Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (67 page)

He and she were discussing an event due to occur on October 20 and she wanted to know what day of the week that would be. He impatiently said, “Go look at the map!”

What he meant was “Look at the calendar!” The slip is easily explained, a calendar being an evident temporal analogue of a spatial map, but nonetheless, in this context, no one would intentionally say “map” instead of “calendar”.

A student was relating the story of the tragically early death (at age 20) of the great French mathematician Évariste Galois, and he said, “And so, the night before the fateful debate, Galois stayed up all night and in a frenzy wrote down all his ideas…”

The student knew very well that Galois had died as a result of a duel, not a debate, but the concepts
debate
and
duel
were semantically close to begin with in his mind (as they are in ours as well). Also, the presidential campaign was in full swing at the time (not “in high swing”, as we originally wrote here!), and televised debates had just taken place, making it much more likely for these particular wires to be crossed.

The
debate/duel
analogy is just one of myriads of potential analogies that are hidden in each human mind but whose existence one wouldn’t suspect
a priori.
The student’s error, however, reveals that this analogy was indeed lurking in his mind and simply needed the right opportunity to show its face. The intensely political atmosphere of the period primed the concept of
debate
, which had the consequence of reducing its distance from the concept of
duel.
Moreover, the likelihood of such a slippage was enhanced by the (essentially irrelevant) fact that the image of writing one’s ideas down on paper is much more easily connected with the concept of
debate
than with that of
duel
.

D. wanted to make a comment about the fall on skis taken by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the first word that came out of his mouth was “George”, from “George Bush”.

What could have led to D.’s confusion between these two people? In the first place, both were very salient right-wing politicians of roughly the same age — but there was more than just that linking them in D.’s mind. Whereas Governor Schwarzenegger had recently broken his leg in a tumble taken while he was standing stock still on a ski slope, President Bush had famously nearly choked to death one time while eating a pretzel. The analogy linking these two mishaps of celebrity politicians is subtle. The shared conceptual skeleton involves a serious threat to a person’s physical well-being that comes about unexpectedly during a seemingly trivial and innocuous activity. It’s hard to imagine that there would be an
a priori
link in anyone’s brain between the ideas of
eating a pretzel
and
standing on a ski slope
, or between the ideas of
breaking a leg
and
choking on something in one’s throat.
On the other hand, the abstract idea that
no matter how famous one is, one can get hurt in a trivial-seeming accident
may well have been a key part of D.’s unconscious encoding of each of the two mishaps, and if so, that common element would have catalyzed his retrieval of the first name “George” in this context.

A science writer who had just published a biography of the physicist and Exploratorium founder Frank Oppenheimer was having tea with a friend, and she stated that Frank Oppenheimer and his more famous brother Robert had both been infatuated with communism in the 1930’s but had rejected it after a short while, and in that connection, she casually added that in those early days of the Soviet Union, Benjamin Franklin, too, had traveled there but he had come back very disillusioned with it. “Benjamin Franklin?” exclaimed the friend, amused. For her part, the science writer was shocked that she had come out with that clearly wrong name, and yet she couldn’t recall who she had in fact meant. A few days later she finally did recall who it was — Thomas Edison.

This confusion was due in part to the fact that in the science writer’s mind, both Edison and Franklin were strongly associated with electricity, but there is far more to the explanation than that. Firstly, both individuals were saliently American (otherwise, why not Ampère, Maxwell, Faraday, or many other famous scientists?). Furthermore, both were self-taught inventors, and both are commonly associated with folksy wisdom (think of Franklin’s
Poor Richard’s Almanac
and all the sayings associated with him, and Edison’s famous quotes, such as “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration”).

Though we cannot be sure which of these factors played a role, let alone how large a role, we see that there are a number of analogies linking Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison, any of which could have given rise to this slippage. And there are further factors that could have tipped the balance in favor of the name of Benjamin Franklin. For instance, it might have been relevant that his last name coincides with the first name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a contemporary of the Oppenheimer brothers and a figure indelibly associated with the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union during that period.

A woman was talking about her nephew, who at age 38 had finally gotten married, and she said, “His mother’s thrilled. Now that Peter’s pregnant, she’s hoping to be a grandmother any day now.”

But no one was pregnant — surely not her nephew, but not his bride either. The aunt merely meant “now that Peter’s married”. However, since the conceptual distance between
married
and
pregnant
is fairly small, and in this highly emotional context even more so, it was very easy for her to slip from one to the other. Of course it wasn’t the aunt herself who was ardently dreaming of having a grandchild, but she had projected herself very effectively into the mentality of her sister.

P. has noticed that on countless occasions over the years he has used the verb “to read” when he meant “to write”, and vice versa. He has also observed that many of his friends have the same tendency, and moreover, he has seen that this is a reliable tendency across languages. Moreover, when speaking French, P. has often caught himself on the verge of blurting out the word “mort” (“dead” or “died”) when meaning to say “né” (“born”), stopping a hair short of making this most embarrassing slip-up.

David and his aging father Jim were driving by a cemetery. Jim commented, “This is where all four of your grandkids were born.” David, who had a daughter of five but no grandchildren, was bewildered by this absurd-sounding remark. But after a moment’s thought he realized that there was a great deal of sense to it — indeed, it was completely true — if he simply replaced two key concepts by their opposite concepts: “This is where all four of your grandparents are buried.”

Jim’s remark was in a certain sense more incorrect than if he had said either “This is where all four of your grandparents were born” or “This is where all four of your grandchildren are buried”, since those sentences contain only
one
error apiece. And yet, although Jim’s utterance contained
two
errors, it was much more self-consistent; it is as if one of the two conceptual slippages had brought the other one along on its coattails, as a result of an unconscious desire on Jim’s part to be internally coherent.

Struggling to recall the name of an acquaintance, a woman said, “Unfortunately, my brother’s not home, because I can’t ask him.”

In this error, one frequent conjunction (“so”) was replaced by another one (“because”) having the opposite meaning, thus inverting cause and effect.

A couple emerged from a pizza place with a hot pizza in a cardboard box. The man pointed to the rear of his bike and said, “I’ll take the pizza home in my trunk” (meaning in the basket located above the rear fender of his bike).

The
functional
analogy here is between parts of a wheeled vehicle that are designed to carry items of any sort. The
visual
analogy is that both a car’s trunk and this particular bicycle basket were located behind the “driver’s seat”, and moreover this particular basket happened to be a rather large one. Had the basket been located above the front wheel or had it been very small, then a slippage from “in my basket” to “in my trunk” would have been less likely to occur.

W. called the doorknob of the bathroom “the faucet”.

The
functional
analogy involves a small object that controls or regulates a much larger object. The
visual
analogy is that both fit comfortably in the palm of one’s hand and both work by twisting. There is also an aspect of priming involved, since it was not a
random
room’s doorknob that was called “faucet”, but a doorknob in a room that featured faucets aplenty.

Two friends were at the edge of a lake. One of them saw a hang-glider with a very thin white line diagonally descending from it towards a motorboat. Pointing skywards, she exclaimed, “Look at that glider being pulled by a boat!” The other replied, “Oh yes, I can see the string!” Several times more she called it a “string”, until her friend smiled and said, “Don’t you mean ‘wire’? You’re probably thinking of a kite.”

The
functional
aspect here is that wires and strings are both used to pull things in all sorts of contexts. The
visual
aspect is that kite strings often go extremely high into the sky and they link high-flying devices to people who are down on the ground, and moreover, kite strings are usually white, just as this tethering line seemed to be. Moreover, a hang-glider seen from far away looks very much like a kite. Even this visual analogy, however, has abstract aspects to it, since the role of the person flying the kite was being played by the boat, the role of the ground was being played by the water, and of course the role of the kite was being played by the hang-glider.

S. referred to the subtitles in a film she was watching as “the footnotes”.

The
functional
analogy is that both subtitles and footnotes are, generally speaking, short written aids to comprehension, while the
visual
analogy is clearly that both occur at or near the bottom of the visual field.

A brother and sister were emptying out their late parents’ house of clutter that had accumulated over some fifty-plus years. One of them referred to the basement of the house as “the attic”.

The
functional
analogy is that both areas of the house had been used for storing the same kinds of old, musty items over a period of decades. The
spatial
analogy is that both the basement and the attic were very large areas of the house, and both could be accessed only by taking stairs.

A. once complained, “I have a wart on my foot and it hurts when I walk.” He meant “blister”.

The
functional
analogy is that warts and blisters are unpleasant growths on one’s skin. The
visual
analogy is that they have roughly the same size and look somewhat alike.