10:25am February 22, 2012

➸ Hearing metaphors activates brain regions involved in sensory experience

sharedattention:

From Science Daily: 

Linguists and psychologists have debated how much the parts of the brain that mediate direct sensory experience are involved in understanding metaphors. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their landmark work ‘Metaphors we live by’, pointed out that our daily language is full of metaphors, some of which are so familiar (like “rough day”) that they may not seem especially novel or striking. They argued that metaphor comprehension is grounded in our sensory and motor experiences.

New brain imaging research reveals that a region of the brain important for sensing texture through touch, the parietal operculum, is also activated when someone listens to a sentence with a textural metaphor. The same region is not activated when a similar sentence expressing the meaning of the metaphor is heard.

Embodied cognition strikes again! I find this interesting, as it is commonly believed that individuals with autism and Asperger’s have difficulty processing metaphors. Could we trace this, too, back to a lack of effective connectivity between the senses? For those individuals who lack a rich and nuanced sensory database for the visual, auditory, and tactile senses associated with a label, such as “rough,” is it any wonder that the word might lack in rich and nuanced meaning?

Read the full article here.  

Nobody talks about it anymore, because views of autism have changed. But one of the ways a person used to be able to fit the criteria for speech problems in autism was highly metaphorical speech.  It’s now less explicit but still there as idiosyncratic speech.  In the next DSM it will be moved into the criterion about repetitive speech or movement, even though it has nothing at all to do with repetition (yay for totally messed up priorities). 

The reason I think that it’s gotten less important over time, is that they’ve come to view the experiences of people who can understand language relatively well – well enough to give tests requiring language comprehension in research – as representative of all autistic people’s experiences. And come to view social skills as the main impairment in autism, even though plenty of research demonstrates that clearly autistic people are different in far more fundamental ways than that.  But the best-known research is some of the least scientific (I’m looking at you, Simon Baron-Cohen). 

You see a similar effect when they did an experiment showing that autistic people, when watching movies, focused on people’s mouths instead of the eyes.  They somehow forgot to notice (even though I noticed) that the people they used were all or mostly people who had good overall language comprehension.  Autistic people with good overall language comprehension often have trouble processing sound.  So they were reading lips to supplement listening to the speech. 

They did the same experiment on children with severe receptive language impairments (therefore no motivation to read lips) and, as I’d long ago predicted, they looked all over people’s bodies, not just the mouths.  I predicted this because I had, and still have if I don’t concentrate really hard, severe receptive language impairment.  And I may look at mouths when I am struggling to keep up with language, but when I let go of language and it turns into just noises I look absolutely anywhere.

And that’s just one example of research trying to use data about people with comparatively good language skills, to explain all autistic people.  You get the same thing when they start talking about reading body language and stuff like that. There’s plenty of autistic people who are fairly good at reading unconscious body movements(*), but that tends to be people whose minds are not being constantly occupied with language.  

Anyway, as far as I can tell the people who use highly metaphorical language are most likely to be people with some kind of speech or receptive language delay.  So less likely to be able to talk about what we mean, and therefore, in modern research where people often take the easy road, seemingly less important.  It’s also important to understand that using metaphors and understanding them are not always the same thing – an example of another flaw that turns up in research. 

So for example, when I was a kid, I called a certain kind of fear “the dog”.  I wasn’t afraid of dogs. What happened once was that my brother hid in a closet with dog skulls in it and barked at me when I came close. I felt a jumbled sort of feeling in my stomach. So any time I felt it again I’d say “he gave me the dog” because I associated the feeling with the sound of barking. 

I also suspect that highly metaphorical speech (what one autistic woman describes as “speaking in pattern theme and feel”) happens the most in people with a highly sensory way of relating to the world.  We tend to go by textures and colors and tones rather than by ideas and the separation and identification of objects (which requires abstraction).  And we have language comprehension trouble pretty much always – because understanding language is tied to ideas as well. But we often have echolalia speech and match the sounds of words directly to experiences. Some of eventually gain language comprehension and the ability to communicate in standard language and some of us don’t. (And for those of us who do, like me, it often doesn’t “stick” – the moment I let go of language it’s gone.)

And I could have told you all that before I ever heard of research tying metaphors to sensory experiences. Because I have a wide enough knowledge of autistic people to guess it.  And the reason I did say it (and the reason I mention stuff like this a lot) is because I feel like we are underrepresented when people talk about the way autistic people experience things, so I’m always trying to insert reminders here and there. 

(And while we are less likely to get diagnosed specifically with Asperger’s, some of us do get that diagnosis.  Because of either someone ignoring how unusual and echolalic their early speech was, or thinking all undiagnosed adults must have AS, or deciding since there’s no direct data about early childhood they’re just going to guess.  So there’s definitely people with that diagnosis who experience the world this way.)

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(*) Body language autism research usually uses actors and models and clips from films and magazines rather than people really experiencing the emotions and expressing them unconsciously.  But that’s another story. So is the fact that even researchers are biased based on what they believe.  One time I asked a researcher how many parents told her their children could instantly pick up tension in their household.  She thought a second then said “All of them actually. But I’d been taught that autistic people can’t read body language so I never thought of it again until this conversation.”  That right there explains a lot about how research results get interpreted.  Unfortunately autism research in general isn’t very rigorous. It also doesn’t help that as far as I can tell from experience, autistic people often read different aspects of body language than usual, so if we pick up on something researchers don’t we are counted as wrong, rather than as unusually perceptive.  I know someone who totally screwed up her testing for diagnosis because she reported how an actor was really feeling rather than how he was acting. 

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