You know those days when the world seems to be conspiring to teach you a lesson? You see signs everywhere. I’m having one of those today. The lesson is metaphor.
The first sign came courtesy of Noah: At his suggestion, I just finished reading Steven Johnson’s excellent Emergence. It’s five or six years old now, but maybe more impressive because of how relevant it remains today. There is a lot to say about this book, but the pertinent thought here is about how our brains work.
The brain is a massively parallel system, with 100 billion neurons all working away at the same time. That parallelism allows the brain to perform amazing feats of pattern recognition, feats that continue to confound digital computers — such as remembering faces or creating metaphors.
We are wired for metaphor. It is our brain’s specialty to create connections between seeming disparate events or things.
Which brings me to a post by Grant McCracken about a conference called Interesting2007 that functions quite differently from your average industry conference. (Actually, come to think of it, this post came to me via Noah as well — maybe he’s secretly architecting my lesson?) You’re not allowed to talk about your personal area of expertise. No typical conference overstatement or self-promotion.
My first guess on why Interesting2007 was going to work (if it worked) was that everyone in the room was drawn from one of the creative industries (design, planning, art, advertising, film making, and so on). This means that everyone in the room at Conway Hall was good at metaphor capture and pattern recognition. So you could talk, as Adrian Gunn Wilson did, about how to cut wood, and the audience was bound to help themselves to that and much more.
All of this makes intuitive sense to me. We learn in metaphor. When we think about organizing, say, a conference, we engage with the problem rationally. What’s going to be of the most interest to our audience? Who are the best speakers to invite? What topics should they cover? It has to make “sense” — right? Well, maybe it doesn’t.
(I just should have figured out a better metaphor for this thought when writing this post…)
