"We often think, naively, that missing data are the primary impediments to intellectual progress - just find the right facts and all problems will dissipate. But barriers are often deeper and more abstract in thought. We must have access to the right metaphor, not only to the requisite information."
 -  Stephen J. Gould, The Flamingo's Smile

Plenty of food for thought here. The emphasis on the "right" metaphor is particularly critical. Metaphors wield much power. When they resonate (thereby allowing us to reach meaningful insights), we cling to them and use them as anchor points that guide our understanding of complex phenomenon. A famous case in point is Einstein's "Train Metaphor," a thought experiment to explain the Relativity of Simultaneity. So it is important that we latch on to the right metaphor.

Makes it worth exploring how they - Metaphors, Analogies and Insight - relate to one another. We learn fairly early on in childhood, when taught the intricacies of a language, that metaphors are in fact a kind of analogy. In the neuroscience of creativity though, these are often treated as being distinct, largely because the paradigms to study analogical reasoning and metaphorical processing are quite different, and their associated brain activation profiles only partially overlap. The question though is whether it makes sense to do this. Is that enough of a foundation to argue for fundamental and even qualitative differences between metaphor and analogy? Is it a case of X versus Y? Or X1 versus X2? If it is the latter, when we need to reframe how we approach this subject.

Here is an interesting characterization of metaphors (Crowther, 2003):
"Aristotle’s emphasis on ‘vividness’ in his account of metaphor is missed by many later theories. Metaphor operates by the imaginative realization and traversal of connections which exist in the ‘latent field’ of possible associations for the tenor of the metaphor. As such, it exploits and draws attention to structural features involved in all acts of cognition."

This depiction beautifully articulates how metaphors are imbued with the necessary features that allow insights to transpire. Which leads to the next point. How are they linked? The relation between metaphors, analogies and insight has been considered in terms of how the use of metaphors and analogies can lead to insights during problem solving (Keefer & Landau, 2016). But how does this come to pass? Crowther's poetic characterization gives an inkling of the operationalization of this process. Psychologists are necessarily concrete in their explanations. Here is one take from key researchers in the field (Kounios & Beeman, 2014): "Insight occurs when a person suddenly reinterprets a stimulus, situation, or event to produce a nonobvious, nondominant interpretation. This can take the form of a solution to a problem (an "aha moment"), comprehension of a joke or metaphor, or recognition of an ambiguous percept."  

Paul Taylor published an article in 1989 on "Insight and Metaphor" in the journal Analysis which explores the nature of a metaphor, and the conditions under which it does or does not express an insight. Here is an excerpt from the introductory paragraph.
"Theorists generally agree that a metaphor can be a stimulus to insight. 'Juliet is the sun' leads us to see various ways in which Juliet is, literally, like the sun. Since there is no stage at which all illuminating points of comparison have been exhausted, there is a sense in which a metaphor like this is ineliminable; something would be lost if we replaced it with a finite list of comparisons or other literal paraphrase. Part of the value of Simon Blackburn's discussion of metaphor in Spreading The Word ([1], pp.171-9) lies in the way it focuses the discussion on a clear and fruitful question: whether a live metaphor can function only as a stimulus to insight or whether a metaphorical statement can in itself express an insight or truth."

When I saw this GIF image several months ago, I experienced a clear moment of the latter. I felt I had stumbled across a wonderful metaphor that depicts how insight occurs in our minds. An insight about the instantiation of the process of insight from a metaphor.

Is it the "right" metaphor, though?

Disclaimer 1: This is not a post about cats.
Disclaimer 2: No cats were harmed in the writing of this piece.

There's a curious inclination we have in the interpretation of findings in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. And that is to assume that there is a single true reading of a situation that can be then applied across a range of other (not necessarily similar) situations. That one way of theorizing trumps the rest. All you need to do is to prove it once. An extreme winner-takes-all principle. A recent example of the vehemence with which such interpretations are made was epitomized within a recent AEON article by Roger Epstein on "The empty brain" which lead to an uproar within the online scientific community and resulted in some rather scathing rebuttals.

What is noteworthy in these discussions is that it is rare to hear views which suggest that we might need more than one metaphor to "represent" (for want of a better word) what it is that the brain does. Let's take the case of the McBeath study that Epstein favors. Even if one was to be fully on board with the finding that the action of a baseball outfielder catching a fly ball can be carried out without resorting to a representational view of the mind, this in itself does not mean that every aspect of human cognition and behavior can be explained away in the same manner and follows the same principles. What about situations in which we are not merely reacting to an external cue? What if there is no overt motor response to speak of? What about imaginative aspects of our daily mental life, like the happenings in my mind while I conceive of this post?

It is not unfair to say that the dominant ideas in cognitive psychology and neuroscience regarding the workings of the human mind are primarily based on stimulus-oriented thought and action in the form of behavioral and/or brain reactions to stimuli. But how do the theories fare when applied to the kind of contexts that draw on the human imagination? One can't answer that question because most do not even broach these stimulus-independent worlds to be able to provide explanations for the same. 

What is clear though is that one size almost certainly does not fit all. And if one subscribes to the belief that it does, then the onus is on the experts who propound a seemingly monolithic view of the mind - representational or non-representational -  to provide the necessary explanations which will account for how they believe both reactive and proactive aspects of human cognition and behavior are instantiated.


Postscript:
It later occurred to me that a good demonstration of the "there is more than one to skin a cat" notion as applied in the neurosciences was recently accomplished by Güntürkün & Bugnyar (2016). In this paper, they accommodate  the fact that certain bird species can perform cognitive skills to the level of primates despite having no neocortex. And they do this not by saying - "Hey people! This means the cortex does not underpin cognition." Their argumentation is more nuanced and hence more powerful. As birds have a functional analog to the prefrontal cortex  - "several large pallial aggregations without apparent laminar structure" - they propose that over the course of the long parallel evolution of birds and mammals, both developed similar brain organizations which converge for cognition and complex behaviors.

Disclaimer 3: The lead author - Onur Güntürkün - was my PhD Advisor. A decade ago. And unfortunately (for me), I played no part in the conceptualization of the said 2016 paper.