Use analogies and metaphors to your advantage. To remind you: an analogy uses the word “like,” as in “this drug is like a protective shield around the cells.” A metaphor links an idea to an unrelated object, as in, “Our plan will be the engine of our growth and prosperity.”
Analogies and metaphors are the tools of poets and skilled communicators, who strive to link ideas to the realm of the senses and to what people already have in their minds.
President Lincoln, like most men of his day, grew up poor in the countryside. So when he said that an opponent’s idea had about as much substance “as a soup made from the passing shadow of a starving crow,” he was linking his opponent’s idea to the perhaps common experience of a thin, tasteless, and watery soup.
Brain research linguist, Adele Goldberg, has discovered the parts of the brain associated with emotion and taste.
“She’s a sweet girl. He peppered her with questions. She stayed to the bitter end.”
Professor Goldberg says, “When you talk about abstract ideas, you can’t help but use metaphorical language.”
“Pick a topic–love, anger, anything–and you start to talk using words from a more concrete domain.”
“I blew my top. I was putty in his hands. I’m so confused I’m tied up in a knot.”
Among linguists there is a debate about how people make meaning out of such words. Are they just symbols that stand in for more literal substitutes, or do people imagine the physical sensation behind the metaphor as they use them?
Goldberg and her co-researcher also found that metaphors engage the part of the brain involving emotional processing as well.
“Since literal ways exist to say something, it’s interesting to ask why do we even use metaphors?”
Goldberg had native German speakers lie in an fMRI scanner while they read taste metaphors, such as “She treated him sweetly,” and then she used another more literal word, “She treated him kindly.”
When the listeners encountered the taste metaphors, the parts of the brain collectively known as the gustatory cortices lit up–the same parts activated when tasting a meal–suggesting that the brains of the German listeners were using their sense of taste to make meaning of the words.
So, in addition to finding that our brains want to taste our words, Professor Goldberg has also discovered that a sentence, such as, “I had a rough day,” is more evocative than,”I had a bad day.”
That makes sense. “Rough” is scratchy. “Bad” is vague.
Weirdly, the subjects of these experiments didn’t consciously find the sentences more emotional–the greater emotional engagement was only evident by looking at the brain activity.
By using neuroimaging to examine exactly what is going on in people’s minds when they hear metaphorical language, the research helps explain the underlying science behind what poets and orators have known intuitively for centuries. Words count. Words matter.
In fact, in the beginning was the word.
Those of us who use words well will be those who are understood, remembered, and believed.