Free will?
I’ve been trying to post this entry for a while, but something always seems to make me put it off another day or so.
Anyway, I recently heard a talk by cognitive psychologist Daniel Casasanto, on some experiments he’s been doing to see if there is any nonlinguistic evidence for conceptual metaphors (like TIME IS SPACE and SIMILARITY IS CLOSENESS). Of course, in natural language the asymmetry between space and time is clear, in that words from the domain of space are co-opted to talk about time, while the other direction doesn’t generally happen. And experiments like those done by Lera Botoditsky (asking people what “the meeting was pushed forward two days” means under different conditions) have shown that people’s linguistic behavior can be primed by physical experience. But this still relies on a linguistic task. Casasanto and his colleagues did several experiments that were ultimately non-linguistic in nature, and showed that the results are consistent with conceptual metaphor theory.
One experiment was to show subjects a white line extending horizontally across a black screen. Subjects had to, for each line they saw, reproduce either the amount of time the line took to extend to its maximal length, or reproduce the length it traversed. The results showed that line length influenced time estimations (longer lines were thought to have taken longer), but time/speed did not affect estimation of distance. Furthermore, speakers of languages like English and Indonesian, which have extensive linguistic evidence for a TIME IS SPACE metaphor, were highly influenced by distance, whereas speakers of languages that do not have extensive TIME IS SPACE metaphors (Greek, Spanish), did not show significant results.
Another experiment, with a schematic filling-of-a-container instead of an extending line, was carried out. This time the results were reversed, with Spanish and Greek speakers being distracted by amount of filledness, and English and Indonesian speakers showing non-significant effects. (Spanish and Greek have more extensive TIME IS AMOUNT metaphors). Native speakers of English could also be trained to think along the lines of Spanish and Greek speakers by teaching them the metaphor by inducing them to produce sentences like “a movie is bigger than a sneeze.” However, not just any pattern could be learned - training on a metaphor like TIME IS BRIGHTNESS did not create interference effects with brighter lines, etc. It’s not exactly clear to me why this should be the case - it might just be that more training is necessary, since the “amount” metaphor may merely be incipient in English speakers’ heads, while the brightness metaphor is simply non-existent.
They then tested the SIMILARITY IS CLOSENESS metaphor (as in “he’s not a genius, but he’s close”). They found that similarity judgements among stimuli varied depending on how close the stimuli were presented. Basically, they presented two pictures in boxes on a screen, but the boxes were either adjacent, slightly further apart, or on opposite sides of the screen. When the pictures were of actual entities (like faces of people), the closeness was inverse-correlated with judgements of similarity. However, when the stimuli were not pictures, but words (like “vicious” and “evil”), then closeness was correlated with similarity. Interestingly, for schematic images of items (like doors, windows, pencils), closeness was correlated with functional similarity, but inverse-correlated with physical similarity. Totally weird, dude. Of course none of this “proves” conceptual metaphor theory, but it at least shows that positing a neural reality to metaphors should not be based on linguistic evidence alone.
Probably one of the freakiest things was when they asked for estimations of line lengths while a particular tone was playing. The higher the tone, the longer the line was estimated to be — but only for vertical lines.
My tentative conclusion: there is no free will. Okay, not really, but at least it seems somewhat clear that the evolutionary pressures on the brain constrains the ways in which we can think, or conceive of the world, and the degree to which certain things can be wired together in the brain is sometimes surprising.