fact that we use around one metaphor for every ten seconds of speech or written word. If that sounds like too much, it’s because you’re so used to thinking metaphorically – to speaking of ideas that are ‘conceived’ or rain that is ‘driving’ or rage that is ‘burning’ or people who are ‘dicks’. Our models are not only haunted by ourselves, then, but also by properties of other things. In her 1930 essay ‘Street Haunting’ Virginia Woolf employs several subtle metaphors over the course of a single gorgeous sentence:
How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of lights, and its long groves of darkness, and on the side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all around them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of the train in the valley.
Neuroscientists are building a powerful case that metaphor is far more important to human cognition than has ever been imagined. Many argue it’s the fundamental way that brains understand abstract concepts, such as love, joy, society and economy. It’s simply not possible to comprehend these ideas in any useful sense, then, without attaching them to concepts that have physical properties: things that bloom and warm and stretch and shrink.
Metaphor (and its close sibling, the simile) tends to work on the page in one of two ways. Take this example, from Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World: ‘She washed old plastic bags and hung them on the line to dry, a string of thrifty tame jellyfish floating in the sun.’ This metaphor works principally by opening an information gap. It asks the brain a question: how can a plastic bag be a jellyfish? To find the answer, we imagine the scene. Cunningham has nudged us into more vividly modelling his story.
In Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell uses metaphor to make not a visual point, but a conceptual one: ‘The very mystery of him excited her curiosity like a door that had neither lock nor key.’
In The Big Sleep, metaphor enables Raymond Chandler to pack a tonne of meaning into just seven words: ‘Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.’
Brain scans illustrate the second, more powerful, use of metaphor. When participants in one study read the words ‘he had a rough day’, their neural regions involved in feeling textures became more activated, compared with those who read ‘he had a bad day’. In another, those who read ‘she shouldered the burden’ had neural regions associated with bodily movement activated more than when they read ‘she carried the burden’. This is prose writing that deploys the weapons of poetry. It works because it activates extra neural models that give the language additional meaning and sensation. We feel the heft and strain of the shouldering, we touch the abrasiveness of the day.
Such an effect is exploited by Graham Greene in The Quiet American. Here, a protagonist with a broken leg is receiving unwanted help from his antagonist: ‘I tried to move away from him and take my own weight, but the pain came roaring back like a train in a tunnel.’ This finely judged metaphor is enough to make you wince. You can almost feel the neural networks firing up and borrowing greedily from each other: the tender limb; the snapped bone; the pain in all its velocity and unstoppableness and thunder, roaring up the tunnel of the leg.
In The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy uses metaphorical language to sensual effect when describing a love scene between the characters Ammu and Valutha: ‘She could feel herself through him. Her skin. The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.’
And here the eighteenth-century writer and critic Denis Diderot uses a one-two of perfectly contrasting similes to smack his point home: ‘Libertines are hideous spiders, that often catch pretty butterflies.’
Metaphor and simile can be used to create mood. In Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Death in the Family, the narrator describes stepping outside for a cigarette break, in the midst of clearing out the house of his recently deceased father. There he sees, ‘plastic bottles lying on their sides on the brick floor dotted with raindrops. The bottlenecks reminded me of muzzles, as if they were small cannons with their barrels pointing in all directions.’ Knausgaard’s choice of language adds to the general deathly, angry aura of the passage by flicking unexpectedly at the reader’s models of guns.
Descriptive masters such as Charles Dickens manage to hit our associative models again and again, creating wonderful crescendos of meaning, with the use of extended metaphors. Here he is, at the peak of his powers, introducing us to Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.
The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas. External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, nor wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.
The author and journalist George Orwell knew the recipe for a potent metaphor. In the totalitarian milieu of his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, he describes the small room in which the protagonist Winston and his partner Julia could be themselves without the state spying on them as ‘a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.’
It won’t come as much of a surprise to discover the interminably correct Orwell was even right when he wrote about writing. ‘A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image,’ he suggested, in 1946, before warning against the use of that ‘huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.’
Researchers recently tested this idea that clichéd metaphors become ‘worn-out’ by overuse. They scanned people reading sentences that included action-based metaphors (‘they grasped the idea’), some of which were well-worn and others fresh. ‘The more familiar the expression, the less it activated the motor system,’ writes the neuroscientist Professor Benjamin Bergen. ‘In other words, over their careers, metaphorical expressions come to be less and less vivid, less vibrant, at least as measured by how much they drive metaphorical simulations.’
In a classic 1932 experiment, the psychologist Frederic Bartlett read a traditional Native American story to participants and asked them to retell it, by memory, at various intervals. The War of the Ghosts was a brief, 330-word tale about a boy who was reluctantly compelled to join a war party. During the battle, a warrior warned the boy that he had been shot. But, looking down, the boy couldn’t see any wounds on his body. The boy concluded that all the warriors were actually just ghosts. The next morning the boy’s face contorted, something black came out of his mouth, and he dropped down dead.
The War of the Ghosts had various characteristics that were unusual, at least for the study’s English participants. When they recalled the tale over time, Bartlett found their brains did something interesting. They simplified and formalised the story, making it more familiar by altering much of its ‘surprising, jerky and inconsequential’ qualities. They removed bits, added other bits and reordered still more. ‘Whenever anything appeared incomprehensible, it was either omitted or explained,’ in much the same way that an editor might fix a confusing story.
Turning the confusing and random into a comprehensible story is an essential function of the storytelling brain. We’re surrounded by a tumult of often chaotic information. In order to help us feel in control, brains radically simplify the world with narrative. Estimates vary, but it’s believed the brain processes around 11 million bits of information at any given moment, but makes us consciously aware of no more than forty. The brain sorts through an abundance of information and decides what salient