I sometimes have a bit of a purist streak to me, preferring things straight and unalderterated. But I am slowly realizing that this is just an affectation, and that most things are in fact blends of one sort or another, and that bringing out the blend is one of the most creative things we do. Much learning is based on the blending of two or more concepts or experiences. Several years ago, when I was deep in my puritanical phase, I had a conversation with a French wine maker about the virtues of the single vairetal wines that have been quite popular with many of the better wineries in North America. His comment, "asking a wine maker to use just one grape to bring out the terroir (the way that the soil and climate are reflected in the wine) is like asking a painter to portray a landscape using only one colour." He stopped me short, and I have noticed that over the past few years more and more of the best North American wines are blends.
Linguists and cognitive scientists have made great progress in understanding how human thought depends on conceptual blending and in uncovering the various mechanisms by which blending is carried out. The roots of this work come from the 'blending" of George Lakoff and associates ideas about the foundational role that metaphor plays in all human thought and a large body of thought around embodied cognition.
Metaphor is sometimes disparaged as a lightweight mode of thinking, not to be compared with the rigors of deductive or inductive reasoning. But in fact most human thought is metaphorical, including most mathematics and logic. Take set theory for example, the foundation of much of modern mathematics. Set theory has grown from basic intuitions about what it means to group things together and what things have in common. Apples and pears are each sets in their own right, and belong to the more general set of fruit. Sets can be joined together, all apples and pears, using what is often known as the 'or' operator (all things that are apples or pears). One can also look for the intersection, the 'and' operator (all things that are fruits and are red would include many apples and some pears). Most sets are actually quite fuzzy and are easily extended by metaphor. In fact, sets are metaphors. We can't really think about sets without using concepts such as 'container' or 'feature'. This is covered in depth in the George Lakoff and Mark Johnson book Philosophy in the Flesh (see below).
Embodied cognition refers to a way of thinking about cognition that recognizes that we have bodies that exist in a world and that the way we think depends on this. Sounds obvious, but in fact this goes counter to a long strand of Western Philosophy that goes all the way back to Plato and his Platonic forms (ideal forms that exist independent of any physical incarnation) or Rene Descartes' notion that the conscious mind is all there is to thought. This position is demonstrably wrong. The mind is (i) in a body, (ii) that is situated in world, and (iii) communicates with other bodies, (iv) in ways that it is often not aware of. There are many excellent books on this, the most enjoyable to me being Ed Hutchins' classic Cognition in the Wild. Hutchins looks at how teams of people expose their thought processes when communicating, using the example of how the US Navy conducts coastal navigation and then contrasts this with Melanesian navigation. Hutchins also shows how ideas about navigation get embedded into instruments like the compass or sextant.
These ideas about metaphor and embodied cognition have come together in the model of conceptual blending. Before diving into this (note the metaphor) I want to put this in the context of learning. Most of what we call learning is actually the act of (i) creating new blends within our own minds and with the people we live and work with (there is a social dimension to both blending and learning) (ii) unfolding blends to understand what ideas have been blended together to begin with, and (iii) embedding blends in the things we work with - tools, instruments, drawings, patterns, conversations.
Learning as the Creation of Blends
Most os us learn most easily if we can relate what we are learning to something that we already know. This is the most basic form of blending. When I wanted to learn about American politics (I am writing this as a Canadian living in the United States during a presidential election year) I began by mapping from Canadian notions of democracy, representation, political parties, delegates, platforms, political advertising and so on to what I could understand of US notions. Of course there are many differences, and these sometimes misled me (the US Electoral College that actually elects the president is a complex beast) but there were enough points of comparison to give me my bearings. And as I began to understand how things work in the US, my understanding of Canadian democracy also changed. This is an important point: metaphors that support true learning seldom go just one way, they are dynamic and each of the perspectives blended together can change the other as well as generating a third, deeper perspectives that combines aspects of both.
Unfolding Blends for Deeper Understanding
Learning is not just about creating new blends. Most of what we know, or think we know, is already based on blends. Moving from politics to mathematics, Rene Descartes created the Cartesian geometry that we learned in high school by blending the ideas of the number line and the plane, and then writing algebraic equations into this blend. There are three blends working on the surface here, number lines, the plane and algebra, and of course each of these are already complex blends in their own right. Not that this is how I normally think when I calculate a function on a graph. The blend is now embodied in our language, tools and conversations. "The slope of a curve" sounds perfectly natural to many people, but it actually blends many experiences and concepts: a line inscribed on a plane ('line' and 'plane' are already blends), change, a straight line touching a curved one at a single point, and so on. To really learn about Cartesian geometry, and be able to think about it to do new things, one needs to decompose the blends it is based on and then build them back up. This is hard work, but it is part of the work of learning. A similar approach of taking apart a blend and then building it back up is used by many sports coaches. A golf swing, a tennis serve, or even something as seemingly simple as turning the crank on a bicycle can be broken down into steps, each of which is practiced and perfected, and then put back together as a stronger whole.
Embedding Blends
Connecting the old to the new, unfolding assumptions and clarifying the underlying metaphors, these are just steps along the path. To really learn something one needs to be able to apply it. The concepts, perceptions, behaviours need to get embedded in one's life. Embedding takes place on several levels. The most common is language. We have learned something when it is embedded in our language systems. This requires a community and conversations. Common phrases, abbreviations, even acronyms are the seeds of a languages system, that are fed by common questions, assciations and perceptions. Even something as physical as learning how to ski or ride a bicycle involves a shared language system. Learning to cycle one began with the seat, the handle bars, the pedals and a notion of balance dependent on speed - "go faster or you'll fall over". Over time, if you go on long rides, you talk about hydration and nutrition, cadence, gears and boinking (when you run out of fuel in your blood). Riding as a group one learns to "hold the line", "close up" and various hand signals to warn of danger or encourage speed.
Language systems are just one of the tools we use to express and apply learning. Just as important are the many physical artifacts that encode what we learn. I currently work for a management consulting firm where a great deal of learning gets encoded into Powerpoint slide, themselves a blend of visual representations (boxes, arrows, colours) and words. A compass rose embeds a tremendous amount of learning about the world - that there are directions, on a two dimensional grid, that directions remain constant (OK, so the magnetic poles drift, and the compass needle can be misled by surrounding metals or spun by an electric charge, but its power lies in its constant pointing towards the north). Learning how to embed learning into things is at the heart of design. Think of the dashboard and controls of a car - learning how to use these is learning how to drive, learning how to design them so that they provide an interface between driver and car is central to automotive design.
Learning also gets embedded in the body as one lays down and reinforces networks of nerve and muscle, linking perception to action. Riding home from the office in Cambridge, across Harvard Bridge and into Boston my body knows to relax, open up peripheral perception, watch for car doors and busses brushing up beside me, where to twitch away from potholes, accelerate over the I90 highway, make eye contact with drivers wanting to turn right and run over me. Embodied learning goes beyond this to even abstract systems. I have a friend who relaxes by unfolding n-dimensional objects in n-1 dimensions (a simple example, unfold a 3D cube into a 2D cross). How is this embodied? It links our physical experience of 2D and 3D space, of unfolding paper and opening boxes to abstract notions of space and transitions. These abstract notions are imagined by a body acting in the world with others.
This cycle is sketched below.
A General Model of Blends
Fauconnier and Turner provide a useful model of blends in their book The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. In their model there are two input spaces, which combine into a blended space and are abstracted into a generic space. Concepts (and by extension any structure - emotional, social and physical as well as conceptual) are mapped between the input spaces. There are several forms of mapping: direct, opposition or difference, various types of transformation, and the recognition that for parts of the blend there is no mapping. Indeed, if every concept can be mapped the blend is likely to bog down, blends (and learning) are selective. The mapping between the two input spaces is projected to the blended space and applied to new content. Emptied of content, the mapping is projected onto a generic space of relations.
An example from The Way We Think (page 271 in my edition). The concepts of traditional marriage and same-sex couple are mapped and key relationships called out. The blend inherits key concepts from both spaces to create a new concept of same-sex marriage. This concept can then become embedded in language, social practices, laws and financial treatment. It also invites us to unfold the original Traditional Marriage blend and think about it more deeply. Where did this blend come from and how does it blend in other concepts such as ownership or kinship?
In my team at work we have been making explicit use of blends to guide design decisions. We consciously search for the blends that we can make that will inform design, and try to unfold the concepts This is hardly new of course. The compass rose blends a circle, space is infinitely divisible and one can go in any direction, with a two-dimensional axes, that privileges north and south, east and west, giving us our bearings. Or more recently, the desktop user interface blends the control of a computer with a desktop.
Some Useful Books on Conceptual Blending
The core text is
The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities by Giles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, Basic Books, New York, 2002.
This is based in part on
Philosophy in the Flesh: The Emboddied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Basic Books, New York, 1999.
Where Mathemetics Comes From: How the Emboddied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being by George Lakoff and Rafael Nunez, Basic Books, New York, 2001.
And on the embodied cognition school of thought, of which my favourite book is
Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1996.
Some books that apply conceptual blending are
A Clearing In The Forest: Law Life and Mind by Steven L. Winter, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2003.
Semantic Leaps: Frame Shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction by Seana Coulson, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 2006.
Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development With Models Metaphors and Machines by Evelyn Fox Keller, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2003.
Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure Theory and Analysis by Lawerence M. Zibikowski, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005.
Application of these ideas to design is discussed in
Designing With Blends: Conceptual Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering by Manuel Imaz and David Benyon, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2007.
