Our new offerings are just another arrow in our quiver.
We can’t become a fossil; the business needs to evolve.
The community of practice is a Petri dish for ideas to thrive.
A few years ago, a friend of mine fostered a kitten that had suffered internal injuries and broken bones after being hit by a car. When the kitten survived surgery, the veterinary surgeon called her Kintsugi, a word for the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with liquid gold.
Metaphors are an inherent part of language that, for much of human history, have helped us communicate and learn. Derived from Greek, the word metaphor itself is a metaphor meaning "to carry across or beyond." Metaphors carry meaning from one context to another. Not only do metaphors enrich language, but they also help us understand new or abstract ideas by connecting them to ideas we're already familiar with.
Here are 5 neuroscience-based ways that metaphors enhance learning:
Existing Schemas
The only way we have of learning something new is by comparing it to something we already know. — James Geary, American author
When you see something represented that you know in life, there’s a pleasure of recognition. — Stacy Pies, NYU Professor
Metaphors link new ideas to existing mental schemas, or neural networks that organize knowledge in the brain. The concept of a banana, for instance, connects to a schema about your grandmother's banana bread, and to another schema about monkeys enjoying bananas, to another schema about the banana stand episode in Arrested Development.
Metaphors are useful in describing abstract concepts in relation to concrete schemas. Consider:
Theories as buildings: a shaky argument, a novel framework
Ideas as food: half-baked ideas, a voracious reader, an essential ingredient
By creating a sense of familiarity, metaphors help us learn something new by scaffolding new ideas onto existing knowledge.
Sensory Memory
Metaphors are woven intricately into the tapestry of language, and without them, it would be a dull, threadbare piece of cloth. — Hélène Schumacher, BBC Senior Marketing Manager
Through defamiliarization, metaphor helps stop us being desensitized to the everyday and awakens our senses." — Hélène Schumacher, BBC Senior Marketing Manager
Memory is essentially a collection of sensations coded into our brain. The more senses involved in an experience, the more retrievable the memory. Because sensory neurons communicate with the amygdala, a region of the brain that plays a key role in emotion, sensation-rich experiences are more emotionally salient. Emotion is our brains telling us "this information is important," making that information more memorable and retrievable.
Many metaphors appeal to our senses:
Shades of gray
Music to my ears
Bittersweet memories
The stench of failure
A painful lesson
By drawing comparison to sensory experiences, metaphors also improve understanding by making the abstract feel concrete. It's difficult to know what a particular emotion feels like to another person, but we can all relate to a bittersweet or painful sensation, which helps us understand and empathize.
Visual Learning
The first evidence of written language appeared just over 5000 years ago, while the modern eye evolved over 500 million years ago. It's perhaps no surprise that the human brain can process visual information at least 20 times faster than a single word: according to research, it takes about 250 milliseconds to identify a word and a mere 13 milliseconds to process an entire image. Widely circulated (but unvalidated) research suggests visual information may be processed up to 60,000 times faster than the same information presented as text.
Compare these two approaches:
Why is the image of the iceberg more effective?
An image captures our attention.
The visual juxtaposition of an iceberg and plastic bag has an emotional impact.
The image packs in more meaning in a concise format.
Viewers can make their own interpretation of the image (which relates to self-discovery).
Social Connection
There is a two-way thing that has to happen – you’re reaching out, you’re holding your hand out to the person you’re talking to and saying ‘please understand me.’ [There is] a feeling of being understood, of having the invitation accepted, the hand grasped. — Stacy Pies, NYU Professor
For all of human history, learning has been a social experience. We learn how to communicate from our parents. We learn social mores from our peers. We learn about the world from the stories we tell each other.
Metaphors generate the satisfaction of shared understanding between two people: one person tossing the metaphor over the fence hoping the receiver will recognize and "catch" it. Understanding, and feeling understood, foster a social bond that makes the transferred information more memorable due to emotional salience, and it also promotes a sense of trust between the learner and the teacher which supports future learning.
Self-Discovery
[Professor Stacy] Pies compares metaphors to '3D chess.' You’re thinking three things at once: what it says, what it means, and what it doesn’t mean. So what makes a good – or effective – metaphor? For Pies, it’s when the 'zing' happens. Certainly it’s those that are vivid, striking, and original. But it’s also about what the person making the metaphor is seeking to achieve in their audience. When they succeed in evoking their desired outcome, says Pies, there’s 'a wonderful connection… like a spark.'” — Hélène Schumacher, BBC Senior Marketing Manager
Think back to the iceberg image from earlier. When someone experiences a metaphor, they're forced to create meaning out of it through their own interpretation. An "aha!" moment is when an insight occurs through self-discovery; in fact, research shows us a neurological process happens in the brain that dampens some of our senses when such moments occur. This may explain what are colloquially referred to as "shower thoughts": the limited visual stimulation and white noise of the shower set up the brain for insights to occur. A fascinating idea, but I digress.
Visual and written metaphors lean into learner autonomy and, to an extent, trust the learner's experience and intelligence to make the critical link.
So how do you build effective metaphors into your learning experiences that that don't feel tired, cliché, or reductionist? Here are a few resources to start with:
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