for - climate communication - George Lakoff - cognitive linguistics - framing theory - Joe Brewer

// - this is the mechanism by which ritual practice can bring about interpretive shift unconsciously -because bodily movements have a priming effect - Lakoff points to the concept of "biconceptualism, a compartmentalism in our physical brain

//Quote - If the facts don’t fit the frames in your brain, the frames in your brain stay and the facts are ignored or challenged or belittled - (Lakoff 2014: xiv).

The authors here do themselves and their public a disservice by repeating the myth up front before trying to dispel it. This may psychologically tend to reinforce it rather than priming the reader to come to believe the opposite.

A better framing might instead be George Lakoff's truth sandwich: present the truth/actuality, then talk about the myth and then repeat the truth again.

Audrey Watters starts out a piece on the history of school bells with just the sort of falsehood that she's probably aiming to debunk. Perhaps she would have been better off with George Lakoff's truth sandwich model as starting off with the false story is too often has the opposite effect and leads readers down the road to inculcating the idea further into the culture.

She doesn't reveal the falsehood until the end of the third graph at which time one's brain has been stewing in falsehood for far too long.

When presented with problems people are prone to gesture more with the increasing challenges of those problems. The more ways there are to solve a particular problem, the more gesturing one is likely to do.

What sort of analysis could one do on politicians who gesture their speech with relation to this? For someone like Donald J. Trump who floats balloons (ideas--cross reference George Lakoff) in his speeches, is he actively gesturing in an increased manner as he's puzzling out what is working for an audience and what isn't? Does the gesturing decrease as he settles on the potential answers?

isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas, or “latticework of mental models” (Munger, 1994), it becomes easier to make sense of new information. That makes it easier not only to learn and remember, but also to retrieve the information later in the moment and context it is needed.

Our natural memories are limited in their capacities, but it becomes easier to remember facts when they've got an association to other things in our minds. The building of mental models makes it easier to acquire and remember new information. The down side is that it may make it harder to dramatically change those mental models and re-associate knowledge to them without additional amounts of work.

The mental work involved here may be one of the reasons for some cognitive biases and the reason why people are more apt to stay stuck in their mental ruts. An example would be not changing their minds about ideas of racism and inequality, both because it's easier to keep their pre-existing ideas and biases than to do the necessary work to change their minds. Similar things come into play with respect to tribalism and political party identifications as well.

This could be an interesting area to explore more deeply. Connect with George Lakoff.

Tangential to my particular study, but consider the idea of Donald Trump as being an imitator within this framing. He would frequently float ideas at rallies (cf. George Lakoff) to see what would get a rise from the crowed and riff off of that. In some sense he's not leading, yet imitating the mobs.

This is the second or third reference to this I've seen now in the past couple of months. I obviously need to read more Lakoff, though the general conceit rings true to me on its face.