Customer Reviews

The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities

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I think at some level this is a book that wants to live in two worlds, Academia, and the New York Times Bestseller List. But to live on the NYTBL, the text must understandable to the lay-reader, and this book is not "Cognitive Science for Dummies." Instead, the majority of this book is an exhaustive taxonomy of conceptual blending and its many parts in dry technical language. As an academic work, it may be brilliant, but I am not qualified to render that judgment. I only wished that while reading it, I had an instructor to go to for clarification. I did not have the background necessary to fully enjoy the intricacies of the subject matter. That said, I am still glad that I read it.

Blending is the capacity to take two mental spaces, and connect them in certain ways such that a blended mental space emerges. What the reader finds in this book is that this sub-conscious mental facility is always at work, and that it is humans' advanced blending operations that in effect separate us from any other species on the planet. It is our heightened ability to blend that gave rise to art, science, and language.

The best thing I took away from this read was a fascinating theory of the origin of language. It is well written and defended with rigorous logic.

It is important to consider who should really read it though. It has potentially profound implications to the poet, the painter, the AI researcher, the philosopher, the teacher, and the parent, but I think one should also consider if they have the basis necessary to really "dig" what is being said here. I didn't, although I reiterate, I am glad I read it. So I guess the prerequisites are one three credit class in Cognitive Studies or Philosophy of Language. Alternatively, the neophyte could survive given the time and fortitude to do the research that will assist in making sense of this book as he goes along.

Last note. If you do decide to read this one, make sure that you divine your own answer to the Buddhist Monk riddle before moving on to the next chapter, no matter how long it takes to achieve the answer. Doing this will really give you "global insight" into the difference between forms understanding and the development of a successful blend.

Conceptual blending, the basis of this book, is basically the ability of the mind to take two different concepts, form a cognitive link between them and produce a third new concept that is a blending together of the first two (very similar to the thesis, antithesis and synthesis concepts). This ability is what has allowed the human species to move beyond simple logic into creative thinking. It is what has allowed us to excel in arts, develop religious thought, create a language and engage in many other activities that required insight and intuitive thinking. "The Way We Think" provides detailed analysis of this blending and how it not only has affected our past but also how it affects us today.

Filled with numerous examples to help the reader understand the nuances of conceptual blending and how it works in various scenarios, it is a fascinating read. This is not easy reading for those who are not at least somewhat knowledgeable in the area of cognitive sciences. I would consider it a very valuable academic text but not for the average lay reader. There are less complex books available on this subject that would make easier reading for the novice but this is one of the best academic level books available if you want a more complete understanding of conceptual blending and how we are able to blend concepts to create new levels of knowledge. A highly recommended read for technical oriented people.

Fauconnier and Turner argue that in the recent human past, e.g. 50,000 years ago, humans developed the capability to think in new ways, what they call double scope blending. This then led to both a cultural explosion, and speech. In writing a book like this, the authors face a dilemma: in arguing for their theories they would like to show the weaknesses of competing theories, but if they are writing for the general reader, this may mean devoting lots of time to first explaining the competitive theories. In discussing the origins of speech, they were able to accomplish this reasonably well, but elsewhere the book had brief allusions to other theories which I found of little value, as a layman reader The authors mostly do a nice job illustrating their concepts, although some of the examples do require some math background, and one small example even requires a knowledge of French (no interpretation given), and this all could have been avoided. My major problem with the book is that I think the authors are trying to make more of their ideas than is really there: what they have shown is that blending seems to be ONE insightful way of imaging how higher level thought proceeds. Had they been content with this, and less breathless in their account, they could have written a shorter, more focused, better book. Nor have they convinced me that primitive speech, based on the "simplex" network, using their terminology, wouldn't have been useful, and not required the capability to do double scope blending: thus speech could have evolved more slowly, along with the capability of physically making a variety of sounds, and mental capacities. Furthermore, the authors seems to look at the historical record and see what they want to, stating points of view as facts: for example, I believe there are still reputable scientists who believe that the Neanderthals might have had religious/artistic capabilities.

This is an academic treatise. That's unclear from the popsci-like title and subtitle. Nonetheless, it's a very fulfilling work, once you digest it. The authors present their theory of the process by which creative thought operates, called Conceptual Blending. The process is subconscious and pervasive in everyday thought. Essentially, you metaphorically reapply concepts and relationships from the source domain onto a target domain. You're looking right now at a classic example: your computer desktop, where the source is a paper office ("folders", "files", "trash"). There are multiple and flexible ways in how the process operates. And this book deals with its theory, taxonomy, analysis and application. With the awareness obtained after reading this book, you can try to examine your own learning processes. If done with skill, it will aid your learning and imagination. And for the lay reader, that's the best reason to endure this academic work.

The bad stuff first: this book almost has to be read twice. The idea of conceptual blending has many different sides (the different types of conceptual blend, compression within a blend, how certain grammatical structures call up this or that blend, etc.), and there is just no way to provide all of these different sides at once. The first few chapters are therefore pretty rough going, since some of the material that you should ideally have in order to understand them does not come until much later. Part of this is due to imperfect arrangement on the part of the authors, and part of it comes from the complexity of the topic itself. This is not a beach read by any means.

However, if you can plow through the first few chapters, the ideas within are extremely useful. The authors explain metaphor as a special case of what they call conceptual blending, which can also explain how certain words have the meanings which they do (e.g., "prevent," "fake," "eligible") as well as how certain syntactical structures call up meanings in our minds (e.g., "Joe is my boss," "jailbait," "houseboat"). The point is that literal meaning is not the default that our mind uses, with metaphor being the mind's last resort: rather, conceptual blending is the basis for how the mind constructs meaning, with judgments about the literal or metaphorical nature of meaning being added on later.
This book works marvellously well alongside certain works by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (e.g., Philosophy Made Flesh). Definitely a good addition to your library if you're curious about the nature and origins of language, meaning, and higher-order rational thought in human beings.

A book for those interested in how the brain processes information, makes links between new information and existing knowledge, and uses "metaphor" in the widest sense of the word. Fauconnier and Turner present a thorough and complete theory of the higher level operation of the mind called "conceptual blending". The theory is fascinating and compelling. The book builds from simple examples to complex examples, and lays down a robust and well constructed foundation for thinking about your own thinking.

For me, the book offered new insight into my use of metaphor to help my coaching clients and students change.

One word of warning. Although the book is written in a pleasant and readable style, the material presented is not simple. Expect to be challenged!

In the fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence, the most important unresolved problem concerns the methodology by which the human brain combines concepts from two or more disparate domains. The solution of this problem will result in a dramatic breakthrough in how we perceive human thought and how we can implement it in computing machines. To this day no scientist, technician, or engineer can claim to have a full view of how the human brain can take information about a musical composition for example and combine it with information detailing the rules of a chess game.

It is easy to see that a musical composition can be thought of as a series of symbols written down in a definite order under the constraint of certain rules of harmony. A chess game may be viewed as a series of moves on a chessboard under the constraint of the rules of chess. These movies can easily be transcribed in symbolic form. Musical compositions and chess games can therefore be viewed as a series of symbols written on paper or computer screen. In this way one can view musical composition and chess playing as part of the same category, namely the category that describes how entities in time, here musical notes or chess moves, can be represented by symbols.

But having this knowledge will not allow one to become a good composer and good chess player. For that one requires an understanding of the proper places in conceptual space that both of these activities lie, and how to combine these concepts in highly creative ways. What at first glance may be very disparate domains, musical composition and chess playing could be combined into one or more concepts that retain certain features of each domain but form a compact and effective knowledge base for which to compose music or play chess.

The authors of this book call this process "conceptual blending" and have done an excellent job of presenting to the reader their research and commentary on how the human mind performs this activity. Many readers, especially those who demand their support from cognitive neuroscience, will of course view their opinions as controversial. But as a whole they are a good first step in trying to understand what might be called the combinatorics of concepts. Readers in the artificial intelligence community, especially those that are determined to implement these ideas in real computing machines, may find the book helpful but will no doubt also realize after reading it that much remains to be done for a total understanding of domain-general human thinking.

Some of the examples that the authors use in the book are somewhat elementary but this was no doubt by design so as to make it more accessible to a general audience. There are places where this is not the case, as for example their use of the complex number system as being a "double-scoped network." Imagination plays a big role in conceptual blending, and this sets it apart from mere symbol manipulation, i.e. from the deceptions of the "Eliza" machine. They outline four different types of `blending' or `integration' networks and give real-world examples of each. As one might expect, the blending of concepts is a complex process, with the production of concepts never the result of applying just one mapping. It is also natural to expect that any logical inferences that take place in each of the domains may not survive when these domains are subjected to conceptual blending. The resulting blend may have vestiges (one might call them "shadows") of these inferences but the creative process involved in conceptual blending may result in inferences that are completely at odds with those in the original domains. Along these same lines it would seem that conceptual blending is irreversible, with this irreversibility even more apparent the more "entangled" the blended concepts are. This would raise the question as to the evolutionary advantage or energy requirements of conceptual blending, with the answer to this question no doubt arising from the view that a degree of compression is involved in it. Therefore the recollection/storage of huge knowledge bases becomes unnecessary, due to the ability to blend many ideas or concepts into a compact and useful form.

A natural question to ask is whether these networks can be embedded in the computational paradigm, and if so, how computationally complex this implementation would be in real computing machines. The authors emphasize strongly that conceptual blending is not algorithmic, and so any machine implementation may require new computing paradigms and data structures than what have been developed hitherto. There are many researchers in the artificial intelligence community who are working feverishly to implement conceptual blending in some form or another. These efforts have been classified as "artificial general intelligence" and although most of this activity is outside of the realm of the academia, it has attracted the attention of many highly talented (and courageous) individuals.

It might be tempting to view the theory of conceptual blending as outlined in this book as being one that could be easily viewed in terms of the field of category theory in mathematics. But in the latter concepts in one domain are related to another by "functors" that retain most the logic of each domain. Conceptual blending on the contrary mixes up this information and creates objects that could be very dissimilar to the ones in the starting domains. Of course, this does not mean that some sort of generalized category theory could not be invented that would emulate most of the features of conceptual blending. This would be an interesting research project for those who want to give the theory of conceptual blending a more rigorous mathematical foundation. In this regard a branch of mathematics called `topos theory' may be of assistance here.

Most books on creativity try to systematize complex phenomena or theories about the brain by laying out simple phases, steps, behaviors, and instances that underpin them. Some that come to mind over the past quarter-century are Howard Gardner's "Frames of Mind," Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "Flow," Michael Gelb's "How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci," and Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind."

Not so with Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, whose maintain that conceptual blending--the blending of disparate ideas to form a logical basis for creating and understanding a hierarchy of increasingly complicated ideas. What we take for granted, argue the authors, like our ability to conceptualize how baseball and Wall Street are similar and how an African-American Bostonian is not a Senegalese tribesman, is the result of complex networking and symbolic thinking, which the book illustrates in numerous examples that at times belabor or convolute the point. "The Way We Think" avoids the practical, remaining on a theoretical plane throughout; however, Fauconnier and Turner are masterful theorists.

The book is a sort of complement for the authors previous works (1994, 1996, 1997). It is an outstanding work as it clarifies the ways nets, frames, blends and intregations function. It is a didactical book because it goes and returns with examples which help us understand its terminology and content. It is a book of great help for all the ones interested in analysing texts competently and understanding how our mind uses linguistic expressions (triggers)to build up meaning.

The beginning of the book is very good with a perspective on scientific thinking.

The idea of blending is then clearly explained with a multitude of examples. But it is overdone with too many examples and too many question and answer discussions. One has almost the impression that the text is in fact intended as a study supplement.

But in the end one asks, isn't this all just another word for association and so what any way. It is vague in a way not to be useful.

Nevertheless the text is referenced by many cognitive linguists and is a source of inspiration apparently.