The Metaphor Society

You say you feel stuck. Stuck to what? We study the metaphors beneath ordinary language — psychology, symbol, dream, embodied mind. Talks, essays, archive.

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

"I've hit a wall." "I'm carrying a lot." "I'm stuck."

Nobody is stuck in the abstract.

The Metaphor Society examines the figures that thought actually runs on — in therapy, language, dreams and myth.

Live talks, archive, articles: https://t.co/qU1THMxF9p

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

The body keeps turning up in language about thought: grasping an idea, chewing something over, a gut feeling, cold logic, a warm reception.

[Institute of Art and Ideas @IAI_TV]

For decades, Roger Penrose's theory of consciousness has been dismissed as fringe: the idea that human thought relies on non-computable quantum mechanics.

The standard objection has always been that quantum states collapse into ordinary classical ones far too quickly in a warm, noisy brain to matter for something as complex as cognition.

Neuroscientist Mike Wiest thinks that objection no longer holds.

New evidence shows stable quantum states surviving at much higher temperatures than anyone expected, and consciousness itself has structural features that make quantum mechanics a surprisingly natural place to look for answers.

Read the full article now. https://t.co/RXRymKWxa7

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

Friston's "The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?" (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2010) — the paper behind most predictive processing talk. https://t.co/B9ASPebpcY

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

Why the impossible passes without comment until the moment you wake.

Read the piece: https://t.co/2frfngyiUc

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

Live meetings, the recording archive, member discussions, articles and an interdisciplinary community.

Membership details: https://t.co/0Dj6E64ntX

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

The experiment, the replication problem, and what remains interesting about it anyway.

More on this: https://t.co/BIWj0fxikm

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

Ascend, descend, transcend, condescend. Status is height, and the language never lets you forget it.

More roots: https://t.co/ywBeVptiwN

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

A client will tell you their situation is like a room with no windows.

Ask how they got in. The answer is often the first new information in the conversation.

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

What membership actually includes.

More: https://t.co/0Dj6E64ntX

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

How the Society handles problems when they arise. Published, not improvised.

Read the policy: https://t.co/QC9vW9leBk

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

The practical question in the middle of the work: which thread do you pull?

More detail: https://t.co/zkf1jsY5Uc

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

The metaphors a person generates themselves carry a weight that borrowed ones never do.

Read the piece: https://t.co/7NO5aiDNAp

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

— William Blake, quoted by Aldous Huxley https://t.co/xe233VjiVS

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

"Something is holding me back."

What is holding? Where does it grip? And what would happen if it let go?

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

Uniform, unstructured input, and a perceptual system that starts inventing rather than idle.

In Psyche & Plasticity: https://t.co/igSuUlGyiC

[PsyPost.org @PsyPost]

Scientists have uncovered a surprising twist in how our minds age. A new brain scanning study shows that a mechanism designed to protect our memories eventually begins to blend them together, leading to everyday confusion. https://t.co/xogDWM0RHf

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

Feinstein and colleagues on the short-term anxiolytic effect of Floatation-REST (PLOS ONE, 2018). Open access. https://t.co/sA1wfWuB9t

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

Learn, question, discuss and connect with others working on how metaphor shapes experience.

Join the Society: https://t.co/JN75Xe58rX

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

Laing on what happens when a person is treated as no longer quite a person.

More detail: https://t.co/Dq77CIyVMC

[The Metaphor Society @metaphoricals]

One Latin root, eight English words, and the same pulling underneath all of them.

More: https://t.co/Q1HDtSGNcn