ABSTRACT
The brain has been remaining the most mystical and less studied part of human’s body for ages. That led to developing of different metaphors regarding this human’s organ that formed special vision of it and helped to investigate it better. These metaphors changed with time and led to understanding of the brain we have now. However, metaphors often have too big impact on people and their perceptions, especially concerning illnesses. The aim of this work is to reveal the role of metaphors in human’s perception and to discuss how the brain is metaphorical.
Keywords: the brain, metaphor, illness, organ, human
The brain is the most powerful and mysterious part of human’s body. The secret of this organ has been engrossing people’s minds throughout the course of history. Despite all modern scientific inventions and explorations, the brain’s work still has not been completely studied, and, thus, its phenomenon generated a lot of myths and fictions. Why is conception of the brain so metaphorical? And why are metaphors such an essential part of human’s life in whole?
For a start, let’s define what the brain technically is and how it works. The brain is an organ that works as a center of the nervous system. It is located in the head, near sensory organs, providing such senses as hearing, vision, taste, smell, and balance. The brain is the most complicated organ in a human body. Its largest part, the cerebral cortex, contains about 15-30 billion neurons, and by special structures called synapses each of them is connected to thousands of others. These neurons communicate with each other by long protoplasmic fibers called axons; they carry links of signal pulses, action potentials, to farther parts of the brain or body angling specific recipient cells.
Psychologically, the main function of the brain is the exertion of centralized control over human’s body and its organs. The brain affects the body both by driving hormones, the secretion of chemicals, and by generating charts of muscle activity. Such centralized control allows coordinated and fast answers to changes in the environment around a human. Some basic reactions, for example, reflexes, appear due to peripheral ganglia, or the spinal cord; however, the purposeful control over the body’s behavior requires the information from the centralized brain and sensory organs.
Throughout history, people have been striving for learning how human body works and what parts consists of. Regarding each organ, the main questions that could appear under its studying, are:
What does this organ do?
What parts does it consist of?
What do these parts do?
How are they organized and how operate with each other?
However, not only well-coordinated work of humans’ organs causes appearance of metaphors, but its failures called illnesses also. According to Sonntag, illness is very prone to metaphor and symbolism. She states,
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
In other words, illness is a way to death, a dark side of life and human’s imperfection, but at the same time it is mysterious and attention getting. In her work, Illness as Metaphor, Sonntag compares metaphorical manifestations of such illnesses as tuberculosis, which was deathful in the last century, and cancer, which in most cases leads to death nowadays. She writes that two these illnesses and their metaphoric uses simultaneously overlap and crisscross. Tuberculosis was recognized as an illness of soul, the disease of liquids, while cancer means degeneration and tumors. Despite the fact both these illnesses lead to death, metaphors developed in their times show that tuberculosis is more romantic and pleasant disease than cancer, and death from tuberculosis is kind of honorable. In such a way, Sonntag underlines how metaphors influence on people’s perception and how they create false beliefs. Cancer with its tumors gives deformed shameful death, and tuberculosis with cough is more romantic. The “soul” illness and death have always been better than leading to death changing of the body, but technically both of them give the same result.
Regarding the brain, first concepts of the psyche, hydraulic and mechanical, appeared as early as in pre-Socratic thought. In the fifth century BC, the school of Hippocrates created a hydraulic model of mind positing the human’s body has four humors: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. An excess of phlegm leads to apathy, black bile – to melancholy, plenty of yellow bile results in biliousness, and an excess of blood causes sanguinity. In the second century BC, this model evolved into the theory of the Roman physician Galen positing “animal spirits,” a fluid flowing inside the nerves. These animal spirits allowed the brain to get sensory messages and to send commands.
Probably, the first modern explanation of the brain’s mechanical metaphor appeared due to Descartes and his contention that “animals, as distinct from men, were pure automata – the “bête-machine” doctrine.” According to this doctrine, the human mind is excluded as a very different substance; animal spirits move to and from the brain by nervous system modulating this movement, and many phenomena that seem to be mental for people for Descartes are physical; they are regulated by the flow of fluids through the nerves.
A lot of symbols regarding the brain appeared in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, time of Enlightenment invocations of clockwork and mechanical metaphors. The notion of the brain as a machine emerged in the eighteenth century and captivated minds of many biologists. Of course, biological organisms are not composed from the metal parts, but creation of some new mechanisms and even mechanical animals, such as invented by Jacques de Vauncanson mechanical duck, gave birth to an idea that different parts of the body and organs, like different parts of mechanical things, each perform its own operation, but at the same time work together in order to achieve activities of living organisms, like movement of mechanics. Basing on this idea, Hobbes stated that associations and ideas originate for short mechanical motions in the head, and La Mettrie described the brain and body of a human, as “a machine that winds its own springs – the living image of perpetual motion . . . man is an assemblage of springs that are activated reciprocally by one another.” However, the most pervasive theory about the brain is psychodynamic theory, the one holding that both social history and individual behavior are “the outgrowth of invisible forces of desire and repression.” For such structuralist as Freud, psychodynamic accounts of the struggles lied within the unconscious mind, which contains desires that sometimes are unacceptable, and they may be repressed, but, like water or steam pressure, can only be held down without exploding for a long time; they must be rechanneled into save areas.
At the end of the eighteenth century, appearing of the first electric theories, investigation of telegraph and telephone, led to creating of telegraph and telephone metaphors. The first microscopic pictures of neurons underlined importance of their dendrites and axons, and that allowed Helmholtz to suggest that the brain works is similar to work of telegraph. Huxley and Hodgkin borrowed the mathematical base that had been developed for signal propagation in wires in order to model the generation of action potentials. The telephone switchboard metaphor of brain activity gained popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Probably one of the most famous metaphors about the brain is the computer theory. Invention and popularization of computers allowed to suggest that “thought consists of the application of rules to symbols.” In the middle of the twentieth century, the idea of computers’ ability to think and possibility of creating an artificial intelligence became very popular, and soon the idea that human’s brain computes, became popular in neuroscience also. These led to developing of neural network models focusing on the fact that neural networks are able to implement logic functions and combine information in different ways, which sometimes are not dependent on logic.
As one can see, the metaphors regarding humans’ brain have been changed throughout history together with the development of society and science. They allowed to create different suggestions about how the brain works and to study them, in such a way discovering this organ and getting more and more information about it. The brain is really symbolic part of human’s body; it is full of mysteries, and it was its power that fathered all that theories and metaphors that were mentioned before. The brain has not been completely studied yet; probably, some new suggestions and symbols are waiting people relatively soon.
Bibliography
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