INTRODUCTION: WHY METAPHORS ARE SO IMPORTANT IN SCIENCE.
There is a long tradition in our educational system, holding the idea that
interpretation and creation of metaphors can be part of the Humanities curriculum
–mainly literature-, but they have nothing to do with sciences. However, the
evidence suggests that most of our best scientists –especially those
disseminators who are able to convey big ideas to the non-scientific public-
are specialists in the creation of metaphors. Metaphors are an excellent
vehicle to communicate scientific ideas. Very complex theories, models
and hypothesis had been popularized thanks to images and comparisons easy to
understand for the average people. Let’s take the next example: the idea of the
planet Earth as a complex system with different components working together in
an extremely precise equilibrium, prompted James Lovelock to compare the whole
planet with a living thing and to popularize it under the nickname of Gaia, a
Greek goddess. After that, Gaia became a powerful metaphor in the hands of
environmentalists, activists, politicians and the public opinion, generally
speaking. Metaphors are easier to grasp; their educational purposes therefore
are in high stem.
However an abuse of
the metaphor can lead to misunderstandings that generate more problems than
what they are trying to solve. Taking for example the theory of the “selfish
gen” by Richard Dawkins: it created interpretations that were not on the mind
of the biologist, supposing that human beings were selfish and evil because it
was written in their genetic code or that genes had some kind of moral
consciousness. On the other hand, metaphors are images that are not
ahistorical. They explain an idea in a particular social and cultural context.
They can be extremely expressive and cute for some circumstances, but lose all
its power in a few years.
The abundant metaphors of the
brain are typical examples of how fast a metaphor became old-fashioned because
of technological shift. As Grah and Kuma suggested in American Scientist
(March, 2015) it takes only a few decades or years to substitute one metaphor
by another: in the fifties and sixties the philosopher John Searle
explained how the brain was understood as some kind of phone calling-centre.
Nowadays, due to new technology, we find this image inappropriate and out of
date. Computers, Internet, holograms, the cloud, are now the available images
for our brains, but we don’t know for how long[1].
THE BRAIN METAPHORS: AN EXAMPLE OF TBL LESSON
We decided in our secondary school to find
all the possible metaphors we could guess for the brain and the mind (knowing
that can be understood as two different concepts, we gave freedom of choice to
decide for one or another). In order to get the maximum ideas and images, we
had followed the TBL method provided by Robert Swartz. It mainly consists on
giving our students a thinking map about how we could generate good metaphors
and the graphic organizers that will help as conceptual scaffoldings in the
elaboration of these images, and after that, apply some thinking routines that
encourage the students to maximize their creativity.
First of all, students have to
remember what a metaphor is, and we use for our topic one of the oldest images
that is related to our brain: “the brain is like industrial slag”. The
image refers to the external appearance of the brain, and maybe it works for
the narrow knowledge that Egyptians had on this organ, but it is definitively
not enough for our own culture. Therefore, new metaphors are needed, more
useful and precise for the present. The lesson starts at this point with a challenge:
“We are supposed to be writers in a magazine and disseminators of scientific
information and we have to find a good image of the brain and mind that could
be attractive for the readers of our magazine and stimulating for their
imagination”.
How to create a good metaphor? We give the
thinking map for every pair of students and we analyze every step, recommending
if this should be useful in order to obtain a good image. But get a good
metaphor about the brain implies some training and being aware of what has been
done before our own work. We analyze some very ancient images and metaphors
that were elaborated from Antiquity: the Egyptians thought about the brain as
industrial slag, due to the external appearance of both objects. But Plato, for
instance, was much more spiritual, and identified the soul as a winged chariot
flying into the sky where two horses and a rider represents different features
of our souls. We analyzed also two very well-known images from the 20th
century: the mind as a computer (defended by cognitive psychologists) and the
mind as a black box or a tabula rasa (defended by behavior psychologists and
the philosophical empiricism). These are very well known metaphors explained in
the curriculum of subjects like psychology or philosophy in high school
degrees.
We help to motivate the creativity of the
students showing typical pictures from these metaphors. Using the pictures,
they are able to grasp much better all the possible similarities of the
proposed metaphors, and they have to fill graphic organizers where more than
three similarities were demanded. Brainstorming gives many similarities that
were unthinkable for only a single person. These preliminary approaches prompt
the students to check what they already know, how powerful can be these
metaphors to understand the brain and mind, and attempt the creation of new
images.
After that, students worked in
pairs, trying to find the most attractive and recurrent images they can guess
in order to explain scientific, psychological and philosophical characteristics
of our brain. A brainstorming gives us the chance to listen to all the possible
images for the brain that they were able to figure out. We hardly could write
all of them in the blackboard, and some of them were as suggestive as a fridge,
the sun, a nebulous, a plant, a fishnet, a starry night, a music box, a banana,
a theatre, a train station, a piñata, a library, or a stock exchange.
Some of them were so surprising and intriguing that the proper classmates were
demanding more explanations in order to understand the real explicative power
of the images. Some of them were abandoned by the same students, because they
realize they were irrelevant or too conventional. Others, however, won more
acceptation when they were discussed. We select some of the metaphors, and
decided to extend only one of them widely -the fridge-, based on the fact that
it could be original and effective.
Some TBL graphic organizers, to introduce the thinking skill (copyright, Robert Swartz, 1994)
A CHALLENGING METAPHOR: THE MIND AS A FRIDGE.
What kind of similitudes could we find between a fridge
and our minds? That was the challenging question for the bold student who
suggested this metaphor. For this new stage of the thinking skill the teacher
gave them a graphic organizer where more than five similitudes were requested.
After using again the same routine (work in pairs, think and share), the
students were able to show a few of them.
In fact, some common characteristics were easy to
guess. First of all, both of them are divided into some kind of shelves, racks
or compartments. In fridges, different racks and drawers are designed and
created in order to store different items, from bottles and cheese to eggs and
lettuce. In our mind, different parts of the brain specialize in diverse skills
like reasoning, communicating, or controlling our emotions. Even when fridges
and brains have to be understood as a whole, each compartment has its own
function. This characteristic fits very well with an innate approach to mind
(like Plato and Descartes in the old days and current thinkers like Chomsky or
Jerry Fodor), where mind frames are essential for the development of our
knowledge, and the teacher encouraged the students to establish the relation
with these theories that the students knew from the curricular content.
However, there is something equally
essential: the items from the outer world. The students realized that an empty
fridge has no use at all. The amount of food (and its preservation) in the
fridge, and the acquisition of information is the feature that gives sense to
both of them. It goes without saying that this characteristic postulates the
metaphor very close to the ideas of empiricism, but if we take both features
(shelves and food) as a whole, show us a constructivist approach, very close to
the ideas of philosophers like Kant or psychologists like Jean Piaget or Howard
Gardner.
Taking these two characteristics are attractive
enough for the students in cognitive psychology, neuroscience or mind
philosophy. However, we could deepen a little bit more the image of the mind as
a fridge. Preservation is a characteristic in common, keep the information
alive in the mind, cool and preserve the food from excessive heating in
the fridge. Both devices, mind and fridge, need energy from an external power
source, in terms of electricity, or organic supplies like glucose and
considerable amounts of phosphorus or potassium. Even the basic structure of a
fridge or our brains have a external similarity. Both devices are completely
isolated from the surrounding environment, in order to avoid damages in the
content (for instance, fresh food or keep our memories alive) and keep them
working properly. Our skulls preserve our precious brains. The metallic box of
the fridge accomplishes the same mission. The more features and characteristics
you can identify, the better for the metaphor and its power of expression and
persuasion.
The final result of the selected metaphor.
SOLVING
MISLEADINGS, QUESTIONING AND ENRICHENING METAPHORS.
Working
on metaphors has some disadvantages when you are talking about scientific
concepts and abstract theories. For instance, when students were discussing
about this topic, we can miss the typical dichotomy between soul, conscience
and biological brain, that has been so important for some philosophical
schools. For instance, it should be important to ask later if creating the
metaphor of the fridge is supposing that the metaphor is suggesting a
materialistic or a reductive vision of our brain. The teacher could ask more extensive
question in order to solve this problem. But if we want to avoid any
misunderstandings, it should be highly recommended to define very well the idea
or concept that we want to represent in the metaphor. The first time that we
applied this thinking skill on the brain, we include Plato’s winged chariot as
a metaphor of the soul. But we realized that it would bring more problems if we
wanted to focus the metaphors on the brain. Even using the world “mind” as some
kind of reflection of the brain had its own problems, when there is not only
one approach available for this concept.
As a result of all the process, students should be able to compare skillfully the explicative power of different metaphors. They realized, for instance, that taking the Egyptian image of the brain as industrial slag was based only on its external appearance and therefore it is not good enough for the present time. As the teacher remind them, the more features we will be able to compare, the better. And not only the first things that is coming up into the student’s minds.
[1] GRASH and GRUMMA, Metaphors
of the brain, American Scientist, March 2015.
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