This is an intriguing story from Nature about another location in the brain, this one involved in metaphorical and abstract thinking. When the left angular gyrus, a small area in the cerebral cortex, is damaged, people lose the ability to extract a broader meaning from a figure ot speech. Such people tend to place a literal intepretation on sayings such as “reach for the stars” or “the grass is always greener on the other side.” The left angular gyrus is near parts of the cortex that process sight, sound, and tactile sensations, so maybe it is a place where synthesis of dissimilar sensory information can take place. Metaphor is fascinating to me, partly because I work in information technology and I’ve noticed that so many of the things we talk about in IT are more or less abstract or at least non-physical, and we talk about them in terms of analogies with more concrete things. (Just think for a minute about hotlinks, cookies, and bounced email, for starters.)
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050523/full/050523-9.html
(The header for this post is a quote from Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers; it comes from a part of the book where the narrator is describing the economy involved in this kind of metaphorical thinking. The AI program he has been working with has come up with a figure of speech for old age that involved leaves falling: trees were balding, the mind shed its leaves. “…the neurodes storing winter lent half their economical pattern to the neurodes signalling old age.” Fascinating stuff, metaphor, however—or wherever—it arises.)
