Comments on OnFiction: Research Bulletin: Moved by the Imagination

Thanks very much indeed Olly. I have found the ref...

2009-08-28T09:27:45.924-04:00

Thanks very much indeed Olly. I have found the reference you mention in Current Biology (2006) and also a more recent review article by Aziz-Zadeh and Damasio on fMRI in relation to the embodied metaphor idea of language, in Journal of Physiology - Paris, (2008). So I will have a read and a think and do a post on this issue. I'm grateful to you for putting me on to this.

Sure-- the paper I'm referring to is: Lisa A...

2009-08-27T19:36:38.739-04:00

Sure-- the paper I'm referring to is:

Lisa Aziz-Zadeh et al., Congruent Embodied Representations for Visually Presented Actions and
Linguistic Phrases Describing Actions, CURBIO (2006)

Metaphor isn't the main focus of the paper, and she registers some concerns about method-- I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

Thank you very much, Olly, for this comment. I hav...

2009-08-26T18:57:58.079-04:00

Thank you very much, Olly, for this comment. I have just looked up Lisa Aziz Zadeh on PsychInfo, and found four published articles but not yet the one on this issue of "biting the peach" as compared with "chewing over the idea." I guess it is not out yet, or perhaps it's in some pre-publication phase. It would, as you say, be a blow against the Lakoff theory, which does seem a bit overextended. And also it will be worth looking into the difference between what Aziz Zadeh has found and the Buccino et al. data. Very interesting. If you have a reference, I'd love to see it (my e-mail address is in my Profile), and would be happy to do a post on it.

Hey-- interesting post, I'll have to check out...

2009-08-26T18:06:56.085-04:00

Hey-- interesting post, I'll have to check out Buccino's work. Something in return: Lisa Aziz Zadeh actually did fMRI research that compared brain activity when hearing motor phrases ("biting the peach") with phrases that used motor metaphors ("chewing over the idea"), and found that the latter did not activate neurons in motor context. This could be a blow against the Lakoff theory of metaphor. At least for so conventional a metaphor, it seems we are not using any kind of mirror activity to process these phrases.