Read Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking Online
Authors: Douglas Hofstadter,Emmanuel Sander
By contrast, there are cases where it seems clear that the pieces of knowledge activated during perception go beyond what the senses perceive directly. For example, the facts that a dog can protect or can threaten a human being do not directly follow from perception, but the act of perceiving a dog allows these facts to be activated and recalled; thus visual input facilitates access to functional knowledge. The fact that footnotes and subtitles are both pieces of writing aimed at facilitating comprehension, and the fact that blisters and warts are both unpleasant-looking skin growths that one wishes to rid oneself of, are functional pieces of knowledge that any adult has in dormant storage and that can be activated by visual perception. (The same could be said for the relationship between the concepts
round
and
roll
, but such a basic connection is so deeply ingrained that it is hard to think of it as having been learned.)
Are the foregoing types of errors limited to the domain of language? Although the term “slip” is generally thought of as referring to speech errors (as in “slip of the tongue”), the same kinds of phenomena show up outside language, in the world of physical actions. Indeed, speech errors are just one manifestation of a broad phenomenon that concerns categories in general, and which reveals itself in various contexts, including physical actions. Action errors, too, have their own eloquent fashion of showing how conceptual wires can get crossed thanks to analogies.
Sometimes we activate appropriate categories but apply them to inappropriate targets. A typical example is when, after pouring ourself a cup of tea with a bit of milk, we pick up the teapot to put it “back” into the refrigerator, when of course our intention was to put the milk back. “The same thing” happens when, after finishing our bath, we reach out and turn on one of the water faucets, when in fact what we intended to do was to open the drain to let the water out. Our intention (to induce some water to flow) was eminently reasonable, but our action brought about a flow in the wrong place and the wrong direction. Or else we can’t find our computer’s charger because earlier, in a moment of distraction, we placed it in the proper pouch but of the wrong container — our backpack’s little pouch instead of our computer bag’s little pouch — thus getting the category
pouch
correct but missing on the specifics.
C. often placed her cell phone next to her brand-new mouseless computer, and she often reached for it as if it were a mouse. However, it never worked as a mouse, even though it was just about the size of a mouse and was right where a mouse ought to be.
Having pulled into a gas station, D. noticed that the gas pumps were on the wrong side of his car. Instead of making a U-turn or moving across to the parallel set of pumps, D. executed
both
of these maneuvers, and lo and behold, he found himself with the new set of pumps on the wrong side of his car, exactly as before. This was an
action
biplan, similar to
speech
biplans in which a person winds up saying just the opposite of what they intended to say (“My bracelet came unloose”).
One time E. wanted to add a bit of sugar to his coffee and simultaneously to tap his ashes into the ashtray; he wound up pouring sugar into the ashtray while tapping his ashes into his coffee cup, obtaining an undrinkable coffee but a sweetened ashtray.
Then there was the sleepy teen-ager F., who poured his milk right into the cereal box instead of into the bowl that he’d just filled with cereal, and his younger brother G., who, on waking up in the middle of the night, tried to locate his cell phone by shining light around the room from… his cell phone.
As we see, these kinds of action slips are directly comparable to the slips of the tongue discussed above. It makes no difference that some involve words and others do not; the underlying cognitive mechanisms are the same. Our next example is a striking case in which words and actions are intimately mixed.
It was just about time for the German lesson of Doug’s son Danny, and Christoph, Danny’s tutor as well as a family friend, arrived a bit ahead of time. Father and tutor chatted for a moment in the kitchen, and Doug asked Christoph if he would like something to drink — a Coke, some fruit juice, anything he felt like. Christoph replied, “A glass of water would be perfect, thanks.” But such asceticism didn’t jibe with the Christoph that Doug knew, so to entice his guest he opened the refrigerator and said, “Cranberry juice, apple juice, orange juice, Coke, milk, coffee, tea?” But Christoph simply said, with a gentle smile, “Thanks, but really I’d just like a glass of water.” A bit puzzled but seeing no reason to push any further, Doug turned toward the cupboard where the glasses were, and at the same time he pulled his wallet out of his rear pocket, extracting a one-dollar bill from it. Then, in a friendly fashion, he proferred the bill to Christoph. Only when the latter looked at him in a nonplussed manner did Doug realize that something had gone very much awry. Staring bewilderedly at the piece of paper in his hand, he exclaimed, “What on earth am I doing?”
A moment’s thought, however, shed light on what almost surely lay behind this mysterious act. “Do you know what just happened?” he said to Christoph. “Your request really threw me, in its minimality. Who would go for flavorless water over a delicious drink? And yet I was fully intending to give you your ascetic choice, but at the
same time I was also aware that I owed you $20 for the lesson, so I pulled out my wallet. As I tried to carry out the two unrelated actions simultaneously, my wires got badly crossed. My intention to give you some water got blurred in with my intention to pay you: I unconsciously blended the two goals. Offering you one dollar showed that I’d conflated the simplest possible
drink
with the simplest possible
bill
!”
Indeed, lying at the very core of Doug’s action error was an excellent analogy, since the abstract idea of
the minimal version of something desirable
, originally triggered by Christoph’s insistence on a mere glass of water, had been deftly carried over by Doug from the domain of
drinks found in my kitchen
to the domain of
bills found in my wallet.
In a manner reminiscent of the lexical blends that we’ve discussed at considerable length, Doug had changed horses in midstream, nimbly hopping from
plainest beverage
to
plainest bill.
This slippage had doubtless been caused by his bafflement at Christoph’s ascetic choice of drink, but the analogy had remained totally unconscious, for otherwise Doug wouldn’t have been perplexed by his own action.
Curiously enough, there is a classic adjective in English that applies perfectly to both sides of the bridge in Doug’s mind — namely, “watered-down”. In a literal sense, a glass of water is (quite obviously) the most watered-down drink possible, while in a more abstract sense, the most “watered-down” bill is (also obviously) the one-dollar bill.
Playfully flipping this analogy around, we can imagine the following exchange between Doug and Christoph. “While we’re waiting, can I offer you a little bit of cash? Take a gander at all these lovely bills in my wallet! I’ve got a five, a ten, even a twenty — whatever you like!” “Oh, thanks a lot, but a one-dollar bill will do just fine…” Thereupon, Doug goes to the sink, pours a glass of water, and proffers it to Christoph.
As we’ve seen, speech errors and other anomalous actions are the visible traces of a ceaseless unconscious competition between categories, under various pressures. Most of the time, just one of the competitors handily wins out, and in such cases, no auditory or written trace is left of the hidden contest. In that sense, listening (especially without a trained ear) to a smooth, fluent-sounding conversation is a bit like browsing through a photo book of the Olympic Games in which only gold-medal winners are ever shown; one would never suspect that behind each winner’s beaming smile, there was a long and arduous series of merciless competitions over a period of years, beginning with local competitions inside each country, then wider ones, until finally the championship event took place. For every winner, there are countless unseen and unsung losers. But there are occasional ties, and such special circumstances are reminders, although only in a small way, that a fierce competition guided the process from start to finish.
Everything depends on the ear that is listening. After all, the category
error
, just like any other category, is not a precise box with razor-sharp membership criteria, but has shaded degrees of membership. If one’s ear is attuned to this kind of thing, one will recognize in the short pauses, in the slight tremblings, in the “uh”’s and the “ah”’s, in the aberrant intonations, and in various other minute sonic distortions that punctuate most people’s speech, the telltale signs of that seething competition. Rather than witnessing just gold-medal winners proudly strutting their stuff, one gets at least a fleeting glimpse of the silver and bronze medalists, and this serves as a hint about the existence of the rest of the hidden iceberg of the selection process.
Thus speech errors, whether blatant or subtle, are cues that remind us of the frenetic hidden mental processes taking place in parallel and collectively contributing to the utterance of each sentence we speak. These cues are seldom noticed by anyone, but the fierce inter-category competition of which speech errors are perceptible traces pervades every moment of our lives as thinking beings.
Although speech errors don’t provide any useful service for the speaker, they do so for observers of thought and language, thanks to what they reveal about cognitive processes. And this is a quality that they share with a certain odd sort of analogy that we are now going to talk about: although these analogies are eager to attend the party, once they’ve arrived, they wind up doing nothing.
H. is heading off to celebrate a dear friend’s sixtieth birthday. He gets into his car, sets out for the freeway, drives to the airport, and flies across the country. Friends meet him when he lands and take him to their house. The evening is a smashing success; candles forming a “6” and a “0” are blown out while many a knowing wink and nudge are exchanged about the consequences of turning 60. The next morning, H.’s friends take him back to the airport and he flies home. When he lands, he locates his car in the parking garage, heads for the freeway, and drives home.
Nothing has changed about the road, which H. has taken a thousand times, yet the drive home is oddly different from the previous day; this time he keeps noticing the numeral “60” whenever it’s displayed on his car’s digital speedometer, and each time it reminds him, if only for a split second, of his old friend and the party he just attended.
The symmetry of the “out” and “back” trips provides a marked contrast to the change in H.’s brain. For all the years he’d owned a car with a digital speedometer, seeing the digits “60” on it had never had any effect on him, though of course it had shown that reading thousands of times. Yet this time it was different, since the concept
sixty
was highly activated in his mind, thanks primarily to the party, of which it had been the theme. This idea of
sixty
, activated in H.’s head, lurking silently in the depths of his brain, was avidly seeking analogues. Secretly and calmly it was waiting to pounce — and when the speedometer showed “60”, it made its move! Of what cognitive interest was the newly-found link between the “sixtiness” of his friend’s age and that of the speedometer’s display? None. This “discovery” served no purpose in any way. All that happened was that a fleeting thought sped through H.’s mind for a second or two, bringing no new insight, not even the tiniest hint of a new idea, only to vanish moments later into thin air. So why are we focusing on an event so feckless and ephemeral?
It is tempting to think that analogy-making must be a subtle and deep intellectual process that always serves a grand cognitive goal and is always utilized in a serious and efficient manner. Yet all sorts of analogies that we humans come up with lead nowhere at all and lend no support to any prior mental project we might have had on any scale whatsoever. Quite to the contrary: since analogies emerge as an automatic by-product of our cognitive mechanisms, which are at all times searching for familiar-looking landmarks in unfamiliar landscapes before us, they frequently have no depth or insight. In a word, many of the analogies we make are utterly pointless and lead nowhere at all.
And yet, the very uselessness of the two “60”’s tells us something important. Yes, analogy is the linchpin of such crucial and deeply human activities as understanding, reasoning, decision-making, problem-solving, learning, and discovery — and this fact is already proof of the centrality of analogy in human cognition. But the fatuity, gratuity, and vacuity of the analogy linking the two “60”’s shows
even more clearly
how fully analogy pervades human thought. It shows that the search for samenesses linking situations is so profoundly inherent to thought that trivial, meaningless analogies are tirelessly produced by our subconscious minds, for no reason at all, out of the blue. Analogies pop up and momentarily seize our attention wherever the mind roams.
The analogy between the two “60”’s is not in the least anomalous. If we had a neurological technique for capturing fleeting thoughts on the fly, we would harvest myriads of pointless analogies just like it. But it’s their very uselessness that condemns them to being forgotten mere instants after they are born; fleeting analogies of this sort have such a short life expectancy that they disappear only fractions of a second after being created. It thus takes both practice and interest in the mind’s workings to notice such evanescent analogies at all. To shed more light on this kind of analogy, we’ll take a look at a few fleeting analogies that were caught on the wing by their creators.