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I'm Mignon Fogarty.
Welcome to the Thursday show where we talk to people doing interesting things in the world of language.
Today, I'm here with Dr. Vicki Lai, a cognitive scientist and psychology professor at the University of Arizona.
Dr. Lai, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. My pleasure.
Your work is so fascinating.
Once I started looking into your research projects, I just wanted to read more and more about how we use metaphors and what effect that has on our brain.
Can you start by just explaining how integral metaphor is to communication?
Yes. Metaphors occur quite frequently in daily speech. And one study back in 1977 already said that speakers use about on average of 1 .8 novel metaphors and 4 .0 frozen metaphors per minute.
So that's quite a lot.
I'm sorry, what's the difference between a novel metaphor and a frozen metaphor?
A frozen metaphor is something that is very, very conventionalized.
We can call it like dead.
For example, if you say the branch of a bank, nobody would think that's metaphor, but branch is kind of coming from the use of tree and tree branch. So then you say, okay, that's the branch of a bank.
And nobody would think that's metaphor anymore nowadays.
And that's the kind of debt metaphors that we call frozen figures.
And novel metaphors would be something new and interesting.
So I can give an example.
This example doesn't exist in English, but in Chinese, you can say that let's stir fry the stock market.
And that just means that you manipulate the stock market up or down or high or low, you know, in any possible ways, like you would do stir fry.
Oh, that's great. Okay.
So we've got these two different kinds of metaphors, and we use them both a lot.
Yeah. And recent statistics say that.
And when I say recent, this is work done by Gerhard Stien at the University of Amsterdam.
Professor Stien has counted the number of metaphors, for example, in academic texts, it's about 18%.
In regular news, it's about 16%.
And in fiction, it's actually lower, like 11 .7%.
And in conversation, it's about 7 .7%.
Oh, that surprises me that it would be less in fiction.
So what are all these metaphors doing?
Why do we use them so much?
And why aren't we using them so much in fiction?
Yeah. So the question why is a mystery, but some researchers have done work on this.
So in a 1994 paper by Dr. Roberts and Dr. Crois, they sent out a survey asking, you know, why people use figurative language.
And they include different kinds of figurative language, including metaphor, irony, idiom, and so on and so forth.
And so for the purpose of using metaphor, they found that most people use metaphors to clarify their ideas, to add interest, to provoke thoughts, and to compare similarity, and also to be eloquent.
So this is kind of the main functions.
If you ask people, why do you use metaphors, that's kind of what you use.
But for cognitive scientists like myself, we think that metaphors connect two concepts that are distantly related.
So life is a journey, life is more abstract, journey is more concrete.
So we use our concrete experience -based ideas to reason about life.
Time is money. Time is more abstract, whereas money is more concrete.
And these ideas are not originated from me personally.
This was brought up by Lakoff and Johnson back in the 1980s.
They published a book called Metaphors We Live By, and there they talk about how, you know, these metaphors connect concepts in our minds.
And that's kind of what we cognitive scientists think what metaphors are for, help us relate concepts in an interesting way.
Yeah, but your research has shown sort of what goes on in our brains when we hear and use metaphors.
And that's really fascinating, too, because it actually is doing things that you can measure in the brain.
Yes. So we looked at metaphors, frozen metaphors, and also novel metaphors and see how the brains react to metaphors.
And what we do in this case, we're using electroencephalography.
So that's EEG. And we use EEG when people read metaphors.
And we found that there is an effect in comparison to literal language.
And this is significant because previously in behavioral research, measuring reading times of a sentence, for instance, people have shown that it takes the same amount of time to comprehend metaphors as they do literal language.
But these brainwave measures tell us that there are different neural resources that are activated to support the comprehension of metaphors in comparison to literal language.
So that to us is interesting.
interesting. Yeah. So, you know, it's funny because I might imagine that it would take longer to comprehend a metaphor because it isn't literal, but you're saying it's the same amount of time our brain just knows exactly what to do with a metaphor.
Is that right? Yeah.
So if the metaphors are well situated in context, then the reading times are the same between metaphors and literal language.
But obviously, if it's out of context, then the people do pause for a second to understand metaphors.
So the other thing that jumped out at me is super interesting is that it's the brain regions that light up.
So when you use an action verb as a metaphor, like, I don't know, grasp a concept, for example, like talk about what's going on in our brains.
Yeah. So, and this study was in collaboration with Professor Ruvik Desai at the University of South Carolina.
And so what we are studying, the topic is whether language is embodied.
So traditional language theories say that when we comprehend language, we rely on the classic language regions in the brain.
So classic language regions include Broca's areas, Wernicke's areas, those classic labels.
However, embodied researchers think that it's not just those classic language areas, but but also areas that are involved in motor sensory and emotional regions are activated to help us comprehend metaphors.
So when we use an action verb such as kick, right, you could say, OK, kick, K -I -C -K, you use the classic language area.
But at the same time, the motor region also comes in to help like activate the part that, you know, is responsible for the action of kicking.
So that part is literal language and that's okay.
That's, you know, basically, yes, that's activated.
However, the question is, do metaphors or idioms such as kick the bucket also involve those sensory motor regions?
And we found that very conventionalized idioms, or as we previously mentioned, the frozen ones, do tend to fall on just abstract language processing area.
But things that are more novel will make use of the motor regions, basically.
So like when you talk about a bank branch, nothing in our brain about trees is lighting up on your scans.
But if we talk about let's kick this idea to next week, let's you know, if you're in a meeting and let's kick this to next week, your brain really is thinking about like physically kicking the idea.
Yeah, that's a great example.
Yes. That's amazing.
Amazing. So you've also done research on helping students using metaphors to learn.
And that research reminded me when I was in grad school, I was an English major who went into biology.
And I remember all the metaphors like enzymes or little scissors that cut the DNA and the mitochondria or the powerhouse of the cell.
And those were such helpful metaphors I felt like when I was trying to learn.
And you know, what are you finding or working on to see how metaphors can actually help students learn in a more scientifically studied way?
We are actively investigating whether metaphoric learning helps more than literal learning in comparison to a no learning condition.
And this is work funded by NSF.
So in these studies, we invite high school students to our our lab and we tutor them on science concepts, both metaphorically and literally.
And before and after learning, they take pre -tests and post -tests and that's how we assess the learning outcome.
And the measurements that we took include behavioral measures such as multiple choice questions, concept familiarity ratings.
We also take neural measures such as EEG and fMRI images.
And so one example that we use in these metaphoric training is, for example, for the concept cilia, the metaphor we use is a broom.
So the cilia form a broom that sweeps mucus out of your sinuses and lungs.
So we talked about those little hairs, right?
Right. Yeah. Right.
So cilia move basically is the back of your nose and air passages are covered with tiny hairs called cilia.
And the cilia can brush upward, can brush out and wave like motions.
And there's like bundles of bristles, just like a broom.
So that's one of the examples that we use.
And what we're seeing, at least for now, is that there is a very small behavioral effect showing that metaphoric learning is a little better than the literal learning, but not dramatically, which makes sense because we don't want to convert all textbooks into metaphors, right?
We want to make use of the ones that work and there could be ones that don't work and we're still figuring those out.
And that's interesting.
And in the neural measures, especially in the brainwaves, we saw an indicator of the brain extracting, making use of more concrete neural resources to help us understand these abstract science concepts.
And likewise, in the fMRI, in the preliminary data, we also saw that the region that we call the convergence zone, it's called angular gyrus, it is activated for concepts that have been metaphorically learned, learned but less for concepts that are literally learned.
So it's actually forming different connections in the brain when you learn different ways.
Is that right? Yes.
That's a great way to put it.
Yeah. Interesting. Well, we're going to take an ad break.
And when we come back, we're going to talk about irony and how it can actually make people feel better sometimes and about metaphors and cancer outcomes, which is another really interesting area of research Dr. Lai has worked on.
So we'll be right back.
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See site for details.
Welcome back. So you've also done work on irony, which is just fascinating and how it can affect the way people feel about conversations.
Talk more about that, please.
Yes, the work on irony in my lab is led by my former PhD student Valeria Pfeiffer, who is going to be an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
So we have the idea of studying figurative language and emotion, and irony is one of them.
As I mentioned in this big survey conducted years ago about what are the functions of figurative language, and they found that irony is associated with negative emotion.
But in that survey, they didn't say whether it's to express negative emotion or to do something about it.
So we conducted a series of studies to examine the relationship between irony and negative emotion.
What we find through different measures, including behavioral and EEG measures, is that irony can downregulate negative emotion.
Oh, oh, that's so interesting.
So I think of irony as sort of, you know, snarky, mean things that people say to you, but you're saying it can make people feel better?
Well, it also depends on the individual, so say, and depends on the emotional context.
So the example that Valeria has been using is water on your laptop.
So if you spill water on your laptop, that's very negative.
But if the laptop is closed, it's less negative.
It's open and it's more negative.
So in that case, only when it's highly negative context can irony downregulate one's emotion.
Okay. Yeah. Okay. So can you explain how, what's an example of the ironic statements that were used in your study?
so for example if someone spills water on your laptop and the expression is that's careful of how careful of you you mean careless i think careless would be literal and careful would be ironic okay yeah so if so if okay so the people in your study are sort of there as if they're the bystander in the cafe and they're hearing someone else say oh how careful of you yes to To someone else?
Yes. And then how do they feel?
Yeah, because we measure their brainwaves and then we saw indicators that indicates that they noticed the negativity.
And then later on, not too much later, within a second, they start downregulating their emotion.
So if someone says, how careless of you, they feel worse than if they see someone say, how careful of you.
Yes. Fascinating. If you say, how careless of you, that's almost like scolding, right?
and they feel negative.
Fascinating. So I want to finish our main segment today with your research on metaphors and cancer and emotions.
And I thought that was also very interesting.
Can you talk about that research that you've done?
Yeah. So that is work that we collaborate with Dr. Karen Ways, a psychiatrist at the University of Arizona.
And in these cancer, I would say survivors, those are breast cancer survivors.
They were recruited one month after their diagnosis, and they were invited to write an essay about their deepest feelings and thoughts at month one and also again at month nine.
Okay. So then we studied the essays that they wrote and we looked for metaphors or any forms of figurative language.
But in this study, we look specifically for metaphors.
Note that these individuals were not prompted with, you know, could you use metaphors or anything?
No, their prompts were, can you tell us your deepest feelings and thoughts?
And at the same time, they had their depressive scores measured, you know, over the course of nine months.
So we correlated the use of metaphors with the depressive scores.
And what we're finding is a little surprising.
So in those that use metaphors were actually at month nine, they were actually more depressive.
then so if they're still using abstract metaphoric way of thinking at month nine then they're still more depressed than those that have resumed a normal level of metaphor use fascinating is there other research that shows that people use metaphors more often when they're depressed or just when they're having strong emotions in general there are lots of research research that showed that people fall back on indirect language, like metaphors, when they're strongly emotional.
But we're still studying why that is.
So for instance, in expressive writings, which is also a paradigm where you have someone write every day for a couple of days about their traumatic experiences or strongly emotional experiences, so to speak.
And there you also see some metaphoric effects as well.
So the advice I think wouldn't be if you're depressed to stop using metaphors and you'll feel better.
It's that I would guess that if you're using metaphors, that is a way that you are still working through issues that you have. Because Because I can imagine some people looking at the result and saying, well, depressed people used more metaphors that they might interpret that as, well, then stop using metaphors and you'll feel better.
But I'm imagining that's not the advice that you would have. No, I would say that also referring back to this line of research called expressive writing, I think some of the studies said that you do need to reach that rock bottom place before you can climb up.
And perhaps, and this is not tested, okay, perhaps using metaphors can help you express more and reaching that point where you start to climb up.
And this is speculative.
I just want to say that, clarify that.
But we don't know. We are still investigating.
But it is without a doubt that metaphor is intimately tied to emotion in many, many ways.
Fascinating. Well, Dr. Vicky Lai from the University of Arizona, thank you so much for being here today.
Thank you. So this is the end of the main segment.
For the Grammarpleusians, we're going to have a bonus segment where we're going to talk about figurative language in bilingual research, emoji, all sorts of other interesting things.
So stick around. Thanks for your support.
And for the rest of you, thanks for listening.
