Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (33 page)

Intelligence, to our mind, is the art of rapid and reliable gist-finding, crux-spotting, bull’s-eye-hitting, nub-striking, essence-pinpointing. It is the art of, when one is facing a new situation, swiftly and surely homing in on an insightful precedent (or family of
precedents) stored in the recesses of one’s memory. That, no more and no less, is what it means to isolate the crux of a new situation. And this is nothing but the ability to find close analogues, which is to say, the ability to come up with strong and useful analogies.

The final chapter of our book is devoted to showing how analogy-making of a high order has given rise over millennia to the great ideas of mathematics and physics. But of course, the majestically soaring peak of Mount Analogy is by no means the entire mountain. Up there at the top, one finds analogies of great abstraction, while on the lower slopes one finds more concrete resemblances, which, although doubtless less scenic and striking, still result from the same cognitive mechanisms, merely applied in humbler and more familiar contexts.

For instance, in the previous chapter, we encountered, as they were meandering on the low foothills of Mount Analogy, two-year-old Camille, who “undressed” her banana, and eight-year-old Tom, who saw his uncle’s cigarette “melting”. These juvenile strollers were unwittingly demonstrating their keen intelligence when they retrieved those analogues from their personal stock of experiences, putting their finger on the crux of the matter at hand. Camille’s idea of “undressing” her banana is quite a bright one, coming right to the point; indeed, it’s the flip side of the quip someone twenty years older might make, after dancing all night: “When I got home, I had to peel all my clothes off my body!” As for Tom’s idea of a cigarette “melting” in an ashtray, it’s the flip side of what an adult might say upon finding that ten boxes of very expensive candy they’d bought for friends had all melted: “All those luscious chocolates went up in smoke.”

When we effortlessly call something we heard a moment ago “a sound” rather than “a noise”, it is because we’ve just made a mapping between a fresh mental structure, representing the sonic event, and a prior mental structure that we’d built up as a result of thousands of prior occasions — and we unconsciously chose
that
dormant structure because that mapping struck our brain as the best analogy in town. It’s not as if we were ever formally taught the distinction between
sounds
and
noises
; indeed, we’d be hard pressed to explain what that elusive distinction is, but no matter: when we hear something, just one of those categories tends to be activated (
i.e.
, to spring to mind).

It’s rather miraculous that we are all so good at unconsciously making these kinds of instant judgment calls among our many thousands of concepts, given that we were never taught formal criteria for them. What, indeed, is the difference between a
hill
and a
mountain
, or a
country
and a
nation
, or an
enemy
and an
adversary
, or a
sign
and a
symbol
, or a
piece
and a
part
, or an
idea
and a
thought
, or a
shop
and a
store
, or
picking
and
choosing
, or
falling
and
dropping
, or
throwing
and
tossing
, or
putting
and
placing
, or
smiling
and
grinning
, or
big
and
large
, or
sick
and ill, or
pretty
and
lovely
, or
delicate
and
fragile
, or
however
and
nevertheless
? No one would dream of trying to teach such distinctions in school.

The ceaseless activity of making mappings between freshly minted mental structures (new percepts) and older mental structures (old concepts) — the activity of
pinpointing highly relevant concepts in novel situations — constitutes the analogical fabric of thought, and the unceasing flurry of analogies that we come up with is a mirror of our intelligence. Thus when we reflexively make the fine discrimination of calling a very small object “teeny-weeny” (as opposed to “tiny”, “teeny”, “teeny-tiny”, “teensy”, and “teensy-weensy”), or when we unconsciously distinguish between cases of
clutching, clasping
, and
clinging
, or when we casually describe part of a city as a “district” (as opposed to “area”, “zone”, “region”, “spot”, “place”, or “neighborhood”), we are unwittingly displaying our great finesse at the art of rapid retrieval of apposite analogues from our enormous storehouse of experience. In truth, far from being an unthinking activity, the art of super-rapid right-on retrieval is the core of thinking.

When a woman toting two bags nonchalantly saunters out of a butcher shop into the street in front of a car in which you are a passenger, the chances are virtually nil that you will exclaim, “Watch out for that biped!” or “Watch out for that female !” or “Watch out for that redhead!” or “Watch out for that customer!” or “Watch out for that carnivore!” To be sure, in different circumstances, the bag-laden damoiselle might well be perceived primarily as a
biped
, a
female
, a
redhead
, a
primate
, a
shlepper
, a
lady
, a
dress-wearer
, a
customer
, or a
carnivore
— but in this circumstance, she is most importantly a member of the category
pedestrian.
“Pedestrian” may not be the word we utter, but instantly recognizing that she is playing this role is a quintessential act of thinking.

Much the same could be said about rapidly spotting, in highly diverse situations, the telltale signature of the protean concept
mess.
Here we give a handful of typical members of the category (and we urge readers to come up with others):

• a spoiled child’s bedroom, with toys strewn all over the place;

• a toolshed in which no one has set foot in decades;

• a plate of spaghetti accidentally dropped onto a white rug;

• a shoe with chewing gum stuck in the grooves on its sole;

• a china shop after a bull has been let loose for a half hour in it;

• books replaced at random on a shelf by someone who has just dusted the shelf;

• a complex algebraic expression that doesn’t yield at all to attempts to simplify it;

• a musical manuscript covered with crossouts and revisions everywhere;

• the discovery of a pile of important bills that one had forgotten to pay;

• having hired a close friend’s son who turns out to be totally incompetent;

• commitments made to two colleagues to meet them at exactly the same time;

• losing one’s passport the day before one has to set off on an international trip;

• the decades-long strife in the Middle East;

• a romantic triangle.

No courses are needed by any speaker of English to learn the many subtleties of this concept; in fact, for a school to offer such a course sounds like an utter absurdity. Every adult will understand these cases of
mess
-ness without expending any effort.

We humans excel at making fluid mappings between new situations and old concepts lying dormant in our memory, although we seldom if ever focus consciously on the many thousands of such mappings that we carry out each day. Just as consummate dancers are constantly demonstrating their virtuosity at making rapid-fire maneuvers in physical space, so consummate speakers of a language are constantly demonstrating their virtuosity at making rapid-fire maneuvers in conceptual space, where a “maneuver” consists in darting into just the appropriate nook in one’s vast stock of experiences and from it delicately plucking a highly apposite memory, overlapping in a deep and important way with the situation at hand.

If intelligence truly comes down to the ability to pinpoint the essence of situations, then it would seem that the larger and the more fine-grained the repertoire of concepts one has at one’s disposal, the more intelligent one will be. After all, each of us grows up in some culture, and that culture provides its members with a myriad of useful conceptual tools. Thus it might seem that one’s intelligence will be determined by the set of conceptual tools one inherits from one’s culture. The question then becomes whether someone who grows up in a culture that is endowed with more conceptual tools will be more intelligent — that is, more capable of rapidly putting their finger on the nubs of situations they face — than someone whose culture is lacking such concepts.

We who live in today’s highly technological, intensely commercial, advertising-drenched world are awash in a lush semantic sea rife with untold thousands of concepts that people of, say, two centuries ago lacked totally, and those tools pervade, and help to determine, our moment-to-moment thoughts. Consider, for instance, the following picturesque phrase that we encountered not long ago:

an ego the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon

To understand this phrase, one has to be familiar with Sigmund Freud’s notion of an
ego
, with the notion of
department stores
, with the notion of
Thanksgiving
as well as the idea of vast long parades that march down large boulevards in big cities on holidays. In addition, one needs to know something about the gas called “helium” — at least the fact that a balloon filled with it will rise into the air. And lastly, one has to be familiar with the specific cartoon-character-inspired lighter-than-air balloons that are regularly featured in the Macy’s Parade each year, and with how huge they loom above the massive crowds that line the wide avenues of Manhattan each Thanksgiving Day.

No one could possibly have dreamed of a phrase of this sort 200 years ago. And yet today it is a very clear, run-of-the-mill phrase that most American adults would have no trouble understanding. But this is only one tiny example. Below are listed some concepts — just a minuscule subset of the concepts that our culture abounds in — the possession of which would seem to give us a substantial leg up on people from previous generations or centuries:

Not only does our culture provide us with such potent concepts, it also encourages us to analogically extend them both playfully and seriously, which gives rise to a snowballing of the number of concepts. Thus over the years, the concept
alcoholic
has given rise to many spinoff terms such as “workoholic”, “chocoholic”, “shopoholic”, and “sexoholic”. Here we have linguistic playfulness marching hand in hand with conceptual playfulness. The ancient concept of
marathon
has likewise in recent times engendered countless variations on its theme, such as “dance-athon”, “juggle-athon”, “cookathon”, “jazzathon”, and so forth. In a more serious vein, the concept of
racism
has spawned many variations, including
sexism, ageism, speciesism
, and
weightism
, and today there are words for yet other forms of discrimination that previously had had no identity and that were therefore difficult to pick out from all the background noise.