In the last post, Part 1 of the We are our Images 2-post series, I talked about how images are our body’s response to our environment. We take in the world we experience through our senses, forming images in our brain. These images are the language of all the information and understanding of our moving through the world. This means images are holistic, and all at once – we never stop experiencing so we never stop imaging.
I left the post with two questions: What does the brain do with all this ‘all-at-onceness’? And, how do we take all of that ‘all-at-onceness’ so that we can convey our experiences to someone else?
Enter the left brain. The part of the brain we sometimes think of as the thinking brain, the prefrontal cortex, or left brain, takes these all-at-once images and uses them to make decisions for moving forward. Let’s say I meet someone and I have an image of an exploding bottle rocket and a sulfuric smell. I don’t find that pleasant, and I experience it as hot and unpredictable, and so my left brain may decide to step back from this person, or cut the conversation short. That’s a decision. It is also in this stage that we put words to our images.
Words, what we say to others, are our ways of expressing the images that are inside us. Literally, our way of taking the images with all their memories, emotions, feelings and so forth from inside our heads and presenting it to another person so that we can have a dialogue or shared experience. When we learn to speak directly to the images we see, our conversations become much brighter, more interesting and more relevant.
Images come from body experiences, so physical understandings underlie our words and phrases. A lot of work on this has been conducted in the field of cognitive linguistics, especially by George Lakoff with his theories of embodied cognition. Here’s a way to think about it, inspired by Lakoff’s examples:
Step back in time to when you were a baby. You are a brand new being (your consciousness) in a physical container (your body). So, one of the first physical relationships you learn is out/in, or the properties of containment. You put something in (milk) and things come out (poop). When something is in you, it is a part of you. When it is out, it is not a part of you, it is separate from you (hence difficulties potty training because the human wants to be all and one). Now, grow up. You find yourself as an adult telling your friend about your relationship. You are “IN” the relationship. The man has “worked his way IN to your heart; e.g. he’s become a part of you, the relationship is a part of you. When you break up its, “I’m getting OUT of this relationship”.
One more example: As a baby, one of the first things we do is start touching our mothers and fathers and things they give us to hold. Think of giving your pinkie to your child and how they curl their little hands around it and hold it tight. They GRASP it. There are things as a baby we grasp easy – mommy’s pinky – and things that we don’t grasp easily like those that hang above us and dangle (mobiles over our cribs) that we stretch toward and work and reach for and try and pull down, or balls that are too big for our hands yet. Now grow up. You find yourself saying things like: “That statistics class is too hard to GRASP”; “That’s OVER MY HEAD”, or “I’m REACHING for a new way to solve this problem”, “It’s a STRETCH, but I think I can eventually run 7 miles”.
So, how we move in the world shapes our language. Underneath these bodily understandings are actual images, which we can learn to see. So, the first question is what does the brain do with the all-at-onceness of images and part of that answer is the left brain making decisions and creating language to describe the images to ourselves and others. The second question is how do we take the all-at-onceness of images and convey them to others? Part of that answer is language, but the other part is the special thing that we do with language – make stories!
If images and experiencing is all-at-once, the first thing I have to do is put a boundary on it, which is time. I have to take the all-at-once and change it to “a set moment I am going to explain”. Enter story. Story, at its most basic, is beginning, middle and end. Through story I can bracket the all-at-onceness of my life so that I can look at it for myself and tell it to someone else. Characters, plot and so forth are conventions (vehicles) for conveying a bracketed experience series of images.
Let’s think about metaphor for a moment, and about common things we refer to which are actually quite abstract. The statistics example above is about the very abstract phenomenon called “Understanding”. Running is the very abstract “GOALS”. We can talk about anything – freedom, democracy, love, happiness – every single one of these abstract concepts will have a bodily experience connected with it because that is how we connect with the world. Body experiences = images, so we construct metaphors to convey the holistic experience of our images.
Image gives us the metaphors because image is the language of the body, and the metaphor is our way to describe the image. Here is how that works, all put together:
Through our senses we experience our world. These experiences travel the nervous system to our brain where they exist as images. We want to bracket a particular image/experiencing moment to convey a meaningful something to another person, so we attach language and time structure to it. This gives rise to narrative – a story – which is understood around the world and across cultures. Metaphors are simply our language to describe the very holistic image, and thus form building blocks for language.
Let’s reverse the process a moment. Let’s say we hear that the new tax law is going to make it impossible for us to bring home as much pay as we’re accustomed to. We EXPERIENCE that in our body – we may feel CONSTRICTED, and tell someone this law is LACKING in benefits. We understand abstract tax as it affects us, which we understand because at some point in our growing up something was taken away from us, and we felt constricted. We will have an image for this experience in our body – it may be a deflated balloon, or a sagging open door that has been broken into – the image will be specific to the individual, but the energy and details of the image are understandable to anyone who has trained in understanding images, which is to say understand how we are physically based beings with energies that move in different directions and know how these energies move.
This is the tip of the iceberg, and more posts on images will follow, but hopefully this gives a good taste, even if it is quite academic.
