Analogy And Metaphor

Bill Smith, the manager and team leader at a Fortune 500 company rarely hires young recruits. He doesn’t trust them to make the right business decisions. He’s not prejudice, and has made young hires in the past, but it just didn’t work out.

“Young executives just don’t have the right mix of business smarts and experience for making multi-million dollar decisions,” he tells his cronies. “Would you give your kid the keys to the Bentley?”

About age 45 most adults stop relying on their prefrontal cortex – independent logic and reasoning, planning and organizing, for making critical decisions. It’s replaced by our brain’s limbic system (emotions), specifically their hippocampus, the center for memory, to make decisions and exercise options. Call it the battle of cognition vs. experience.

The younger you are, the less imbedded experiences in long-term memory.
Youth forces you to be more creative, analytical and speculative. Less reliance on the principle of - “Oh yeah, this is how we always did it!” Too dumb to fear failure?

Copycats

Instead of cognitive analysis we let analogies and metaphors lead us. We look at each new challenge and search our memory for mental imagery and associations
to compare the new experience with old memories and results.

Why?

It’s easier, faster than thinking, and intuitively feels right. Our limbic feedback whispers, “Hey, this new experience (problem) is just like what happened in our
Los Angeles office ten years ago.”

The power of mental images and association highjack our prefrontal cortex, (original thinking) and we choose the comfort-zone of familiar long-term memories.

Analogy

When we call the heart a fancy water pump, it’s an analogy. How about labeling the
brain a high-class computer or a 3-pound coconut? Analogy is derived from Greek,
meaning ratio, something having the same proportions.

Metaphor

It’s from good old Latin meaning a transfer, meta for along with (after) and phor,
meaning the bearer of. The Great Bald Eagle or Uncle Sam is a metaphor for
the USA. A metaphor is a figure of speech, symbol, a simile or image.

Both analogies and metaphors organize our thinking. If we accept the figure of speech we do not have to use our 3-pound coconut to work through the answer.

Politicians love analogies and metaphors as a shortcut to influencing and
conditioning the collective public mind. Remember Saddam Hussain? Bush
called him a Hitler, a Nazi, and said the U.S. had to beat him the way we did
Germany in World War II.

Call your associate an Einstein and the metaphor will warm her heart and mind for the next ten days. Say to your computer repairer, “Your work is Mickey Mouse!” and get out of his way.

Both analogies and metaphors create mental-images using the limbic (emotional) system, and inhibit your prefrontal cortex. We are not ranting against using figures of speech, but suggest you choose you exercise your neo-cortex, and its left-hemisphere of language and cognition.

The less you use your thinking brain, the less potent it becomes. Use it or lose it
sounds like a cliché, but is as true for your brain as well as muscles. Metaphors and
analogies in the wrong hands can be used to condition your feelings and behaviors.

Smile – a Lot

Folks on the other side of the telephone can tell whether you are smiling, and even
the type of smile. Before you say, so what? - the smile in the voice often decides a
Go or No-Go decision by the listener.

University of Portsmouth researchers, published in Speech Communication, 10.01.07, report there is informational power in a smile. It changes the sound of
the speaker’s voice and lingers at a subliminal level.

The original research on smiling was by French scientist Guillaume Duchenne,
1806-1875. Scientists in the 21st century call a real smile a Duchenne Smile because it combines the use of zygomaticus muscles of both sides of the face, and crinkling of the eyes.

Later named the Pan-American (phony) smile, only the teeth were shown without
the involvement of the eyes. It was used in some airline advertisements and caused
negative feedback by consumers. We react instinctively to genuine and phony smiles
and can intuitively tell the difference.

Physiology of a Smile

A genuine smile requires the interaction of from 10 to 100 facial muscles. We also
may smile because of anxiety, called a grimace. Amazingly, humans can differentiate between genuine, phony, and a non-smiling voice. We do not have to
stop and analyze, it is based on stimulus/response.

Amy Drahota, lead researcher offers conclusive evidence folks can recognize a
suppressed smile from a non-smile, as well as a Duchenne from a Pan-American
flash of teeth.

This research will impact computer generated speech programs, computer games,
and that robot on the telephone we call automated answering machines.

Laughter

Does laughter require a good joke to fill the air? Is it an advanced smile? What use
is it? And finally, why do we value laughter so much?

The latest research indicates laughter is an instinct and genetic behavior. It occurs 20x more often in social setting than in solitary situations. The punch line for laughter is a group of sounds that bind folks together.

Experiments indicate people will fall into a fit of laughter over Hello! A joke is not
required. It is a social lubricant and one that inhibits aggression. The actual stimulus for laughter is not the punch line where the he slips on a banana peel, but
social bonding. Watch a group and notice a lack of smiles and laughter, and you will
witness social distancing.

The Results

Smiling and laughter cause better respiration through more oxygen intake. The human immune system and digestive system activities are measurably improved by being in the midst of smiles and laughter. Even a dumb, phony laughing sound track on TV changes your mood, attitude and expectations from negative or neutral to positive and healthful.

Do rich people – the upper 10% in the economy – laugh and smile more than the
poor and middle-class?

The results show financial success does not cause joy and happiness, while being
with relaxed others in a social bonding environment does.

Endwords

We suggest you improve your lifelong learning, long term memory and
stress-busting skills in order to extend your longevity and avoid dementia.
Would reading and remembering three (3) books, articles and reports in the time others can hardly finish one, improve your competence (personal productivity) in school and career?

Ask us how. See ya.

copyright © 2008 H. Bernard Wechsler www.speedlearning.org
hnw@speedlearning.org
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