Metaphors that came in from the cold

Further evidence of the fundamental metaphorical nature of language rooted in bodily experience as per Philosophy in the Flesh. In this article An icy stare really does make you feel cold - being-human - 19 September 2008 - New Scientist we are told: "I was given the cold shoulder', 'she froze me out with an icy stare' – such metaphors describe the social isolation we've all felt on occasion. What psychologists didn't expect is that social exclusion can actually make you feel cold, yet that is precisely what a new study finds."
I need to think about this more, but it would seem that both the experience of exclusions leads to physiological or at least perceptual changes and that these changes form the basis of an enbodied metaphor.

Belief and unbelief and doubt are different in kind

... neurologically speaking, that is. Different parts of the brain are involved in each. However committing ourselves to beliefs, or not, does require and emotional engagement.

'What I find most interesting about our results is the suggestion that our view of the world must pass through a bottleneck in regions of the brain generally understood to govern emotion, reward and primal feelings like pain and disgust,' Harris said. 'While evaluating mathematical, ethical or factual statements requires very different kinds of processing, accepting or rejecting these statements seems to rely upon a more primitive process that may be content-neutral. I think that it has long been assumed that believing that two plus two equals four and believing that George Bush is President of the United States have almost nothing in common as cognitive operations. But what they clearly have in common is that both representations of the world satisfy some process of truth-testing that we continually perform. I think this is yet another result, in a long line of results, that calls the popular opposition between reason and emotion into question.'

That last statement is almost old-hat now. What we may want to put a question mark against is the 'representation' bit. Representation may not be an adequate model to work with neurologically speaking.
It does seem to underline why arguments about politics and religion are sometimes the most heated: they are about world view and have to pass through the more emotionally charged processing areas of the brain. The question is whether there are ways to make progress in these kinds of areas. Does knowing this help us in reconciliation, for example?
Different Areas Of The Brain Respond To Belief, Disbelief And Uncertainty:

Hand Gestures Dramatically Improve Learning

I'm wondering whether this is transferable to other kinds of classroom learning. "Kids asked to physically gesture at math problems are nearly three times more likely than non-gesturers to remember what they've learned." The figures look like this: "Of those children who had learned to solve the problem correctly, only a third of the speech-only students remembered the principles involved, but that figure rose dramatically for the speech-and-gesture, and the gesture-only group, to 90-percent retention."
Also wondering: what kind of gestures? Is this transferable to other subjects? (probably it is).
It may have something to do with recent research and hypotheses which implicate gesture in communication, and this is significant because of the increasing likelihood that language/representation is fundamentally metaphorical and the metaphors are based in bodily experience (see Philosophy in the Flesh and Metaphors we Live By), indeed the lead researcher almost says as much: ""My intuition is that gestures enhance learning because they capitalize on our experience acting in the world," says Cook. "We have a lot of experience learning through interacting with our environment as we grow, and my guess is that gesturing taps into that need to experience.""
ScienceDaily: Hand Gestures Dramatically Improve Learning:

Why scientists need pomo

Following my earlier irritated postings, I came across this (via) " It is easy to get a computer to take a picture, much harder to get it to “know” what is in the picture.
How does a hornet with virtually no brain do it?
Today the language and modes of thought of computing dominate the biological sciences. One speaks of behavior as being genetically “programmed” or “hard-wired,” and of a brain’s “processing power,” of “integrating” information in “real time.” We are perhaps not always aware that we do this. When you think in terms of a particular scheme, you can begin seeing it where it isn’t, begin projecting it onto the world.
When I think of how the control of a hornet’s legs must work (except of course that it doesn’t have to work the way I believe it must), I think in terms of sensors of angle and force, of procedures to calculate this and that. Do hornets do it this way? Maybe not. Scientists as much as other people struggle to escape their preconceptions or, more usually, don’t struggle. Many don’t seem to know that they have preconceptions."
Just so, the lessons of perspectivalism need to be learnt.
And the comment from the blog that led me to Fred's musings adds this: "Brains are sites for thinking in those animals that have them. It doesn't follow that they are necessary for thinking. I am reminded of the claim that alligators cannot feel because they do not have a mammalian brain, and the response of a man who worked with alligators for years:".
And that reminds me of the work of Antonio Damasio, whom I have been referring to from time to time, whose collection of evidence seems to indicate that thinking is more emotional and more body-distributed than we tend to think. Thinking humanly requires an embodied brain. The brain in a vat would not produce human thought except, presumably if it was on cable like humans in the matrix.

What does this mean for incarnation? that's what's occupying my speculative theological thinking from time to time nowadays. It has implications too for the concept of God without parts and passions and what humanity might mean for God. It also impinges on the matter of suffering.

Fred On Everything: