Complete video at: fora.tv UC-Berkeley Linguistics Professor George Lakoff discusses how idea framing and metaphors contribute to shaping the way we think. —– UC Berkeley Professor George Lakoff discusses concepts from his new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. George P. Lakoff is a professor of linguistics (in particular, cognitive linguistics) at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. Although some of his research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, such as the conditions under which a certain linguistic construction is grammatically viable, he is most famous for his ideas about the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior and society. He is particularly famous for his concept of the “embodied mind” which he has written about in relation to mathematics. In recent years he has applied his work to the realm of politics, and founded a progressive think tank, the Rockridge Institute. Joe Epstein is the former President of The Commonwealth Club’s Board of Governors.
Idea Framing, Metaphors, and Your Brain – George Lakoff
March 23rd, 2010 
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One way to get a phrase repeated in your brain is to put it in a song chorus. That’s what I’ve done with the Song “Tyranny of the Minority”. Check it out in the Video responses.
I find it interesting that most replies on YT seems to correct the prior post. Even my reply to you can be seen as a correction of your post. When you say “You are partially right…..” , it makes me think that we tend to compete with one another for a superior post. I think it’s an interesting topic-dominance or superiority complex.
You are partially right when you say emotions give us a reason to reason, but you forget that emotions, as opposed to mere sensation, are value-responses. You love the ones you have reason to love. You love only those who share your same rationally-chosen values. So, you see- rationality is involved even in love. All emotions are simply lightning-fast subconscious value judgments. Also, anyone who has read Crime and Punishment knows that it is not in one’s self-interest to kill others.
I think you miss the limitations of reason. Emotions give us a reason to reason. For example, if I feel 0 emotion towards my mother and father, there comes a point in time where killing them and taking my inheritance becomes the most rational thing to do. Yet if I factor in the emotion of love, this becomes completely irrational. With me?
This science is evidence based. The Self-esteem movement has been proven to be a failure because the model did not match up with reality. You can’t decide without emotion, removing emotion makes you autistic and incapable of decision. Expecting to reach a rational result when we are not rational organisms is to live in denial. We have to accept what we are and work with that not try and become something we can’t.
What i took from this: Repetitive experiences cause our brain to make connections between various sensory inputs occurring at different locations in the brain. Forming such connections, e.g. between mommy-close-hug and warm temperature feeling, causes us to possess hundreds of metaphors common to all languages, e.g. huggy, emotive people are warm; and detached, non-touchy people are cold. I’m trying to understand precisely how the brain forms these connections, especially via triune brain lens.
Reason is acquired through decades of education, historic hindsight, and mental discipline.
The Hitler quotes are from Rauschnings’s 2 books on Hitler’s “table talk”. They are recollected quotes and not verbatim. Hitler did say many similar things in recorded speaches. For instance, he told a court at Leipzig, in 1928 “Our movement is a spiritual revolution of the masses.” Goebbles, in his diary, records his belief that the Party is his new Church. Fascism is all about an idealized “spirit of the community”, which is adamantly opposed to reasoned analysis.
us-politicswitholi.blogspot……….press ctr+enter
I think there was a quote by Hitler addressing this issue: “We are now at the end of the Age of Reason, the intellect has grown autocratic, and has become a disease of life.”
I also quote from Goering: “As for me, I am subjective, I commit myself to my people and acknowledge nothing else on Earth. I thank my maker for having created me without a sense of objectivity.”
Hitler also told to Rauschning: “I need men who will not stop to think if they’re ordered to know someone down!”
This kind of thinking will destroy self-esteem and lead to a collapse of western civilization accompanied by wide-spread irrationality, collectivism, and emotionalism.
Could it be that we are all animals? That in my opinion, is a fairly low estimate of humanity. If we reject the faculty of reason, we are left with the way of the jungle: force. If you deny reason, then you uphold force. Atomic dances and glandular squirting in the mind is characteristic of apes, not of skyscraper-builders, moon-walkers, and eradicators of disease.
After watching this entire lecture on the FORA website, I am convinced that this man is fundamentally wrong in his teachings. While he denies the existence of reason, he fails to answer the single most important question: If reason is invalid, what is the HUMAN means of survival? What distinguishes us from all the other animals in the animal kingdom, those animals who rely on nothing but the perceptual faculty?
Our brain is far from perfect. I watch this and wonder how many primary metaphors I’ve have managed to create.
This is sound stuff. Kind of rhetoric meets psychology meets NLP. All good subjects worth studying.
i don’t know about this
Brilliant.