Inventing Reality: Stories We Create To Explain Everything

Introduction

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Muriel Rukeyser, The Speed of Darkness

What do sunsets, forty percent–off sales, conspiracy theories, and lower back pain have in common? They are all stories we create to make sense. Everybody loves a good story, so this book is about stories—with a few delusions and illusions added for good measure.

The stories of interest here are not fiction or pretend. They are not the stories we tell around the dinner table or water cooler. These stories are the tools we use in our Reality Construction Project—the stories we use to make sense, to invent our own realities. A curious aspect of these stories is that we deny our active role in their invention.

We spin stories to speak, taste, see, hear, believe, predict, decide, and remember. We use stories as building blocks in our Reality Construction Project. We use stories to rule ourselves and fool ourselves. Story is the universal language of consciousness.

We begin spinning our world of stories as children. Kids say the darndest things, and we find their sure-footed ignorance cute and often hilarious. They make up explanations for what they clearly do not understand. Ask a five-year-old where zebras (or cars or carrots or babies) come from, and sit back and be entertained. The answer will have some sort of interior logic and will be told with the apparent certainty of a professional con artist. Surely children quickly outgrow this tendency to make up stories on the fly. Or do they?

People with brain injuries do it. Oliver Sacks left behind a series of books outlining fantastic stories made up by people with Korsakoff syndrome and other brain disorders. A hospitalized woman refuses to believe she is not at home. When asked by a doctor how she explains the elevator outside her room, she replies, You would never guess how much that cost to install. Their stories are bizarre, but even more amazing is that these stories are made up instantly and with apparent effortlessness. The storytellers clearly show no intent to deceive; they believe their stories. They are living in a storyworld, as do we all.

Psychologists use the word confabulation to describe these invented and clearly delusional stories. The classic definition of confabulation is from Carl Wernicke’s Principles of Psychiatry published in 1900. He defined a confabulation as the emergence of events and experiences which never took place. Confabulation is typically limited to the world of the mentally ill, but I can think of no better word describing the stories we create to explain our reality. Some of these confabulations overflow with truth, others contain but a modicum. The quality they share is that all take the form of a story.¹

Somewhere between Kids Say the Darndest Things and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a truth about how we shape our personal view of reality. We are all confabulists. We make up stories on the fly to explain the world, and we do it almost instantly and with ease. The truthfulness of the story is often of little importance. In fact, many of these stories are delusions, but we treat them as obvious, just as kids and Korsakoff patients treat their stories. Of course, what is obvious does not leave room for doubt or questioning.

These confabulations are adult versions of How the Tiger Got Its Stripes. We confabulate to explain. A culture is made of people who share similar stories. Storying is so human that we really can do it in our sleep. We are story people.

We create stories as part of seeing, hearing, tasting, and touching. We create stories to deal with pain and illness. We create simple stories to justify beliefs and explain why. We will see in the following chapters how we create stories about time, nature, politics, religion, physics, animals, the body, and human behavior. We create character-filled stories about the natural world. We create a story and call it self.

When you say, It’s raining out, you tell a story. When you say, The sun is setting, you tell a story. When you say, The sky is blue, you are storying. When you say, I’m leaning toward going on the trip, you use your body to tell a simple story. You tell a body-based story when you are feeling down or when your feelings are hurt. When you recall what you did last week, you are creating a story. When you tell time, you are using a story. When you say, I’m tired, I’m sick, I love you, or I don’t get it, you are storying. When you explain what you taste, see, smell, hear, or feel, you tell a simple story. You speak and write in microstories called sentences.

I could ask you to keep an open mind as you read the following pages. You might make a mental note to do just that. In this informal agreement between writer and reader we have a story. It is a story in which something called a mind is a door or window that you can keep open, and presumably close. It is a story in which the mind is like paper on which you can store information. Of course, there is no little door in your skull that you control, no yellow legal pad in the brain. But this is a workable story we can share. Making Sense asks readers to explore the storyland of everyday life with an open mind. Or, is the idea of an open mind itself a confabulation?

On this journey to explore our confabulations we will find puzzles that might entertain Alice in Wonderland. We will encounter numerous reversals and paradoxes:

On not seeing what is there versus seeing what is not there.

On seeing what we construct versus constructing what we see.

On hearing things versus hearing no-thing.

On I’ll believe it when I see it versus I’ll see it when I believe it.

On stories I create versus stories that create the I.

On stories that create frames versus frames that create stories.

On optical illusions that are neither optical nor illusions.

On nouns that are verbs.

On not believing what exists versus believing what does not exist.

On beliefs that create feelings versus feelings that create beliefs.

On filling in perceptual holes without knowing the holes exist.

On time as the main difference between memory and perception.

On memory as a creator versus memory as a replicator.

On reality as our invention.

Let the journey begin.

1

I Seem To Be a Story

The development of civilization is essentially a progression of metaphors.

E. L. Doctorow

Metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.

José Ortega y Gasset

Once upon a time is a clear signal that what follows is just a story. Stories are typically considered entertainment, flights of fancy, make believe. By default, a story is fiction—not true. When you want to tell a story about what really happened you need to preface your tale with the assurance that this is a true story.

Stories are important. We watch films and TV in the form of stories, read stories in novels and newspapers. We tell stories to our friends and in turn listen to their tales. But these are not the stories that concern us here. Our stories are not those to which you can apply the phrase "it’s just a story." Everybody loves a good story, so let’s begin this exploration with a story:

Once upon a time there was a famous filmmaker. We will call this artist The Director. In this tale, The Director is obsessed with creating the ultimate masterpiece. Our Director is an auteur who writes, directs, and produces films almost single handedly. The Director is driven, sometimes forgetting to eat, often neglecting family and social life in the never-ending search for perfection. The walls of the editing suite define life for over a year while raw footage is magically assembled into the perfect film. The Director works alone with the slavish dedication of an artist who leaves no detail to chance. Every line of dialog, every shot in the film evidences a high level of craftsmanship. Finally, after years of nonstop work, the film is finished.

The film is finally ready for public viewing. Hundreds gather to watch the premier of the finished masterpiece and it is well received. Critics call it brilliant, and the entire audience gives The Director a standing ovation over the final credits. The Director seems overly modest, admitting only, I also enjoyed the beautiful film. At the post-debut party, a guest asks The Director how to explain the wonderful special effects in the film.

The Director has no answer to the question, only a blank stare. The Director replies, What special effects?

The inquirer pushes further, perhaps seeking a directorial secret, and asks, Where did you find the inspiration for your film?

Here the story takes an unsettling twist as The Director apparently suffers from a strange form of amnesia. Yes, it was beautiful, but why do you say I made it? The film just appeared on the screen this evening.

The story, dream-like, ends here.

The Director applauds and appreciates the film but appears puzzled in the presence of adulation and praise from viewers. The auteur does not seem to recognize the film as self-created. This modesty is not pretense. The Director genuinely lacks awareness of any role in creating the movie.

Being a clever reader, you probably know this is a story (we did clue you in with the once upon a time gambit) and probably suspect it is a parable. In our parable, The Director is an Everyone. The film represents the collection of our perceptions. A philosopher might describe them using words like qualia, ontology, or "Umwelt." Scholars would write of paradigms, schemas, models, narratives, or mental maps.

What all this stuff of daily experience has in common is that it takes the form of a story. This book is about how we create these stories without awareness of our role as Director. Like The Director, we create stories about ourselves and the world and fail to realize our creative role. In fact, we are not even aware we are making stories. To us, they are simply what is. In the library of our mind, they inhabit the nonfiction section. These stories are simply there, self-evident, demanding no proof or evidence.

How important are stories? We think in stories, dream in stories, and speak in microstories called sentences. Our perceptions are stories, tastes and sounds are stories, memories are stories, feelings are stories, beliefs are stories. Story is the language of consciousness.

We spend nearly a third of our lives as The Director, creating stories while lying prone and paralyzed in the dark. We create highly dramatic and creative scripts and cast the self as lead character. We call these stories dreams and believe they simply appear on the screen of sleep. Sleep is a self-induced paralysis that unleashes our storymaking talents. Making a story is one of those rare activities we really can do in our sleep. Studies of brain activity show that parts of the brain are up to thirty percent more active during REM sleep than when awake. Someone who claims, I don’t dream, means, I have no memories of my dreams.¹

Upon awakening you realize it’s only a dream. A feeling of relief sweeps over your foggy awareness and you fall back asleep only to create more stories that you won’t remember the next morning. This feeling of relief when you realize it’s only a dream is one of the few times that you recognize your authorship of stories. Rarely in our lives while awake do we experience a similar awakening and realize, I created that story.

What we can learn from dreams lies not in their hidden meanings, but in their very existence. That we dream is more important than what we dream. Dreams remind us we are born storytellers and creative beings. We might say, I’m not very creative, yet when it comes to dreams, our creative output outshines Edgar Allan Poe and James Patterson combined. Dreams serve to remind us we cannot stop storying any more than we can stop digesting or feeling.

The reality casting agency

We assign stories a humble role as in "it’s only a story." A story implies the unreal, the world of make-believe and escape. Yet that is not the role stories play in our lives. The stories we create are the building blocks of our Reality Construction Project. We use these stories to create our reality rather than to escape it. Stories are not a special part of life reserved for artists and writers; they are the way we structure our experience.

Our storytelling demands agents—actors who play a role in the drama of life.

We create agents (a being or entity that initiates a goal-seeking action) even when we know they don’t exist. When you observe, It’s raining out, that it is an agent (or character) you create, even if it has no clear meaning. To speak of stars that come out at night or moods that go up or down is to employ active agents in order to create a story that makes sense.

In this book, the word story is often a verb describing the process of creating a story. In this sense, we story reality: I just lost it. I was consumed by anger. I couldn’t help it—I just blew up. The car just came out of nowhere. It’s just not my day. I was overcome by emotion. I’m fried. Senior moments. My brain just isn’t working today. Head over heels in love. I kept my emotions bottled up. It was surreal. I can’t believe it just happened. Nervous breakdown. Meltdown. Blew her top. My nerves are all jumbled. I can’t handle it. I can’t take it anymore. My body just wouldn’t listen to me. These are all self-created stories featuring creative agents—feelings in bottles, brains as creaky machinery, nerves that break down like worn-out cars, insides filled with spaghetti-like nerves, and even some exploding people.

Our storying typically remains invisible as a process. We assume what we see is simply out there, like a movie projected on our screen of awareness. Consider how we story the sun. People worldwide gather on shores every day to admire a sunset. Perhaps a million photographs each day capture the magical scene of the setting sun.

The fact that we are space travelers hurtling through space at over sixty thousand miles per hour and spinning somewhere between four hundred and a thousand miles per hour is not part of our awareness. We do not sense we are cosmic travelers. We cannot hang our collective heads out of our spinning globe and feel the planetary wind on our faces. We do not feel space dust twisting our hair. Instead, we create a story about a sun that goes up in the morning and down in the evening. We explain our perceptions as a story featuring the sun as an active agent. If we did sense ourselves as cosmic travelers, our explanation-story of a sunset would be completely different.²

We place ourselves at the stable center of it all, we speak of the sun as an animate being that not only rises and sets, but also shines, tries to come out, goes behind a cloud, and helps create a sunny disposition. It shares this aliveness with the moon, the stars, and thousands of other inanimate objects. This quick and easy conferring of agency on objects and processes is characteristic of our Reality Construction Project.

You might point out that the words sunrise and sunset are merely linguistic conveniences. After all, we learned in fifth grade the sun doesn’t really rise and fall.

The setting-sun story is more than a figure of speech; it is a glimpse into our role as story creators. No matter how many science textbooks you read, you still see the sun rising and setting. You don’t see science; you experience your story of an active sun that moves down—it sets.

The sunset illusion is not a mere astronomical misperception; it illustrates how easily we create a story to explain sensations. The objective truth of the story takes a back seat to the value of a story that explains an experience—the sun is setting. That the sun goes down in the evening is a universally shared story even though we all know it is incorrect.

The illusion of a setting sun illustrates that accuracy is not required for a story to be useful. Historical or scientific accuracy is often counterintuitive and requires we ignore what we see or feel is right. False stories can still work as the lies that bind. Imagine a science-minded zealot running along a beach lined with sunset gazers shouting, The sunset is an illusion, the sun is not yellow, the sky is not blue! The sun does not go up and down! He is scientifically correct but will no doubt be branded as a mere nuisance by beachgoers enjoying their beautiful illusion. Somebody buy that guy a margarita!

The stories we create are not cinematic masterpieces; they are simple tales often told in merely a word like sunrise or sunset, or in a phrase we call metaphor.

Ceci n’est nas une pipe

Consider a three-year-old perched on a parent’s lap with My First Picture Book. Mom or dad anxiously gives names to the pictures in the hope that the child understands that a picture can represent something external. Parents are delighted when the child points to a red circle and makes a sound that sounds something like apple. This is seen as evidence of development; it is also early evidence of story creation. Being able to link a two-dimensional picture and an object in reality is evidence of the metaphorical mind at work. The parent might just as well say, Nice job kid. Your ability to map reality, create metaphors, and spin stories will take you a long way on this peopled planet.

Later that year, when the child points to a photo in a picture album and says, Gramma, she knows it is only a picture of grandma, but she doesn’t say picture of grandma or like grandma. She says simply gramma. She is telling a simple story in which the lines and shadows in a photo play the role of her grandma. There is no need for mom to explain that this is not a grandma, merely printed dots on paper arranged to resemble the face of grandma. The child is old enough to spin stories.

As this child pages through the photo album, remember that vision does not involve sending pictures or images to the brain—there are no snapshots in the brain. All a brain receives are electrical impulses from which we infer what is outside the skull. The same is true for all sensory input. There are no smells, flavors, or sounds floating around inside our heads. Our awareness is of the inferences we make—the stories we create in response to this electricity.

Rene Magritte understood that when he painted The Treachery of Images. I have a reproduction of it on my office wall to remind me of one of the central ideas of this book. The painting depicts an elegantly shaped pipe with script below in French stating This is not a pipe. If you are not familiar with the image, search the Internet for Magritte pipe.

Visitors give it a quizzical look, and I translate the French for them. It doesn’t register at first. The most common first reaction is, Of course it’s a pipe. I explain that Magritte pointed out that you can’t smoke it—it’s an image, not a pipe. They groan and treat the painting like a joke with a bad punchline. Of course, these are the same people who groaned when reminded that the setting sun is an illusion. The image is a shadowy glimpse into how our minds create effortless stories. Art historian Robert Hughes says of Magritte’s pipe and art, His visual booby traps set themselves and they go off over and over again—‘gottcha’ we hear him whisper—because their trigger is thought itself.³

Magritte said of the picture, The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe,’ I’d have been lying! Photographs and paintings are metaphoric objects.⁴

Saying Of course it’s a pipe, or Gramma, or The sun is setting, can be seen as factual errors, mental shorthand, or social conventions. Yet that perceptual error is our normal mode of dealing with the world; we see the story we create rather than the thing or event. They all illustrate how we explain by creating stories.

Try telling the families of the twelve murdered workers at Charlie Hebdo magazine that images of Muhammad are just pictures. Try telling Americans who feel literally sickened by a flag burning that the flag is just a piece of cloth. Those pictures form part of the series of stories we call beliefs. To paraphrase Magritte, You can’t worship a picture or live in a piece of cloth. But you can live in a story of your own making in which pictures and cloth play a major role.

A painting is simply an arrangement of paint, a collection of chemicals, a distribution of atoms on a canvas. To an inkjet printer or a computer monitor, Magritte’s pipe is a specific arrangement of pixels or positions. That these arrangements of chemicals are a picture with meaning is an emergent property of the painting created by the storying ability of an attentive human. The image, the sound, or the flavor has only to be accurate enough to allow a vivid re-presentation to emerge. We don’t experience pixels on a screen or dots of paint directly; we experience our re-presentation. We sense vibrations from a loudspeaker and construct the sound we hear. We sense the chemicals in a wine and assemble the story we taste. We lift an object and sense it has a character we call weight. Our re-presentation is the stuff of experience. In a very real sense, we are all out of touch with reality.

Semanticists remind us that the map is not the territory or the word is not the thing. When it comes to human perception, the map is sometimes more critical than the territory, and the word might not be the thing, but the story we tell using those words is often our thing. Smashing religious statues or burning flags or effigies is like smoking Magritte’s pipe.

Perception creates our reality

The well-known illusion below is called a Necker cube, named after Louis Necker, who first published it in 1832. Stare at the cube for a while—it might take twenty seconds or more to work. You will eventually see the drawing is really two cubes, one with the A in front and one with the B in front. As you stare at the image something happens that causes the cube to flip front to back.

Each of your eyes detects a slightly different image and sends data to the brain, a process called binocular rivalry. Some viewers quickly latch on to their most likely guess and never see the alternative. Others can easily switch between the two, one at a time. The visual trick here is that the cubes are similar enough to cause perceptual confusion.

Most explanations of this drawing stop with noting the clever illusion of two different cubes. But there is a more basic perceptual illusion going on here beyond seeing either the A-B cube or the B-A cube. The most striking fact here is that we see these flat lines on a flat surface as a three-dimensional object we call a cube. The drawing is no more a cube than Magritte’s painting is a pipe. When I explained a few paragraphs ago that this is a Necker cube, you didn’t stop and say to yourself, That’s not a cube.

We always see things as something. The Necker cube does not exist as a cube until a human perceives it. Necker could easily have labeled his drawing with the words This is not a cube. The lines on paper become a cube only when a human looks at it, much like Magritte’s paint on canvas becomes a pipe only in the presence of a human viewer. The cube is created by the act of perception as part of our Reality Construction Project.

The Necker cube illustrates that seeing is a process of creation rather than of recording. The cube itself does not change, only the story we create to describe or explain it changes. The image on your retina does not change.

Sunsets revisited

I was on a sunset boat cruise in Florida a few years ago and came face to face with the question of what is real? In spite of reliable winter weather in south Florida, this particular day was heavily overcast. The captain announced, It looks like there won’t be a sunset today. I thought to myself, Of course there’s a sunset; we just can’t see it. But the captain was correct. A sunset is like the Necker cube in that it is self-constructed, created by you, the forgetful Director. What do you mean I created that sunset?

We can confidently say that without observers there is no sunset. This does not mean the sun is just in your head—that would be total solipsism—but it does mean that without observers there would be no sunset. The skies would still change, but that darkness exists only when perceived by beings with specific visual restrictions regarding light waves. A tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it does not create sound. A sun with no one to see it does not set.

The sun as a bright orange ball in the sky during the day is another story that exists only in the I of the beholder. Other creatures—bats, worms, sparrows—do not create a story about a bright orange ball. There is a source of energy for our planet, but that it is up there and is a bright yellow circle is our invention. We story this source of radiation as a thing that rises and sets and even tries to peek from behind the clouds on a dreary day.

You might pride yourself on being a realist. I sense what is there and what is there I sense, proclaims the realist. But that too is a self-serving story. We sense very little of what is out there. Our senses are limited to a small band of awareness with vast swatches of reality beyond their reach. At best, we see the universe through a keyhole.

Sentences and metaphors

Sentences must be important—we use them every day. We write in sentences, and speak (more or less) in sentences. We even think in sentences. Recall your elementary school introduction to sentences. I remember two definitions: one required identifying a subject and a predicate, the other described a sentence as a complete thought. Both these definitions fail to satisfy. The subject/predicate definition involves a bit of circular reasoning. If you can understand a subject and a predicate, then you must already understand a sentence. The idea that a sentence is a complete thought was not helpful either—what is an incomplete thought? It seemed to me a bit like trying to imagine digging half a hole.

My working description of a sentence is that it is a story. Grammarians will point out that it is possible to have a sentence that is not a story, but we will treat our definition as a working hypothesis. In its simplest form, a story has an actor or agent (subject) who does something (predicate) usually directed at someone or a goal (object). To describe a sentence as a story helps us understand that we use stories as basic building material to describe and explain the world. We think and speak in stories. This book is a collection of short stories—very short stories called sentences.

Consider a metaphor; the seed from which parable grows. We study metaphors in a literature course as figures of speech and admire writers who use them expertly for our entertainment and enlightenment. But metaphors are far more than clever literary devices.

Our basic story unit is the metaphor. The plot is always the same—this is like that. The goal of the metaphor-story is to create familiarity, to give a sense of rightness or familiarity to actions and feelings. The more abstract and difficult a situation, the more likely we are to employ a metaphor as a story-that-explains.

A metaphor describes one thing or process in terms of another. A simile is a metaphor with an attached reminder in the form of the word like or as. Robert Burns said his love is "like a red, red rose," presumably so the reader would be sure he was talking about a person and not conclude he was in love with his rose bushes.

A metaphor is not merely a clever way to use words; it is a way of thinking. We are not able (at least without great training and/or practice) to shut down our tendency to story by metaphor. A metaphor is a story about alikeness and meaning. Perhaps we have some deeply buried awareness of our metaphorical urge that explains why modern American English is so liberally salted with the word like. It’s like, you know, like somehow we seem driven to, like, use metaphors.

Many metaphors assign human attributes to inanimate objects or abstractions. People know what you mean when you say, Sauerkraut just doesn’t agree with me. You can be sure no one will ask, Have you ever sat down with the sauerkraut to work out your differences? When the captain commands, All hands on deck! he doesn’t have to add, And bring the rest of your body, too.⁶

Many metaphors about learning are visual. If you have good ideas you call them insights or you say, "Oh, I see." You are enlightened, observant, or a visionary. People in agreement are said to see eye to eye. If you lack knowledge you are in the dark, or perhaps you simply can’t see the truth. We create a story about knowledge based on bodily abilities; vision in this case. When we leave a friend, we might say, See you later. We use that expression only because vision is our most cherished sense. Two friendly dogs departing might say the equivalent of smell you later.

Our bodies monitor temperature, so we use temperature as a metaphor for affection—we have warm feelings for someone. We monitor spatial location so intimacy is storied as closeness. Love is a journey along a path or a state we fall into. A relationship falls apart if people go in different directions instead of being on the same track.

Psychiatrist and neuroimaging researcher Iain McGilchrist emphasizes the importance of metaphor: "Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself. It is what links language to life."⁷ McGilchrist isn’t the first writer to make this observation. In his Poetics, Aristotle notes, Strange words simply puzzle us; ordinary words convey only what we know already. It is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh.⁸

A meta-study of how we use metaphors shows that metaphor density ranges from around twenty metaphors per thousand words for college lectures, to around fifty in ordinary conversation and sixty in teacher talk. Doctor–patient interviews included about fifty-five metaphors per thousand words.⁹ Metaphors enable us to understand what is unfamiliar, complex, or abstract.

Consider:

The stock market crashed early in the year then soared to new heights within months. The abstract stock market is storied as an agent capable of vertical and horizontal movement.

The copier spat out ten copies in a minute, but the printer chewed up my essay. Copiers do not spit nor do printers chew.

The tornado wreaked havoc on Springfield, but mercifully spared Worthington. A weather event is given a life in which it can exercise the virtue of mercy.

A fence runs along the rear of the property, and a path goes to the nature preserve. Movement is attributed to a fence and a path even though both are stationary.

Spring arrived late this year. The seasons are travelers who show up each year according to a schedule.

His hard work propelled him to the top of the class. Work is storied as an agent and achievement as a space that has a top and a bottom.

Help stomp out racism. An abstraction is storied as a physical object; probably a fire. Its elimination is storied by referring to the bodily action of using a foot to squash an object.

My mind raced through the possible implications. The mind becomes a thing capable of operating at varying speeds. We’ve already seen that mind can also be storied as a door (or a trap) that is open or closed. The more difficult an idea is to understand, the more we lean on metaphor to explain. (Note the bodily metaphor lean on.)

Their beliefs forced them to seek an alternative lifestyle. Here a belief (an abstraction) is compared to a source of energy that can apply force to a person.

A third-world country is on the road to democracy if only it can overcome obstacles blocking its progress. The journey metaphor uses our shared knowledge about motion through space to a destination, whether a career path or the road to ruin.

Let me make a mental note of that. Thinking is storied as an internal notebook in which we store ideas. Some people are easy to read. It’s as if you can read my mind. You misread my intentions. He’s an open book.

These examples can still be seen as colorful or creative language crafted to enhance communication, but most of the metaphors we use are more subtle and so much a part of ordinary speech we fail to recognize them as metaphorical. For example, infants learn that body contact with a parent produces warmth and security. They associate warmth with comfort and security and cold with insecurity and danger. These bodily sensations filter into speech as metaphors describing relationships beyond parental body contact. We speak of having warm feelings for someone, or of others who give us an icy stare or a frosty reception. We warm up to an idea or perhaps only feel lukewarm about it. A feeling of rejection is sometimes expressed as being left out in the cold.

Many of our most common metaphors reference universal bodily experiences— grasping or reaching, moving from one point to another, holding or letting go, rising or falling, chasing or fleeing, sensing hot and cold, pulling or pushing, catching or throwing, feeling pressure or weight. These are sensations we have experienced since the crib, so we apply them to inanimate objects, events, or abstractions. We inhabit a metaphorical universe in which we story the world out there in terms of our personal sensations.

It all starts in the crib, if not before. Picture an infant waving around a pudgy little hand. That hand makes contact with something and grasps it. That thing might be a finger of a parent, a rattle or even its own foot. The infant does not know the finger belongs to someone else and the foot is his own. Infants are still working out the difference between me and not me. But that distinction is of little import to a neonate. Making contact with the world by grasping is a crucial step on the road to personhood. Note in the preceding sentence how the process of growing up is storied as a journey along a path.

Human infants go through predictable stages of mental development. But these stages are not shed and left behind like the skin of a snake. Instead. they are like a powder dissolved in the liquid self. We never completely put away the things of a child. That infant will need a lifetime to determine the elusive boundary dividing self from nonself.

Years later the infant will be able to understand abstract ideas like parent, family, love, or friendship. Ask about understanding these abstractions and the answer will most likely include a metaphor. Adults speak of getting a hold on ideas or of grasping the concept. In other words, we relate back to those early days in the crib spent grasping at whatever objects were nearby. We readily provide our take on the situation or even admit to a mis-take.

We understand what is new in terms of what is familiar. This is how we bridge the gap between sensation and the physical world. We use a simple story called a metaphor to realize that this is like that. Grasping is a body-based metaphor that helps us get hold of things or to put a finger on it, or simply to get it.

For the infant, it is a finger or a foot. Twenty years later our infant will have learned to avoid toes in the mouth in public, but will still try to grasp abstract ideas like family, nation, virtue, or friendship. These often prove more difficult than toes. And, of course, as an adult, you can still put your foot in your mouth.

To grasp requires a thing to take hold of, so we tend to thingify (a philosopher might use the term reification here); we turn a process into a thing or an abstraction into an active agent. We move beyond basic physical grabbing. If there is no thing to grasp, we use a story to create one. The abstract belief becomes a story in which a belief is a thing we hold—something that belongs to us. We even story ideas as things we have.

We create a story about the self as a two-part creature made of squishy physical stuff called a body and of mysterious immaterial stuff called a mind, a soul, or consciousness. We live this two-part self-story every time we talk to ourselves. We create a story about the real me that lives somewhere in our heart of hearts. We create a story of a soul that can be searched, a brain that can be filled with ideas and memories, a heart that can go cold, a mind that can be changed, and a will that can power the body.

When we taste a sweet food, we experience pleasure. The connection between sweetness and physical pleasure is universal and automatic. So when we experience even a remotely similar pleasure—for example, from hitting a winning shot in tennis or driving a newly purchased car—we borrow the familiar pleasure from eating to explain it. We say it’s sweet. To call a new car a sweet ride, or the center of a golf club or tennis racket the sweet spot, is to use a body-based metaphor.

The following list illustrates that much of our speech and thinking is built on metaphor. The list is long, so you will likely skim it, but its length serves to emphasize the commonality of metaphor in ordinary speech. As you read this list, you will likely think of several other metaphors not listed. These new metaphors will, to use another metaphor, just pop into your head.

Sensations of warmth and cold

warm feelings

He’s cool.

She’s hot.

You’re getting warm.

cool under pressure

warm hearted

once you warm up to it

warm colors

cold feet

icy stares

frosty glances

hot-headed

boiling mad

heated argument

blow his top

all steamed up

feeling the heat

Grasping/reaching/pulling/pushing/throwing

He’s quite taken with her.

catch a cold

hold a job

hold a grudge

grasp an idea

reach a conclusion

held back by doubt

catch a train

seize the opportunity

That’s quite a reach.

had the win within reach . . .

. . . but let it slip away

slip into sleep

hold an opinion

take a chance

let go of a memory

pull away

pull your weight

pull yourself together

Get it?

got it

throw out a question

throw away a chance

have time for

pulled toward that lifestyle

get a hold of yourself

get a grip on yourself

pusher

eye-catching

take a vacation

take a few minutes

take your time

catch yourself

it just came to me

reaching for an explanation

get a handle on it

keep a secret

pulled by conflicting ideas

pushed to conform

Touch/texture/weight

stay in touch

out of touch

touching experience

touched by the gesture

under pressure

feeling pressured

soft on crime

scratched the surface

rubbed the wrong way

seven-year itch

smooth operator

smooth sailing

rough times

high-pressured sales pitch

softy

slimeball

still rough around the edges

sharp

soften the blow

burdened by problems

weigh the pros and cons

weigh in on the debate

the gravity of the situation

heavy reading

He’s a lightweight.

keep your feelings bottled up

a weighty issue

hard to bear

She was quite a burden.

weight off your shoulders

carries a lot of weight

soft-hearted

rough around the edges

a rough patch

a load off my mind

the secret was weighing her down

a rugged face

edgy

fuzzy logic

an abrasive personality

weighed down

depressed

Contest/fight/struggle

fought off the cold

battling cancer

struggled with addictions

feel trapped

weighed down

torn between

a divided mind

control your emotions/impulses/anger

fight off temptation

fight