Science and poetry, cont’d: Metaphors and the brain

As always, when in layman’s fashion I stumble upon some interesting notion (as I did with the idea of how “reincarnation” might feel absent a divine force, in a completely material universe) it’s fascinating to learn how that notion gets explored in more academic circles. In this case I had mused a bit about the relationship between religion, science, and poetic language, and was pleased and intrigued to read Robert Sapolsky’s essay on the biological underpinnings of metaphor:

Symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech: we understand them. We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when he orders all of them on deck. We understand that Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” isn’t really about a cockroach. If we are of a certain theological ilk, we see bread and wine intertwined with body and blood. We grasp that the right piece of cloth can represent a nation and its values, and that setting fire to such a flag is a highly charged act. We can learn that a certain combination of sounds put together by Tchaikovsky represents Napoleon getting his butt kicked just outside Moscow. And that the name “Napoleon,” in this case, represents thousands and thousands of soldiers dying cold and hungry, far from home.

And we even understand that June isn’t literally busting out all over. It would seem that doing this would be hard enough to cause a brainstorm. So where did this facility with symbolism come from? It strikes me that the human brain has evolved a necessary shortcut for doing so, and with some major implications.

Sapolsky explains how:

Science and poetry, cont’d: “to name each thing and try to tell its story against the vanishing”

*

The Enigma We Answer by Living
by Alison Hawthorne Deming

Einstein didn’t speak as a child
waiting till a sentence formed and
emerged full-blown from his head.

I do the thing, he later wrote, which
nature drives me to do. Does a fish
know the water in which he swims?

This came up in conversation
with a man I met by chance,
friend of a friend of a friend,

who passed through town carrying
three specimen boxes of insects
he’d collected in the Grand Canyon

one for mosquitoes, one for honeybees,
one for butterflies and skippers,
each lined up in a row, pinned and labeled,

tiny morphologic differences
revealing how adaptation
happened over time. The deeper down

he hiked, the older the rock
and the younger
the strategy for living in that place.

And in my dining room the universe
found its way into this man
bent on cataloguing each innovation,

though he knows it will all disappear
the labels, the skippers, the canyon.
We agreed then, the old friends and the new,

that it’s wrong to think people are a thing apart
from the whole, as if we’d sprung
from an idea out in space, rather than emerging

from the sequenced larval mess of creation
that binds us with the others,
all playing the endgame of a beautiful planet

that’s made us want to name
each thing and try to tell
its story against the vanishing.

*

From my new favorite blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture, in which scientists and philosophers explore the intersection between science and the rest of human culture, including the relationship between science and poetry (which I’ve also touched on here, here, and here).

(h/t The Daily Dish; image via PLoS Biology)

Poetic atheism

From Jennifer Michael Hecht, on the blog Unreasonable Faith:

The truth may be real but it is not “matter of fact.” What in fact we have here is a billion fantastically sexy weird interesting stories all going on at once in a great cacophony of experience. How do we make sense of what it is to be human, to be this thing, this sentient matter?

Well I certainly don’t think the magic of consciousness should be considered evidence for something hidden, something else. The magic of consciousness is magic enough. Nothing is gained by adding fantastical imaginative inventions to the wonders that actually are.

But the truth, the what actually is is very strange and overloaded and wondrous indeed.

This next bit, in particular, seems to resonate with and expand on something I tried to touch on in my “Science vs. poetry?” post:

Science vs. poetry?

I was listening to Archbishop Desmond Tutu being interviewed on NPR this morning, and was struck by the language he used to describe his relationship with God:

I am learning to shut up more in the presence of God. Previously you have a kind of shopping list that you bring to God. But more and more, you are trying to grow, in just being there. Like when you sit in front of a fire in winter — you are just there in front of the fire. You don’t have to be smart or anything. The fire warms you.

As an atheist, I won’t dwell on my usual qualifications and objections: that I respect Archbishop Tutu for his courageous fight against apartheid; that his language explicitly demonstrates religion’s tendency to “shut up” or stifle intellectual inquiry; that the goodness of the human spirit that he believes in would be equally valid without a supernatural explanation; and so forth. But what caught my attention was the power of his simple metaphor: God is a fire that warms you. The archbishop was speaking like a poet.

Which made me think about the relationship between religion, science, and poetry.