8 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2023
    1. Ritual practice embeds tacit knowledge. Its bodily actions enact meaning and operationalize values. The bodily motions of ritual actions, such as physically sharing drinks and food, and giving gifts, matters because of the reciprocal ideomotor effects of unconscious priming (Kahneman 2011:53). As Lakoff explains, there are connections between metaphoric meanings and bodily actions such that metaphoric associations are embedded in the structures of our brains. Compartmentalism, or “biconceptualism” in his terms, is physical in our brains, and frame shifts can be triggered through bodily movement with priming effects. “Going through the motions” of ritual will have some effects even for those who start off feeling silly for doing it.

      // - 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

    2. 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).

      //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).

  2. Sep 2022
    1. As discussed in Chapter 1, there are many myths and misperceptions sur-rounding who the poor are. The typical image is of someone who haslived in poverty for years at a time, is Black or Hispanic, resides in aninner-city ghetto, receives two or three welfare programs, and is reluctantto work. On all counts, this image is a severe distortion of the reality.

      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.

  3. Mar 2022
    1. I'd wager it's the most frequently told story about ed-tech — one told with more gusto and more frequency even than "computers will revolutionize teaching" and "you can learn anything on YouTube." Indeed, someone invoked this story just the other day when chatting with me about the current shape and status of our education system: the school bell was implemented to acclimate students for life as factory workers, to train them to move and respond on command, their day broken into segments of time dictated by the machine rather than the rhythms of pre-industrial, rural life.

      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.

    1. Gesturing also increases as afunction of difficulty: the more challenging the problem, and the more optionsthat exist for solving it, the more we gesture in response.

      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?

  4. Feb 2022
    1. Our brains work not that differently in terms of interconnectedness.Psychologists used to think of the brain as a limited storage spacethat slowly fills up and makes it more difficult to learn late in life. Butwe know today that the more connected information we alreadyhave, the easier it is to learn, because new information can dock tothat information. Yes, our ability to learn isolated facts is indeedlimited and probably decreases with age. But if facts are not kept

      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.

  5. Aug 2021
    1. Imitation did not mean exact reproduction; rather, words could be added or substracted, and a passage reworked in order to express the same or a contrary view (52)

      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.

  6. Aug 2018
    1. Berkeley linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff has famously argued that liberals and conservatives operate with competing and incompatible concepts of freedom. (For analysis of the evangelical theocratic understanding of freedom, click here.) While the physical metaphor at the core of our understanding of freedom remains the same, liberals and conservatives cognitively frame that core concept in radically different ways that are linked closely to the two groups’ approaches to family. The “strict-father” model of family corresponds to conservatism (and authoritarianism), whereas the “nurturant parenting” model corresponds to liberalism.

      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.