James Geary
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The Aphorism is literature's hand luggage... light and compact, and fitting easily into the overhead compartment of one's brain.
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The Brain operates not by logic but by pattern recognition. This process is not precise, as is logic and mathematics. Instead, it trades off specificity and precision, if necessary, to increase its range.
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A Dormant metaphor is a metaphor such as 'we're getting in over our heads' which tends to petrify into clichés and whose figurative nature slumbers just below the surface.
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Etymology is the final resting place for dead metaphors, figurative uses of language that we no longer consciously recognize as figurative.
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An Extinct metaphor is a metaphor such as 'I see what you mean' whose metaphorical magma will never rise again.
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Ignoring is only safely done once one thoroughly knows that thing that they wish to ignore.
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Metaphor is a linguistic hand-'me-'down in that it represents meaning passed on from an old word to a new thing.
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Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words, influencing our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways.
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Metaphor is for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgement... and so indeed are perfect cheats.
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Metaphor is intensely yet inconspicuously present in everything from ordinary conversation and commercial messaging to news reports and political speeches. Metaphor is always breathing down our necks.
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Metaphor is lending a thing a name belonging to something else such that it also lends it a complex pattern of relations and associations.
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Metaphor systematically disorganizes the common sense of things'jumbling together the abstract with the concrete, the physical with the psychological, the like with the unlike'and reorganizes it into uncommon combinations.
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Metaphor is actually the way we think. It is the way we make sense of the world... as such, every individual metaphor is a specific instance of this imaginative process at work.
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Pattern recognition is so basic that the brain's pattern detection modules and its reward circuitry became inextricably linked.
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Pattern recognition is the most primitive form of analogical reasoning, part of the neural circuitry for metaphor. Monkeys, rodents, and birds recognize patterns, too.