progress towards your common life goals. You're putting a lot of energy into it and you're frustrated. That's what it means to be spinning your wheels in a relationship. That is, there's an inference from this. There's metaphorical reasoning going on. That mapping is taking what you know about the, what it will call, the source domain of travel and mapping it on to love. Aristotle didn't say that. Not only that, it's trickier. Because I had previously spent from 1963 until then, about 15 years, trying to get logic to work for natural language. And trying to get the theory that meaning was based on truth conditions to work. Right? Now, meaning is based on truth conditions, on how words fit the world or symbols fit the world. Where is this metaphor? Can't be in the world. Can't be in the relationship between that and the world. It's got to be in your head. Wait a minute. That's not what philosophers say. That's not what Anglo-American philosophy teaches. It's not even what postmodernist European philosophy teaches. Something is wrong here or maybe right. Something interesting has just happened. There is metaphorical thought. And the metaphorical thought is in the form of a mapping from one domain of experience to another. And it has lots of different, very different expressions with different meanings. But they're all part of that generalization. That's cool. Okay, the woman did not make up with her boyfriend, but she graduated, got her PhD, got a nice job, met a nice guy who also, they both got tenure and they're fine. And she's even a department chairman right now, but I won't tell you where. Now, the main part of this is that after that, I spent about a year collecting examples of this. And a year later, Mark Johnson happened to show up in Berkeley and we happened to start working on a book. And three months later, there was a book called Metaphors We Live By that came out. And we had to finish it in three months because Mark had to go on vacation with his wife. He promised his wife he would leave. So we finished it in three months. Now, the big thing about that was we noticed that there were lots and lots of other metaphors, metaphorical thought. And in particular, we noticed that some of them had to do with the body. So for example, something like happy is up and sad is down. I'm feeling up today. I'm depressed. I'm down and in the dumps, et cetera. That has to do with the way your body works. And we found lots of others that are due with experience. Like more is up and less is down. Why every time you pour water in the glass, the level ever goes up. You pile more stuff on the table. The level goes up every day, all around the world. This happens. So we started looking at the ones that were like that. And then we noticed something about good old love as a journey. That it got decomposed, could be decomposed into other conceptual metaphors that had to do with embodiment. In particular, why is it that you have journeys being understood as reaching goals? Achieving a goal is reaching a destination. And the difficulty is something that stops you from reaching that goal. Well, think about it for a minute. Every day, you want a coffee. You've got to go to where they sell their coffees. You want a cold beer. You've got to go to the fridge constantly. Every baby wants his blankie. He's got to crawl over and get it. You don't want to be snuggly. You've got to get into bed. I mean, this is crucial. Every day of your life, there's a correlation in your experience between achieving a purpose and reaching a destination. Just as there's a correlation and experience between pouring water into the glass, getting more water and seeing the level go up. And we started noticing lots of those. For example, you also have things like, why is it that a relationship is a vehicle? One, relationships are containers. You're in a relationship. You enter a relationship. You can leave a relationship. You can be deep into a relationship, etc. Okay? It's a container. Why is it a container? When you're a kid, you live with your relatives, your relations in one contained place. Very simple. Correlation and experience. Intimacy is closeness. You're close in this car. Why is intimacy is closest? The people you're most intimate with are the people you've been close to from the time you were a kid. Why is it that it's a... What about vehicles? Vehicles are used to take you places, purposes or destinations, right? So there's a reason why that relationship is a vehicle in there, but it has to do with embodied experience. But then there's a further thing that we noticed when we started looking around at other cultures, the embodied experience cases seemed to be widespread around the world, if not universal, because many of the experiences are universal, but things like love as a journey is not universal. There are lots of cultures that don't have that. So we sort of wondered why should that be? Well, we noticed also that you have a metaphor that life is a journey, but a very different kind. But it's interesting and there's a reason for it. There's a general metaphor that goes like this, that action is motion. So a careful action is careful motion, like walking on eggshells, walking a fine line, things like that. And we can go through that. There's a long list of these action is motion cases and achieving a purpose is reaching a destination. So a purposeful action is motion toward a destination and then what's a life? It's a sequence of actions toward some various destinations. But in this culture, there's something more. We require a purposeful life. You're supposed to be achieving life goals, not just immediate goals like what am I going to do for dinner or something like that, but life goals. Now, we even have documents for this. They're called curriculum vitae, the run of life, the course of life, right? And you're supposed to tell where you are at various places in life and you all know about these documents. You write them and you've seen them and you read them all the time. Now, so this is important. And then, well, how does that relate to love as a journey? Think about two people in a long-term love relationship. They're supposed to, both of them are supposed to have purposes in life, but they're supposed to be compatible purposes in life. And if you ever had the problem of having such compatible purposes in life, you know, I have and many of you have, like you. It's not so easy to be in a long-term love relationship where there are compatible purposes in life. And this metaphor is about those difficulties, right? Now, when you put all this together, you find out that you have a structure that is very interesting. And it's a hierarchical structure where let's put at the top, just for the sake of the embodied metaphors that are basic, we call them primary metaphors, the ones that are widespread around the world. And here you go, action is motion, purposes are destinations, and they entail the difficulties or impediments to reaching a destination. And there's a composite metaphor, purposeful action is motion to a destination, and that fits certain frames. So life is a sequence of actions performed over a lifetime, and there's a structure, a sequence of regions of life, like childhood, adulthood, and so on. Now, you also have entailed metaphors, like a life is a sequence of motions and so on. A purposeful life is a sequence of motions to our destinations. Sorry. Difficulties in a purposeful life are impediments to reaching those. And a journey is a long sequence of motions to one or more destinations, so you get life is a journey and is a cultural norm. People are expected to have purposes in life. Love is a journey as this cultural norm, lovers in a long-term relationship are expected to have compatible purposes in life. That entails a metaphor. Compatible purposes are common destinations. This is all metaphorical logic. A relationship is a container, a bounded region in space, intimacy is closeness, and you get a vehicle as a means of reaching destinations in a two-person vehicle. The travelers are close, the vehicle is solid, can last a long time. A two-person vehicle is a means for reaching common destinations, and then you get a long-term love relationship is a two-person vehicle, lovers are travelers, et cetera, all of those. A long-term love relationship is a means for reaching common life goals, the difficulties are impediments, and relationship difficulties are impediments to reaching compatible destinations. To understand something like the marriages on the rocks, you have to know all of that. And you have an image, a cultural image, the boat on the rocks, and in that the boat is the vehicle, the boat on the rocks can't move, can be damaged, can be less solid, the travelers can be hurt. Possibility of getting off the rocks is possible, but you could do it. And then there are mappings. The boat is the relationship, the motion is progress, third common life goals, and there are inferences. The lovers could be psychologically harmed, the likelihood the relationship will last is lowered, and so on. That is, you take your knowledge about the boat on the rocks, for the marriages on the rocks, you apply the general mapping, and you have to have all of that together to know what that means. All of it at once. And there are lots of other cases that train off the track, the marriages off, the relationships off the track, you know, can't tackle if we can't move, the dead end street case, the spinning its wheels case, car being stuck, we're stuck in this relationship, we've got to bail out, it's been a long bumpy road, we're not going anywhere, this is a wreck, and so on. Notice each of them is a different specific metaphor with different entailments. But the entailments come from knowledge about the image, apply that mapping, and you get the meaning of the specific metaphor. So what you have are primary metaphors that are based on experience and embodied experience. You have composite metaphors and lots of inferences that go on, that whole thing. You have cultural norms you have to be concerned with. And then each of these fits the composite metaphor and they each give different entailments depending on what the metaphor maps. That is how metaphor works and it's conceptual. And then the language fits the image. And then you ask well how many images do like that do you have? And the answer is tens of thousands. That's what it means to know a culture. Now what is this list of relationships? Within the neural theory of language and thought it's called a cascade. Cascades in the brain are circuits that control the activation of things going on all over the brain often at once. And that's what you need here. So that's a nice example of what a metaphor is. You've got a simple case and you can see what you're going to need in a brain-based theory of this is cascades of at least this complexity. Normal. Is that cool? How many of cascades are they going to be? A lot. All right. How does the brain do this? How many neurons you have 100 billion at birth? How many connections to other neurons for each of them between a thousand and 10,000? It gives you about a quadrillion connections at birth. By the time you're five about half of them have died the ones that are least used which is why you need early childhood education. But that only leads you with half a quadrillion connections. Now every thought you have we'll go to this. But first of all there's a general point here. That is we have primary metaphors, specific knowledge, all of these things we just said. And notice if you ignore the general metaphor and just do the analysis on the specific cases there would be dozens of different journey metaphors and you wouldn't see any generalization across them. And you wouldn't be able to know what a new rocks on meant. Now so the point here is important. Metaphor is a natural mode of thought. It arises spontaneously. It shapes how we think, how we reason, how we understand the world. Mathematics is also cognitively a system of precise embodied metaphors. And Raphael Nunez and I have a 600 page book full in full detail easy to read but lots of fun. But it goes through, I was an undergraduate math major here. It goes through what I learned in my undergraduate math curriculum in detail of what the metaphors are precisely in formal terms. And what it shows is what advanced math is is a cascade of metaphors that start with things like arithmetic and geometry and so on and then build metaphorically on those. And those are metaphorically based on experiences like putting things in containers and taking them out which is why addition is adding something since subtraction is taking away. It has to do with taking steps as you move which is why you have the number line and so on. And what we do is we work out the entailments of those metaphors in full detail in this book. And it's cheap. You can pick it up, go and get one and not only that it shows that formulas mean things. Mathematical formulas mean things. And the way we set up the book was this. My favorite formula when I was in high school was e to the pi i plus one equals zero. Right? Great Euler metaphor. We show what it means and why it's true and showing that it requires putting together metaphors from five branches of mathematics. It's an 80 page demonstration at the end of the book. Enjoy it if you're into this. Now, also scientific theories use conceptual metaphor in their content. Think of space time where time is understood in terms of space which is a standard metaphor we have for understanding space in terms of time not just here but around the world. So basically metaphor is central in both technical and everyday reasoning and it's everywhere. Now the problem with this is it contradicts what I learned here as the theory of rationality and reason. Here's what I learned. Thought is conscious as Descartes said. This is straight out of 1650. Say thought is conscious. Thought is abstract not physical. Emotion gets in the way of reason. Reason uses mathematical logic. Reason can directly fit the world. Reason is what makes us human. Therefore all humans have the same reason. The job of reason is to serve our interests and words are defined by conditions of truth in the world. What cognitive science and neuroscience have shown is that every part of that is false. Every single part. Now just to give you a sense of that before we go through the new theory let me go through some of this. First, about 98% of thought is unconscious. It could not be conscious because consciousness is linear and thought is massively parallel. It could not be conscious and it isn't and it's well below the consciousness. Thought is not abstract. It's all physical. If you don't have the neural circuitry for the right neural circuitry for understanding something you won't understand it. You can only understand what the circuitry of your brain allows you to understand and that is profound when it comes to politics. As you really will see. You should be laughing. You should be crying. It's unfortunately true. Emotion does not get in the way of reason. Emotion is required for reason. There's a marvelous book on this by Tony DiMascio called Descartes' Error. Tony is one of our great neuroscientists and for many years he studied people with brain lesions. Particularly those who've had car accidents or strokes and so on. There's certain people who lose the ability to feel emotion because of strokes or lesions. When that happens they like and not like don't mean anything and they can't tell if anybody else would like or not like what they do. So they can't set goals. They can't set goals. They can't rationally pursue any goals because they can't set any goals and they wind up acting kind of randomly screwing up their lives in most cases. This is a deep point. You must be rational. I mean it must be emotional to be rational. You can't be rational without emotions. Not there. Not possible. Next. Reason does not just use mathematical logic. It uses metaphor. It uses what are called frames that we'll get to. It uses what are called image schemas we'll get to those. But it uses certainly it uses lots and lots and lots of metaphors. Reason presumably is what makes us human therefore we all have the same reason not true just think about the republican and democratic national conventions. Not the same reason. And we'll talk about that in a while. We don't all have the same reason. We have different neural circuitry for doing reasoning. Next. The job of reason is supposed to be to serve our interests. Well it is to a large extent that's not false but there's another thing even more important in the early to mid 1990s there was a great discovery made in Parma, Italy in the neuroscience group there the discovery of mirror neuron circuitry. Now and I worked with one of the discoverers Vittorio Gillesi in some detail working on the primary data that they had. And basically think of it this way. They started out with doing research on macaques and they have put probes in the macaques brain where they can go neuron by neuron and C in the premotor cortex which choreographs what's going on in the motor cortex. They put probes in to see what would happen when they train the monkey to peel bananas crush peanuts, push on bars, pull on ropes and so on. They taught the monkey to do these things and as they did them different neurons with fire and they kept track by computer of exactly what neurons with fire and to make sure the computer was operating they made it go click click click click so they could hear that it was working. So Vittorio is running this one day everything is going fine he goes out to lunch comes back he's still a little hungry there's a pile of bananas he goes to peel a banana and he hears click click click click but the machine is tied up to the monkey not him why? They check the data and it turns out that the banana peeling part of the brain of the monkey was engaged and then they tested and they found out that the same part of the brain that was used for acting was used when you perceived the same action done by someone else. Well that's the mythology the reality is more complicated and interesting it's only 30% of those neurons the other neurons are doing more interesting stuff like giving a semantic hierarchy going through the semantic sequences of parts of the action you know saying what's central when it's finished when it's beginning doing all kinds of other things as well as you know for both seeing and doing but there's circuitry that links seeing and doing and then they traced the circuitry to the parietal cortex premotor to parietal not that far and we learned we have we're born with this circuitry and then it gets tuned as we grow up to fit what we see and what we do in addition that circuitry in premotor cortex is connected to the emotional regions what that means is that we know from Paul Ekman's work that there's a physiology of emotions you go around the world and you know people are happy smile and smiles look the same way and use the same muscles and if you're sad other other muscles are involved and if you're angry you bear your teeth and so on there's a whole physiology of emotions that has been studied in great detail and that means that the physiology which is controlled by the premotor cortex is connected to the emotions which allows you to tell when someone else is happy or someone else is in pain or someone else is sad or angry it is the basis of empathy it also allows you to tell when someone else picks up a bottle like this and goes like this that I'm about to take a drink and I was and you could tell and then they found out that there are what are called canonical neurons so those are oh a few millimeters away along a certain ridge and they fire when either you perform an action or you see something you can perform it on like this bottle see wouldn't you like a drink now we are evolutionarily constructed to have brains that connect with other people emotionally and with what they're doing and by the way the mirror neurons fire more in cooperative action than in just you know noticing in addition we are set up to connect with the world what is a canonical neuron it fires when you perform the normal canonical action of this so I hold this up and you have taking a drink not sticking it in my ear all right that's not the canonical action this is it and that's what's important here we are we are environmentally linked to objects in the world via what we normally canonically do with those objects in the world that's wild and that says the job of reason is everything to do with connecting the things in the world via our bodies and connecting to other people via our bodies not just carrying out our goals which is also important and then what does this say about the idea that reason can directly fit the world it can only fit it via our bodies via our the way our brain and body connects us to the world if you know you can't just it doesn't just fit automatically you got to be able to connect to your body connect to your brain and then you might be able to get the fit but the only fit is what your brain allows you to understand okay words fit these neural structures they fit frames they fit metaphors and so on words don't directly connect the things in the world so that is pretty cool so here you have a new theory of real reason it's based on what we're putting together neuroscience neural computation cognitive linguistics and embodied cognition experiments and this is the basic idea we think with our brains all thought is physical carried out by neural circuitry most thought almost the usually 98% is the estimate is unconscious you can only understand what your neural circuitry allows you to understand emotion is needed for reason rationality requires emotion the basic mechanisms thought thought are embodied conceptual primitives now these are interesting they are what are called schema circuits and they have embodied roles and so on let me explain what they are there are spatial circuits for things like containment something is in or out of something so you have that you have a container schema has an interior exterior and a boundary a motion schema has a source a path and a goal and so on those are called semantic roles and we have lots of them dozens of not hundreds of those we have action schemas that carry those out Srini Narayanan figured out how they work back in 1995 and what he showed was that you can model them computationally using standard kinds of computation fixed up a lot to make it look neural and they have structure and what he did was show what it would take to model the kinds of actions you perform with your body he did this for lots and lots of bodily actions and found that the same structure was used for all of them and when he showed up with that structure I noticed that that structure shows up in every language of the world it's called aspect in linguistics and what it means is it's the structure of actions and events as they're structured in every language so we have things like I'm about to take a drink begin just before the beginning I started to take a drink I picked this up I'm taking a drink I'm in the middle I'm still taking a drink I'm checking to see if I'm still thirsty no I'm fine then I can put it down I finish and after I'm done there's a consequence I have taken a drink that's what have with EN means and so on and every language of the world can express stuff like that now so process those are called process schemas sometimes called x schemas or executing schemas and then there's neural binding if you're going to put together various metaphors to form complex metaphors they have to be bound nothing moves in the brain so you have to have circuitry that binds them together called neural binding and we're working out theories of neural binding right now there are frames what are called frame circuits for framing actions like riding on a boat for example or driving a car there are what are called metanemic mappings where you say things like we need a strong arm at third base where the arm stands for the person and lots of others the White House isn't talking or is talking as in the cartoons there are metaphorical mappings that you've seen these are neural mappings the primary ones are for body schemas et cetera and there are composite ones that are bindings and so on now how does this happen and what's interesting is that Narayanan in his dissertation after he worked out how actions worked for concrete actions I then asked him okay if you can do that can you get a logic of abstract actions and abstract events well he said to do that you need metaphor to map from the more embodied ones to the quote abstract ones they turn out not to be abstract we'll get there in a minute through the other ones that are not physically out there in the world and so he picked the domain of international economics where an economy goes forward up for downer into depressions and recessions and gets pulled out or not and so on and then he went online to the New York Times business section the Wall Street Journal and the Economist with a list of simple actions that he had analyzed in terms of what your body did so things like India is stumbling toward economic liberalization or France fell into a recession pulled out by Germany etc and he asked could you then create a neural a computational neural theory of metaphor that would go along with what the body does to give you all the right inferences and he did that was his dissertation 1997 and the idea is basically this that how do you learn let's say affection is warmth hey we all have that you know he's a warm person he's cool to me etc hey how do you you know how do you learn that well you're held affectionately by your parents and you feel the bodily warmth what's happening in your brain two different parts of the brain are activated one for temperature one for affection they're in different parts of the brain okay same thing for more is up there's a part of the brain that registers verticality and in part that registers quantity so what happens when they are activated over and over together well the more you activate a neural circuit the stronger it gets and since itch neurons connected to lots of others and the circuit is not just one neuron at a time it's a neuronal group of usually several hundred neurons you have connections along existing pathways and those you get spreading activation along that and then you get more spreading activation and it gets stronger each time via heavy and learning because neurons that fire together wire together and so you get heavy and learning and you get the shortest connection between these is eventually found and you form a circuit but at this point you get spike time dependent plasticity coming into effect which adjusts the structure of the circuits what that does is strengthen connections that are in the direction of more spiking and weakened ones that are in the direction of less first spiking now what determines more spiking and less spiking in the metaphor cases let's take affection as warmth your brain is always computing temperature but not always computing affection your brain is always computing verticality even when you sleep in order to turn over but not always computing quantity so what's going on is that when you have more going on more input you're going to get more first spiking and you're going to get asymmetric connections and metaphors are asymmetric now we've then checked out several hundred of these primary metaphors and they all work we can predict the directionality of the metaphors on the basis of the neural circuitry is that cool I like it this is all Sreeni's work I didn't do it he did it now so what we have is a thing called cascade theory a cascade is a neural pathway along which you have circuits that determine the activation flow in the brain and that's what Sreeni first did when he was looking at the activation flow for simple actions for sequence of actions it determined activation flow in the brain but activation flow in the premotor cortex but this the same mathematics and the same circuitry the same neural computation will work for all flows of activation in the brain and we're now working out all the circuitry for frames metaphors etc for how that works and that's called cascade theory and we know that there are cascades for lots of other things and if you want I can go through some others later that we know exist but that's what we're going to need and flow along the cascade can originate either internally or externally that is can be perceived something you hear in language or you can make it up not only that you can make up things internally that can't exist like flying pigs right now imagine a flying pig okay how does it fly what allows it to fly wings where are the wings are the wings on its feet on the back which way is the snout oriented in the direction of motion you all know the answer to that how did you know it right you knew it because you could do neural binding of pigs and birds this is this is Pegasus by the way you could do neural binding of Pegasus and you know the optimal binding which is called best fit which we'll talk about in a while and that allows you to create something internally that can't exist but flying pigs there are this is another kind of flying pig called super swine he has a cape and goes like this and so on okay and you now understand super swine instantly you know it you know so you can do this and you do it internally or externally now what does all this have to do with politics so I'm going to zip ahead and go on to politics from all of this I won't go through all of the details of this best fit is going to be in there etc best fit is interesting because it has it comes from the fact that we're a physical system and we use conservation of energy and the neurons the neural circuits that are activated are the ones that will use the least overall energy that is the ones with the strongest connections and you can model that computationally by base nets which is what's been done in our lab now what does this have to do with politics first Charles Fillmore back in 1975 observed that language is defined relative to what are called frames they are neural structures in the brain that have various roles classic example of Roger Schenck's the restaurant frame you have a waiter you have a chef you have a customer you have a menu you have a dish those are the roles and you know the order in which things occur that's a scenario that fits that defines a frame and then there are various inferences from that okay so those are real and metaphors map from frame to frame what's interesting is that negating a frame activates the frame norally just that's why I wrote a book called Don't Think of an Elephant makes you think of an elephant Nixon said I am not a crook who's the Christine what's her name and running in south was it in the Carolinas said I am not a witch remember that one anyway is it Delaware she said I am not a witch cost her the election for good reason now the more frame is activated the stronger the frame circuitry gets they come in hierarchies now the crucial thing is all politics is moral now in case that isn't obvious it's very simple think of it this way every political leader gets up and says here's what you should do we should pass this legislation that legislation etc because it's right nobody gets up and says do it because it's wrong it's evil do it or it doesn't matter do it the assumption is it's right they just have different ideas about what right is different moralities what that means is that there is a frame hierarchy which we know exists and that the highest part of that hierarchy is in politics is moral and that everything in the frame hierarchy all those policies have to fit the moral system and these morals I describe these moral systems in a book called moral politics in 1996 now and we'll talk about it in a while but they have very different moral systems now the moral systems are general the policies that fit them are specific so you have lots of cascades going on now interestingly very important to know is by conceptualism there are a lot of people who are partly conservative and partly progressive morally this means that they have both neural circuitries in the same brain now they contradict each other how is that possible the answer is very simple mutual inhibition there are circuits in the brain all over the brain where one circuit inhibits the other the activation of one turns the other off right now this isn't just in politics with moral systems think about the following there are cases where you where many many people have two opposed moral systems and they don't even notice when they switch just think saturday night and sunday morning very common this is not and this is not a weird phenomenon so many people are by conceptual and usually in politics they are have different moral systems applying to different things so they're not applying to the same thing they're conservative about some things and others and they're called moderates swing voters etc but what is a moderate it's somebody who is largely conservative but progressive about something or other or largely progressive but conservative about something or other and then there are swing voters okay now how do you influence a moderate or an independent or a swing voter or by conceptual you use your language to activate your moral system to strengthen it and weaken the other the last thing you do is use their language conservatives are taught this in training institutes like the leadership institute in virginia that trains tens of thousands of conservatives every year and they're spread and along around the country and in other countries they're in europe they're in canada they're in australia they're in korea etc and they're taught how to think and talk conservative and what to do and what not to do but our guys often make the mistake of thinking you have to go the other way why because they believe in enlightenment reason enlightenment reasons as if you want to communicate with someone and convince them you should talk their language it's fine language is neutral it just fits the world no it doesn't language is not neutral it fits frames that fit different moral systems and politics very crucial point and a lot of point many democrats miss why because they went to college now i'm not i'm quite serious as suppose you are conservative and you take a business course in college in your curriculum there will be marketing and the marketing professor study psychology how people really think right so conservatives have no problem marketing their ideas using all of this stuff but liberals who want to go into politics study political science law public's policy and economics and they learn the rational actor model and enlightenment reason they learn a false theory of reason and that false theory of reason leads them not to understand how brains work it leads them not to understand that they shouldn't that they should use their language about their moral systems not the other guy's language it leads them it means that they don't understand they have to set up a system of communication where they repeat repetition is what changes brains even if it were true that everybody thought according to traditional reason the fact that thought is physical means if you convince someone and somebody you're changing their brain changing brains is not manipulation it is smart in politics that's how it works and the conservatives have been doing this consistently since the 1960s in you know I could go through all the institutions and so on that they've set up for it but it's that mind change is brain change arguing against opponents using their language and negating the frame just helps them example how many of you saw Bill Clinton's speech I liked it I thought it was a great speech and what he did was he corrected the misconceptions right so the next day I walk into class and I say okay you see Clinton's speech yes what was great about it he corrected all the false claims okay you know that he gave us the truth the real facts all right how many of you remember the facts tell me how many of you remember at least one fact one person in this class of 40 at Berkeley very smart undergraduates remembered three facts and that was it for the whole class now how many people remembered the Republican claims that Clinton was arguing against everybody think about that for a moment and they this was brought up on Fox News and one of the Romney advisors said Clinton's speech doesn't matter people won't remember what he said it's not entirely true because what he got across was you can't trust them even though people might not remember the exact facts so it did have a major effect but not the effect that a lot of liberals thought it had I mean you'd have to carry the the thing around with you to remember all of them unless you're a political junkie like me now this is important because if you turn on MSNBC you will see lots of people using the other guy's language and arguing against them by negating their frames and therefore strengthening them okay notice it next time you turn on liberal pundits notice now the big thing about this about morality is morality is all metaphorical and that's not obvious but it's true morality is about well-being your well-being and the well-being of others and that is registered chemically in the brain we have pathways for positive and negative emotions okay that is things that that are that have to do with our well-being and our ill-being the positive emotion pathways go past things like happiness awe satisfaction and so on the negative ones go past things like anger sadness fear disgust and so on okay so the way to think about this is think about the metaphors of your form morality you're going to learn on the basis of the activation of satisfaction and dissatisfaction pathways paired with other experiences because that's how you learn primary metaphors when they're paired you learn mixed the circuitry and you ask okay when you're a child which is better eating pure food or rotten food pure food morality is purity immorality is rottenness something is even rotten in the state of Denmark okay that was a rotten thing to do purification rituals occur around the world every one year old knows you're better off if you can stand up right and if you have to crawl on the ground so morality is being upstanding immorality is being a lowdown snake morality is light immorality is darkness because you're better off if you're functioning in the light than in the dark around the world you get things like this in Japanese you have the Hara center of emotions having a black Hara is being immoral in Hmong having a black liver is being immoral in Swahili having a black stomach is being immoral nothing to do with skin color it has to do with light and dark morality is beauty immorality is ugliness that was a beautiful thing to do you're better off if you're good looking than if you're not even as a baby all right things are getting ugly around here as Perry said you know if so-and-so Bernanke comes to Texas it's going to get ugly now well-being is wealth you're better off if you have the things you need than if you don't and then you have moral accounting if I do you a favor that increases your well-being you say I'm in your debt how can I repay you I owe you one right moral action is accumulating moral credit and moral action is balancing the moral books in these cases morality is you're better off if you listen to your parents than if you don't so morality is obedience to legitimate authority you're better off if your parents nurture you than if you don't morality is nurturance and this answers a mystery that the mystery that led me to write moral politics I wondered in 1994 when the when the conservatives took over congress why these were very strange people they were against taxation and against abortion what do they have to do with each other they're against unions and worker rights what does that have to do with abortion they're against environmentalism what does that have to do with taxation they're against therefore laissez-faire markets what does that have to do with abortion therefore the use of military strength what does that have to do with worker rights therefore corporate personhood for you know for tort reform against public employee benefits against public programs what do they have to do with each other now I looked at this and I said what is going on here and so I said okay I'm against all of I have the opposite views and all of these what do they have to do with each other for me I'm a cognitive scientist and I got embarrassed because I didn't know but it's a cognitive science problem and I took it on and it turned out that the answer to that was contained in those metaphors for morality because you get two models of the family a strict father family and a nurturing parent family and the strict father family is the one that is the basis of conservatism under a certain metaphor so let me first tell you about that metaphor when are you first governed in your family so you learn that a governing institution is a family it could be a church it could be a team it could be a classroom or a nation okay now there are two models of the family that are prominent in America you may or may not be raised under one or the other you may have both in your family but they go like this and they're in our culture the strict father family has father knows best knows right from wrong he's the ultimate authority no one in the family has moral authority he must preserve that authority authority no back talk authority must be maintained the father protects and supports the family financially children learn morality by being punished for disobedience punishment is morally required of the father and it must be painful the child will never learn what's right and to stop doing what's wrong morality requires discipline so if you're undisciplined you can't be moral what does that mean if you're disciplined you can go out in the world and earn a living if you're not earning a living then you can't be disciplined which means you can't be moral which means you deserve your poverty so the best people are the people who make the most money surprise surprise all responsibility is personal responsibility follows from this you are responsible every adult is responsible for satisfying their own interests there's one way communication the father and the family is responsible for reproduction decisions adults are responsible for their children what does this explain we're about to be done there's another one which is nurturance parents have equal responsibility to empathize with their children et cetera it explains for example why it is that you can be pro-life and for the death penalty it explains why you're pro-life because in the strict father family the father is the person who determines reproduction and therefore if they're going to be a child he doesn't want it aborted because he's determined it and so he'll be against abortion and for parental notification and spousal notification and so on and all of those rights that is men will be responsible for women's reproduction in the strict father family you apply that to conservatives and it turns out that the conservative views on this activate the entire moral system and it was not stupid for conservatives to be advocating this it activates the rest of their system you apply it to the market it says the market is the decider let the market decide that means there should be nothing above the market what is above the market regulation taxation worker rights and tort paces all the things conservatives are against now we can go through this bit by bit the book moral politics spills it out in 500 pages of easy to read detail cheap okay so that's the general idea biconceptuals of both the psychology of the middle etc freedom the freedom to start a business when you have roads and you have all the other things you need and government research the freedom to live a decent life you've got to have roads and sewers and health and all those other things for conservatives democracy is based on a different moral principle it's the freedom of citizens to seek their own interests regardless of the interests of others those who succeed deserve to those who don't succeed don't deserve to and this imposes a moral hierarchy which should be reflected in political and economic power what it says is democracy is about liberty the liberty to seek your own interests without any government interference without anybody interfering with you and without anybody helping you you don't have to help anybody else and nobody else is supposed to help you that's what you saw in those two conventions and that's what this is about smaller government is actually a government that imposes and supports that moral system it's not necessarily smaller because conservatives by that mean that it's a government that gets rid of the public provisions it might increase defense they might have a bigger deficit but that doesn't count as a deficit a deficit for republicans is only a deficit caused by public provisions to help people not a deficit caused by wars or a deficit caused by increased military spending it's not part of the concept deficit they mean different things so for progressives if the Ryan budget goes through it will defund all public provisions by 2050 91% of all public provisions will be gone and as they defund institutions they destroy them what this means is destroying the moral basis of democracy, thank you so, thank you once again George, so what we're going to do now is we're going to have Professor Heather Hendershott here moderate discussion we'll have questions from audience members as well so we're going to ask, because all of this is being recorded it's for audience members to go to the mics on either side of the room in order to ask your questions I know a lot of people want to have a commentary express yourselves have answers and engagements so try to keep the questions relatively brief here and so without further ado I'll just turn it over to Heather great, thanks and I think we also have people who can help pass the microphones too sometimes it's a little hard to get up if you're right in the middle and get to the aisle but just raise your hand and we'll make sure you get amplified somehow well it's a very provocative talk I'm dying to say something so let's open it up, we have a good 20 minutes we might go over a few minutes who would like to kick off our first yes? I'll ask the obvious question how would you suggest or give us some examples of how you would have a conversation with the other side it depends on whether they're total conservatives or whether they're partially biconceptual and most conservatives are biconceptual in some ways they have certain progressive ideas there's a whole chapter on this at the end of a book called Don't Think of an Elephant and there's what I tell my students when they say I'm going to go to Thanksgiving and my grandfather's going to be there and we always have a fight and I say look don't fight with your grandfather ask him the following question what are you most proud of in helping doing something for someone else for other people what are you most proud of and they come back and they say I never knew my grandfather did three really important good things in the world maybe not others but at least three good ones and we talk about them every time we get together and I respect them for at least doing three good things and that's the best you can do in a lot of cases but it's an interesting thing conservatism has a lot of in-group progressivism in-group, nurturance and out-of-group apply their normal moral theory and you see this in the army the army is inside the army is a socialist collective and just think about it for a minute and that's how they work there's in-group nurturance and this was provoked beautifully by Michelle Obama and Jill Biden in their talks because what they did was they talked about helping out veterans families which evoked nurturance about the army and about the military and what it did was evoke their moral system in a discussion of the military which is vitally important and not one pundit noticed it okay, thank you who's next? here we go Chris Peterson, Comparative Media Studies Professor, I read your critique what Orwell didn't know and while I agree with your point that Orwell had suffered from the editor's fallacy of thinking that words had discrete meanings and everything I had always thought that the point of his essay was that metaphors kind of structured not only what we thought but what it was capable for us to think so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how you saw the gap between what Orwell understood and what you understand he certainly understood that and I said that I'm a big Orwell fan and have always been but Orwell thought that it was possible simply to tell people the facts and they would reason to the right conclusion and he was wrong and this is important to understand you can only understand what the brain circuits you have allow you to understand if you don't have enough available brain circuitry that needs to be recruited every time you learn something you're recruiting pretty much circuitry that's not used for anything in particular strengthening it so it can be used you're doing brain change if those appropriate circuits are not available the facts won't mean anything to somebody and that happens with extreme conservatives they can hear Clinton's speech it'll go in one ear and out the other Daniel Lois Deutsch, media psychology and I know you have a colleague down south in Emory, Drew Weston he's more I guess of a neuroscientist actually he's not he's a clinical psychologist who has worked once with a neuroscientist thanks for the clarification and he did a very nice job so you wrote the political mind he wrote the political brain I've read both of them I guess what you see is the distinctions between what each of you say and if there's anything not to start a feud between you two but if there's anything that you guys disagree on I know there's a lot you agree on and you actually reference each other a number of times we agree on many things but there are a couple of major disagreements that are important first he isn't a neuroscientist although he was involved in this I'm not a neuroscientist either he's a clinical psychologist he believes in enlightenment reason and all of the things he suggests to the Democrats are enlightenment reason arguments you know get the facts out there and argue strongly he correctly believes that emotion is important that you should do it emotionally and use emotional rhetoric he correctly believes that you need to use narratives and stories he's absolutely right on all of those calls but he misses biconceptualism his suggestions are often to move to the right to move to quote as he would say to the active center he's more of a centrist than a progressive although he has you know extensively against Obama's centrist positions and otherwise he's a very very smart very articulate person you know and we have just those disagreements I'm just going to interject one here how would you account for differences among Republicans for example or not Republicans conservatives for example that the fact that there are libertarians who identify themselves as a person biconceptual or they're actually legitimately very different kinds is an equal or compelling body what they should do same thing and have the force to back it up but we don't have enough of a military now we need more so that's part of it there's another part which is the fact that when you support the military you support the military industrial complex which is you're supporting corporations that are part of the Romney father morality when you start going into the deep and who's more moral is by looking at in a well ordered universe ordered by God who has been ruling in the past God above man, man above nature western culture above non-western culture adults above children men above women straights above gays Christians above non-christians etc etc got it? not all conservatives have all of it they all have things like America above other countries western culture above non-western culture and man above nature and so on not all of them are bigots by any means but it's an extension of the same hierarchy that you get now another very important feature when you study the system in detail is that in the strict father family the authority of the father must be maintained so the authority of conservatism must be maintained and spread that is the highest value in that system is maintaining and preserving that system itself and that explains something a number of things but one of them is why conservatives would vote as you get an ultra-conservative congress in there they're going to vote against anything that would help Obama because that would go against their moral principles of doing something that would hurt their own moral system George Mokrem an independent scholar one of the most interesting things that I saw within the last year in public discourse was an interview on MSNB's no it was on current TV with one of the occupiers and the interesting thing about one of the interesting things about the occupiers is of course as soon as they're introduced they say well I can't speak for Occupy I can only speak for myself and this was at the time when the New York police were supposedly taking drug addicts and drunks and other troublesome people and saying go to Zuccotti Park go there, go there, go there and the interviewer was asking about that and trying to I was listening to NPR one day when the world had an interview with the British ambassador from Sierra Leone and there was a British interviewer and she asked the ambassador about truth and reconciliation he explained they had done these awful things but they were going to get them out in the open let everybody know about them and then stop and the interviewer said in this presidential campaign it seems like Barack is going to miss Compound so it's not really a pure story Romney's grandfather is a Mexican immigrant from a polygamous compound so it doesn't really resonate purely for him well he didn't mention that but you get the drift of this and then he's heroic because Bain Capital saved Staples not mentioning the ones they destroyed and not mentioning the kind of business that they were in but this is the general way that this goes in this country those are major narratives that you expect politicians to have and the Obama campaign has them now that doesn't mean they will or won't work for the election or for the election of other Democrats but they're there and what's interesting is the reaction to that in the convention hall because not everybody in that convention hall was pro-Obama on everything there were a lot of people there who are much more progressive than Obama and they cheered those narratives too I mean those narratives are important in our culture and they're using them whether they work I can't say I think we have time for a few more questions yes I'm Colin McDonald I'm a computer and political science right now and I read a book by Richard Thaler and he's also trying to kind of apply cognitive science to politics so for anybody who hasn't read Nudge I guess he's trying to suggest that the government should use the heuristics and biases that we know about the human brain to try and make them make better decisions and so I was wondering if you think that's a good idea a bad idea depends on what the decisions are some of them have been pretty bad and some okay what you have you have Cass Sunstein was in the Obama administration until recently and so was the and Cass Sunstein was in the position of pushing cost-benefit analysis now everybody in this audience will recognize the equation for cost-benefit analysis it's an integral and it's an integral over a particular action and it starts at one time and ends at another time and it has a factor of e to the minus dt where d is the interest or discount rate which means that everything must be translated into money all this everything there so let's take the environment for an environmental thing you take the benefit which is the cost times e to the minus dt well what that means is e to the minus dt as you know goes down exponentially with time so that any environmental benefit goes down exponentially with time and goes to zero very quickly which means you shouldn't be using it for the environment but they do and Cass Sunstein did I don't like that this is part of what is being used to decide what medical tests should be give to people so for example there's an argument that on cost-benefit analysis terms that women who are 40 should not get tested for breast cancer they shouldn't wait until they're 50 because it's only an extra you know 3% of women who would get breast cancer in that time multiply that by 150 million women and you get a number like 45,000 and you don't want to talk about 45,000 deaths even though it's only 3% somehow some of these uses are not beneficial some of them can be the ones they always talk about are terrific do you tell somebody that they have a choice to have a retirement plan or do you just tell them they have a retirement plan and can opt out if they have to opt out that takes more effort so more people opt in which is beneficial they're absolutely right about that it really depends upon the particular cases but the idea of using it across the board as Thaler and Sunstein suggest is immoral thank you we have time for just one more question can we take yours please yeah so thank you very much I'm an urban planner and I hear a lot this kind of spatial metaphor also in a political context of top down versus bottom up and people who use this metaphor usually say that top down is somehow bad and bottom up is always very positive but I notice that the notion of bottom up people talk about very different things both on the left and on the right when they talk about bottom up so I wanted to ask you about a comment on this very frequent metaphor again the issue is what it's about so you have an idea let's say in the case of the 1% versus the 99% the folks who were out there demonstrating for the 99% had a bottom up view in such a case that it never went up that was a disaster we needed them to be moving up to be actually saying something beyond individuals saying something there was a very a great lost opportunity I'm sad that that happened top down isn't always bad bottom up isn't always good bottom up isn't always bad top down isn't always good and so on it depends on the case there are cases where you really need a leader to do something when you need a leader to do something you need it to be top down there are cases where ordinary people have to be able to have the ideas first before it can happen make me do it start a movement well in many cases that's right in other cases it's really a bad idea and you need leadership it depends on the particular case in a particular situation I know we have you all have a lot more questions but we are out of time and apparently even though Professor Lakoff's books are very long they're very readable and they're sold at a fair price so that would be a good way to continue to learn more and they're not all very long you did emphasize the 5 and 600 pages oh those are the big ones the little blue book is very short don't think of an elephant is very short metaphors we live by is very short there are a lot of very short books very good so you can read those books to follow through and thank you all very much for coming and so we'd also like to thank Heather for her job moderating I just want to mention briefly the final talk in this year's Cognitive Dimensions of Media Series by the ICE Lab and compared to Media Studies Department will be by Mark Turner who co-authored More Than Cool Reason with Professor George Lakoff here he'll be here in November so stay on the lookout for that one as well also will engage the news and finally join me in thanking George Lakoff one more time before we leave