by Mark Turner (2014)
Reading Time: 4 minutes
From the Jacket: What makes human beings so innovative, so adept at rapid, creative thinking? Where do new ideas come from, and once we have them, how can we carry them mentally into new situations? What allows our thinking to range easily over time, space, causation, and agency?
Mark Turner holds degrees in Mathematics and English from UC-Berkeley. His first works studied literature in the light of cognitive science. Turner is best known for his book, coauthored with Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. The Way We Think was published in 2002, but the core concept of conceptual blending had been percolating through the pair’s work for nearly a decade. Twelve years later, Turner wrote The Origin of Ideas, a book that I classify as popular psychology intended to bring his ideas to a wider audience.
The book is erudite, at times very engaging, and the author is enthusiastic about the subject. However, as a reader I was not enthralled. Blending itself seems to be a useful metaphor, but perhaps also a tautology. In the first case, perhaps it gives a clearer way to think about the operations the mind performs in concocting complex ideas. However, the point that more complex ideas are made up of simpler ideas seems more philosophical than scientific, and not especially mind-blowing at that.
The book blasts through dozens of examples of blending at work, but there was no description of a physical mechanism and only one attempt at testing a concrete prediction (which was in the appendix).
The prediction involved a grammatical construct referred to as past tense + proximal deictic (PT+PD). The example from the book is “he now saw that….” The original researcher (Nikiforidou 2010, 2012) used conceptual blending theory to posit that “the grammatical pattern has the ‘effect of zooming in on the events.’” Based on that, Turner predicted that usage of PT+PD in news reports would often be accompanied by a “zoom-in” visual. The prediction sounds very specific, but:
- The link between the proposed mental process and the visual effect seems more serendipitous than necessary.
- PT+PD is designed to sound portentous. A significant narrative moment is likely to cause more dramatic grammar and more dramatic camerawork. Stated another way, the content of the broadcast is likely confounding grammatical/visual variables.
- As an armchair grammarian, PT+PD seems to signify a shift in tone or expectation. I would expect any psychological effects related to conceptual blending to be overshadowed by heightened narrative tension or subverted expectations.
- While the author found that the PT+PD was often accompanied by a zoom-in, he did not establish a base rate (how often is zoom-in used in a broadcast regardless of the grammar at the time) or express any specific statistics
The short version is that as told in the book, the only prediction marked “successful” seems tenuous at best. Given that The Origin of Ideas was written 12 years after the landmark book and nearly 20 years after research in the field began, the concept may lack Popperian falsifiability.
The apparently more scholarly The Way We Think, which I have not read, may provide more sources and documentation. I’m certainly not qualified to judge any published papers or studies; all I can say is that this book did not convince me of anything. However, the author is passionate about the subject, the book is filled with erudite literary examples and careful breakdowns of thought patterns, and there is even the occasional brainteaser. I don’t recommend it, but it wasn’t a waste of time either.
Recommendation: No recommendation