Mining Your Metaphors

Change the metaphor, change the self.

Left Brain/Right Brain and Mining Your Metaphors

You may have seen her on YouTube, but Jill Bolte Taylor’s book, My Stroke of Insight, is still worth a read, especially if you’re curious about the workings of the brain. Taylor, a neuro-anatomist (or brain scientist, as she translates it for the layman), experienced a stroke that flooded the left hemisphere of her brain, leaving her to experience the world largely from her right hemisphere’s perspective. Over the next eight years, Taylor carefully observed her recovery with a scientist’s curiosity and attention to detail. As Taylor worked diligently to relearn to navigate in the world and to recover her former self,  she found one the most life-changing realizations for her was that she had the capacity to make choices she’d never realized were choices.

In the past, when some event triggered a reaction like feeling angry, jealous, or highly critical, she would react reflexively and run the well-established neural pathways. These old pathways, with their myriad interconnections with all sorts of past history and associations, resulted in plenty of unpleasant feelings, memories and subsequent behaviors. After the stroke, Taylor was blissfully unaware of any of these. As her functions returned, she discovered her memory had not been destroyed, but she would have to work hard to re-access and reactivate those pathways…or she could choose not to.

She learned that when an emotion is triggered in your body, its initial physiological effects—hormone release, etc.– last only 90 seconds. After that, if you are still connected to that emotional response, it is because an extensive and complex array of neural pathways has been activated. It may happen so rapidly that it feels like a natural, inevitable reaction. But in that moment at the end of the 90 seconds between the emotion and stepping on the pathway,  one has a choice. Taylor says she realized she could choose to engage her left brain connections with past memories, with fears about the future, with its tendency to fill in gaps of information with assumptions–the “storyteller’s potential for stirring up drama and trauma.”  Or she could “step to the right” and embrace her right hemisphere’s personality and value system, which emphasize staying in the moment and meeting it with compassion. Taylor makes clear this isn’t easy; she says it’s a choice you may make many times every day. But it’s a realization that changed the way she meets the world.

Taylor’s book also offers what I consider supportive evidence for the impact Clean Language has for a client. To cite but one example,  Taylor says, “I believe the real power in experiential recreation is located in our ability to remember what the underlying physiology feels like.” (p. 176) In a Clean Language session, you may re-imagine the past, re-image it. Inferring from Taylor’s book, I suggest that by doing so you are building new neural pathways– ones that serve you better than the old ones.  By using your own metaphors and getting to know not only where they are, but how they feel (Taylor’s ‘underlying physiology’) and by revisiting them often, you can strengthen them and increase the likelihood of ‘going there’ when an unwanted memory or emotion is triggered.

Given that this is the start of the year, it’s a good time to re-image what you’d like to have happen…or like to have had happen in the past. When you notice uncomfortable memories surface or their accompanying old feelings (such as anxiety, sadness, or jealousy) or physical reactions (perhaps shallow breathing, queasiness, or headache), they’re a signal to you that those old, familiar neural pathways are being engaged. Replace them with your new image and its accompanying feelings—emotional and physical. Or… step to the right. And if you read Dr. Taylor’s book,  we’d be curious to hear how you think her experiences explain Clean Language’s effectiveness.

Just how free are we to choose?

We all make choices every day; we gather information, assess our options, and come to logical decisions about our choices. Or do we?

I think most of us would readily admit there are subconscious factors at work influencing our choices. Our past experiences have given us a vast repository of information that informs our logic. And we have personal preferences we develop from those experiences, whether we consciously recall them or not.

But what I’m curious about today is the choices we make that are not informed by our logic or those idiosyncratic experiences singular to each of us. They are the choices that are influenced by things of which we may quite unaware, and that influence all of us in similar ways.

I’ve been reading Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. The authors do a fascinating job looking at how we present or frame choices for people predictably affects their behavior. Diners in a cafeteria, for example, more often choose food that’s near the front line and at eye level. The book’s examples get increasingly complex, dealing with everything from pensions and health insurance to encouraging energy efficiency. How we’re presented with choices is every bit as important as what the choices are; we can be ‘nudged.’

Other things I’ve been reading lately show that subconscious influences on our choices don’t stop there. Researchers at the University of Toronto Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli* ran two experiments. They found that people who are socially isolated reported feeling cold (as determined by their assessment of the room’s temperature.) In the second experiment, they offered socially-isolated subjects a choice of warm or cold drinks and food, and found they preferred warm food (presumably, to warm up.)

There’s certainly plenty of evidence in our language that supports this sensory/social association. We commonly use metaphorical expressions like “being left out in the cold”, “getting the cold shoulder” or describing a person as “cold-hearted”—all examples of being rejected or identifying a person as unfriendly. Contrarily, we use phrases like “a warm and friendly person”, a person or idea getting a “warm reception”, and seeing something positive as “warming my heart.”

The same is true for connecting other sensory experiences and our more abstract experiences. We talk, for example, about the sweet smell of success, the betrayal that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. We might talk about the rough road ahead or declare it’s all smooth sailing from here. A heavy topic of conversation is one that is to be taken seriously, while keeping the conversation light means the conversation should be superficial and pleasant.

So we don’t just use our senses to navigate our way in the physical world. Since conception, they’ve been helping to create a personal dictionary that we refer to, consciously and subconsciously, when we seek words or images to describe a feeling or experience. We make sense of a new experience by comparing it to something we’ve already experienced, and we encode it, with all its sensory/physical nuances, with a metaphor found in that personal ‘dictionary.’ Then we use these stored metaphors as part of our processing of every living moment.

Interestingly, Zhong and Leonardelli found it didn’t matter if the social isolating of their subjects was occurring in the room or simply being recalled. It seems once the association has been catalogued by the mind/body, the physical associations are part of the response.

Sounds good, right? Kind of impressed with our cleverness, yes? So creative and efficient! But there are pitfalls. You’re probably familiar with something like this scenario: you happened to be eating cherries just before you came down with a stomach bug. Now you can’t stand even the smell of cherries, though logically you know there was no causal connection.

In regards to social experiences, the problem with our sensory/social associations is we’re too quick apply them in reverse. Researchers have found that if we go into a cold room, we are more likely to perceive a person we meet there as unfriendly. If we are holding a warm cup of coffee, we’re more apt to perceive the person we meet as friendly.** We infer that heavy objects are more important, and subjects were more rigid in negotiations when influenced by hard objects.*** So, we don’t always reach accurate conclusions when we let those associations color our assumptions. But, as we’re not aware of the influence, we don’t question our reactions, checking them against more logical input.

What an intriguing thought: how much of what we judge to be true about the world, about others, about our situations and experiences, is influenced by these erroneous, subconscious associations we’re making? It gives a whole new level of challenge to avoiding assumptions!

Curious for more details ? References:

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (Penguin, 2009)

*Cold and Lonely: Does Social Exclusion Literally Feel Cold?, Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Univ. of Toronto, Psychological Science, 15 September, 2008 . Click here for a  concise review of the experiments and results.

**Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth, Lawrence E. Williams and John A. Bragh, Science 24 October, 2008, vol.322

***Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions, Joshua M. Ackerman, Christopher C. Nocera, John A. Bargh, Science 25 June, 2010, vol.328

Lost and Found: An Artist’s Brain Revealed

I am intrigued by memory, how it is stored and how it is accessed, and what metaphors have to do with it all, so I was fascinated to attend a dual lecture given by researcher Mike McCloskey from the Cognitive Science Department at Johns Hopkins University and artist and mother Margaret Kennard Johnson in conjunction with an exhibit at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore featuring the recovery artwork of Lonni Sue Johnson.  A successful illustrator before an attack of encephalitis in 2007 left her with severe temporal lobe and frontal cortex damage, she had produced delightfully whimsical and often insightful drawings, brimming with visual puns and clever conceptual conceits.

Lonni’s illness has basically destroyed her working memory. She remembers her mother, her sister, a few old friends, and little else. She can retain new information for no more than a matter of seconds.  While she can read words, she quickly loses the context, and trying to follow ideas from one sentence to the next is futile. Yet she can read music, and still remembers how to play the viola. Surprisingly, her language is intact. Her personality and her sense of humor are the same, though she remembers very little about her own history.  I watched a fascinating video of a conversation with her, when, given the slightest of prompts about 9/11, she was able to retrieve some details about the event: that it was about a big building in NYC, that it was sad, that there was an explosion, a declaration of war.

As tragic as brain damage is for a victim, for brain researchers, it offers a special opportunity to study how the brain works.  Her story raises fascinating questions about the nature of mind and memory.  About what is lost and what might only be consciously inaccessible. About what is knowledge and what is a skill. About just what one’s personality is– is it or isn’t it dependent on the memories that we imagine helped shape it? To what degree is the subconscious intact and functioning when the physical and conscious mind is damaged?  And what role might word-making and art-making have in neuroplasticity, in laying new neural pathways in the brain to areas we may not suspect capable of playing a role in a particular ability to compensate for the ones that were lost?

The Walters exhibit shows the many stages of Lonni Sue’s drawings over the three years, incorporating her obsession with word puzzles, theoretically an instinctive urge to heal using what skills she has retained and the power of images on paper to extend the time she can hold onto an idea that would otherwise slip away like water through her hands. Representational art-making is always metaphor-making (“It’s like this in my perception”), and to make art is to tap into the storehouse of metaphors in the brain. I was left pondering what further role her metaphors may play in Lonni Sue’s healing.

What it is about her story that peaks your curiosity?

Crossing London Streets and Neural Pathways

I’ve recently returned from London , where I was doing advanced training in Symbolic Modeling and attending the Clean Conference 2009, a gathering of people from around the world sharing their work with and thoughts about Clean Language.   Surprisingly, one of my lessons came not from my classes nor the Conference, but from walking around London.

Being American and used to driving on the right, it was a challenge to manage there, where they drive on the left. Forget trying to drive a car; just crossing the street was difficult!    My crowning moment was when fellow trainee Dena Robbins-Deckel (who is from Israel, where they also drive on the right) and I approached a crosswalk. There on the street, painted in large letters, was LOOK LEFT. I stopped, mindfully telling myself, “Okay now. I have to do the opposite of what I instinctively do.”  Dena was pausing, staring, concentrating, no doubt going through a similar mental process. So what do we do? We both looked right.  And then, at the same moment, we said, “Which way is left?” Our brains were positively scrambled by the effort to change!

Besides giving us a good laugh at ourselves, the incident provided a wonderful demonstration of just how difficult it is to overcome patterns of behavior that repetition has firmly established in our brains, despite cognitive awareness and the intention to do something differently.   If you’ve ever found yourself wanting to change your behavior, fully intending to, but finding you just can’t seem to, you know what I mean. And insight into why it might be hard or where your behavior came from in the first place doesn’t help much either.

Something has to change in both mind and body, where old patterns are deeply entrenched. I’ve found Symbolic Modeling is one effective way of doing that, using the language of the subconscious: metaphor.  Where most verbal coaching and counseling techniques engage your cognitive faculties, the slightly altered state feel of a Symbolic Modeling session is taping into a different kind of knowing and processing. It bypasses your ‘logical’ knowing and self-limiting beliefs to enable your brain to “do something differently”, bringing about change (if that’s what you want) on an internal level that transcends cognitive awareness and those well-established patterns. Want to learn more about this technique? Check out my website www.miningyourmetaphors.com

As for crossing the streets in London, I gave up trying to retrain myself entirely, and just looked both ways wherever I was!

Gina

Gina Campbell, offering Clean Language trainings since 2005

gina_campbell

A Certified Clean Practitioner with a Masters degree in a developmental counseling field and decades of teaching experience. Read more

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