One critical review of Steven Pinker’s populist science book The Stuff of Thought describes how the title “Things the Mind Does” might be more fitting. The Stuff of Thought is not a neuroscience account of the relation between our crinkled grey matter, and the phenomena we call thinking. Instead Pinker’s linguistic vantage point looks at relatively higher level emergent phenomena. Structures just below the acts of everyday utterances. For someone like myself constantly tip-toeing away from the realm of direct perception towards some kind aesthetics of cognition (if such a thing could be said), an individual with a trained sensitivity to spatial/visual composition trying to understand the untamed world of dynamic and intelligently responsive media, I found Pinker’s account of the metaphoric relationships between spatial, temporal, and causal reasoning worth much of its space on my shelf.

I originally picked the book up a couple years ago, but it languished until recently. Staring at me one morning I thought I’d check it for a contemporary views on Lakoff and Johnson’s ideas of metaphor. Sure enough there was a chapter on it inside that reaffirmed the key points of what was described 20 years prior. As I revisited his ideas though I caught pieces of more contemporary thinking that elaborates on our metaphoric constructions.

Pinker’s discussion of spatial and temporal metaphoric structures are where I found this book most interesting. He describes how, regardless of ontologies be them physical, social, or capitalistic, we understand abstract relationships in terms of potentials for causality. The potential of influence (or may I say the potential for manipulation) is analogous to spatial proximity. Even more interesting is how we cognitively parse physical and continuous spatial relationships intro discreet states based on the functional or causal relationships of the entities involved. For example, being ‘under’ an umbrella is as much or more a statement about being able to stay dry as it is about the abstract positions of the elements involved.

[As an aside, and I may be out of my depth here, the conversion of a continuous variable into a discreet value of causal meaning seems to be some very basic form of 'thinking'. McCullough describes intelligent systems as those that respond to input in deliberate and varied ways. This is useful for categorization of existing artifacts, but less so for thinking through the creation of them. Perhaps it wold be more helpful to say that 'interactive' systems convert continuous input into discreet output, the variety of input and the the complexity of the conversion reflecting the general complexity of the system. This would give a starting point for those learning how to design such systems, a small reoccurring problem to understand. A mapping problem really.]

The verified importance of causality in our thinking, not to mention Pinker’s particular interest in verbs, makes my apparent fixation on designed manipulation less discouraging. (Perhaps it’s fitting that both Pinker and Miyamoto both are interested in verbs; Pinker finds in them the clues for how we interpret the world, Miyamato uses them to define how we play with it). Reading about the eternally present, if even implicit, agent in statements of action struck me in how similar to manipulation if painted verbs in general. The content is better than heartening though. Pinker presents research by Len Talmy, a linguist whose studies into causal perception have exposed a mental model of force dynamics. His studies look at our perception of action and effect in terms of a set of common mental configurations that concepts like prevention and helping map to. Finally, Pinker discusses our universally shared sensitivity to chains of action and intention exist even when end consequences are identical, and plays a major role in our understanding of ethical actions.

One last take away from How The Mind Works was a few related low level metaphoric structures. In my discussions about manipulation I always hit on the problem of metaphor definition. To manipulate something observable in screen space, it must first be described (and modeled). The limitless ways we would could look at something are exceptionally problematic though. What would be useful would be a limited but powerful set of categories to study. “Metaphors We Live By” showed how a great deal of thinking grows from ideas like Object, Container, and Surface. “How the Mind works” introduced me to some interesting elaborations on some of these constructs. Particularly interesting were the relationships between entity, multiples, and aggregates. Pinker shows how entities are defined by their spatial bounds, but can also be viewed, in a sort of figure ground shift, as an aggregate or media, whose shape is ephemeral and temporary. This shift can be used in language for effect in such statements as ‘There was cat all over the highway.’ (which dismisses the structural qualities that regularly define a the unfortunate creature). Also interesting is the distinction between aggregates and a large collections of similar but individual entities. While this distinction is universal, the placement of the dividing line is not. English treats hair and grass as aggregates but other languages describe them as multiples. i.e.. One might comb their hairs. I like these structures as they provide a cohesive set to select from when choosing a creating a model for something visual. A simple choice with implications for potential forms of manipulation.

If you’re familiar with contemporary ideas of language and mind you might not be interested in reading the entire book, but I’d recommend at least Chapter 4, “Cleaving The Air”. Chapter 5, “The Metaphor Metaphor” could also provide a brief but good alternate to “Metaphors we Live By”.