What’s in it for me? Get a new perspective on your own line of thought.
How does the brain work?
How do we decide which words come out of our mouths?
How do we solve problems, come up with ideas, or make decisions?
While there’s no shortage of research on the subject, this Blink to Surfaces and Essences argues that it all boils down to analogy.
To put it simply, without analogies, there can be no concepts, and without concepts, there can be no thought.
Analogies allow our minds to link past experiences with new ones, shaping how we categorize, interpret, and interact with the world.
Ultimately, analogy isn’t just a mental tool – it’s the mechanism behind all thinking, from simple recognition to profound creativity and scientific breakthroughs.
Ready to dig in?
Let’s go.
The concepts behind our words
What’s the definition of the word “band?
” This is kind of tricky since “band” is one of those words that has a sizable list of different meanings.
It could refer to a wedding ring, a colored stripe, a musical group, a radio frequency, a piece of cloth wrapped around something – the list goes on.
But even those definitions only scratch the surface.
How about a chair?
This should be more straightforward, right?
But if you think about it, not really.
There are all kinds of chairs, some with legs, some without.
Even a small table can end up being a chair in some circumstances.
We can go on and on in this fashion, until even the simplest words are revealed to have multiple meanings.
As a result, it should be clear that our minds don’t store words in an isolated fashion.
Every word that we learn is stored through connections with concepts.
In other words, it’s all about analogies.
This begins early in life.
For a while, a child might call every woman they see “mommy,” but over time, their understanding of the concept both expands and becomes clearer.
Concepts grow and evolve through analogies, continually reshaping and refining how we understand the world.
When we first learn a word, we’re essentially creating a category in our mind.
We use these mental labels to define things, but they aren’t as rigid as we might think.
Take the word “golfer,” for example – it doesn't just refer to one specific type of person or gender.
Our minds create clusters of connections, with some concepts feeling more central than others – kind of like an airport hub linking different destinations.
These clusters evolve as we gain new experiences, and because they’re so fluid, they don’t have clear-cut boundaries.
Rather than seeking fixed definitions, embracing this fuzziness lets us keep learning, adapting, and making sense of the world.
It’s this constant flux that fuels human creativity and growth.
Metaphors, often seen as poetic or decorative, are also a form of analogy – and are equally foundational to how we think, communicate, and view the world around us.
We talk about time in terms of “space,” life as a “journey,” and emotions as having “highs” and “lows.
” Many metaphors, like “fighting corruption” or having “a dead-end job,” are so common and ingrained in language that we don’t even notice them as metaphors anymore.
This constant evolution of language, through metaphor, analogy, and categorization, is part and parcel with the ongoing process of refining our conceptual world.
Language isn’t static.
It’s a dynamic, ever-expanding system that continually shapes and reshapes how we think.
Making connections with phrases
By now you know that analogies are at the root of all thinking – even groundbreaking scientific thought.
We’ll get to that later, but for now, let’s take a step up from words and look at compound words, phrases, and proverbs.
In all of these cases, we can see that language is processed as patterns involving analogies rather than as individual pieces.
Every new word, term, or phrase reflects the effort we make to fit things smoothly into our categories and clusters.
Sometimes a purse doesn’t quite look like a purse.
So we come up with “pocketbook,” a compound word that relies on two categories of meaning – and makes perfect sense to any English speaker.
Idioms, such as “losing your marbles” or “cutting to the chase,” also rely on combining whole categories of meaning.
Even though they don’t make a lot of sense when you take each component literally, native speakers easily understand the intent behind the phrases.
Proverbs are another example of a cultural tool that attempts to frame a situation in an analogous way by offering a specific perspective.
Funnily enough, sometimes proverbs even contradict one another, as in the case of “Don’t judge a book by its cover” and “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
” They’re not aiming to be a universal truth, but rather offering a way to understand life’s challenges.
Proverbs, idioms, and fables all function as mental shortcuts, allowing us to draw connections and recognize patterns without overthinking it.
They offer a way to make sense of the world quickly and efficiently, helping us navigate complex situations by relying on shared cultural wisdom.
Since language varies greatly across cultures, and since our idioms are so rooted in the analogies of our language, a lot of them don’t translate.
A bored Englishman might say, “It’s nothing to write home about.
” But the closest equivalent for a Frenchman would be to say, “Ça ne casse pas trois pattes à un canard,” which translates to “It doesn’t break three legs of a duck.
” In other cases, French words like déjà vu, hors d’œuvres, and risqué so perfectly fill small gaps in the English language that they naturally become of use.
Likewise, English words like foot, flipper, baskets, hi-fi, and caddie have found their way into the French vernacular – even if their meanings changed along the way.
This constant evolution is at the heart of intelligence.
It’s not just about raw knowledge – it’s about recognizing patterns and making quick analogies.
As cultures develop, they build richer frameworks for thinking, which leads to more nuanced understanding.
This growth in our ability to think conceptually is tied to intelligence, as shown by the Flynn Effect, which explains the rise in IQ scores across generations.
Today’s average person can make observations that would have impressed thinkers like Einstein or Shakespeare – not because we’re inherently smarter, but because we stand on the shoulders of accumulated cultural knowledge.
Memory and the abstract analogies of creativity
Many of the analogies we use in daily life are subtle and automatic, making them almost invisible.
For example, when we respond to someone’s story with “Me too!
” we’re making a connection to our own experiences.
Simple phrases like “There you go again!
” show how we’re constantly framing the present against past experiences.
Our ability to make these tiny, unnoticed analogies – “banalogies,” if you will – are essential to thinking itself.
Every thought, big or small, relies on analogies based on the categories we’re familiar with.
This is how we draw conclusions, empathize with others, and make predictions.
Without these mental shortcuts, our thinking would be much more chaotic and difficult.
Memory is also shaped by analogies.
When we hear a story, our minds search for similar experiences to help us make sense of it.
If the story is unique or dramatic, it might evoke strong, specific memories.
If the story is uneventful, like someone eating pizza, our memories blend together into simple categories.
Some memories don’t easily fit into nameable categories, but they still influence how we understand the world.
For instance, maybe you took your child to visit the Grand Canyon and were shocked that she was more impressed by a big anthill than by the majestic landscape.
There’s no easy label for this kind of cute, ironic memory, and it would require a uniquely analogous situation – a story of someone overlooking something grandiose in favor of something insignificant.
The same goes for creative thinking.
These ideas are also shaped by the analogies we make and the concepts we’ve developed.
And the more abstract we’re able to go with our connections and metaphors, the more interesting ideas we can arrive at.
When we picture experts, we tend to think of how much knowledge they have.
But what they’re really skilled at is using knowledge to make analogies – drawing connections between categories and applying them at various levels of abstraction.
This is creative thinking in a nutshell: seamlessly making connections that might seem surprising at first but make sense in hindsight.
It’s not so much thinking outside the box, but rather rethinking the categories within the box to find new solutions.
Abstract thinking comes down to recognizing the possibilities that different categories can have.
The category of chair is open to a higher level of abstraction than rocking chair, for instance.
The category of bird is more abstract than sparrow.
The category of possible after-school activities for a 9-year-old could include things as disparate as judo class or flute lessons.
Our ability to draw these connections and categorize things in different ways is key to our adaptability and creativity.
Learning and growing through analogies
There is one peculiar category of analogy worth mentioning before we reach the final section, and that’s naive analogies.
One of the best examples of naive analogies is technology.
Imagine your friend is moving to a new city and you say, “Hey, when you get there, don’t forget to send me your new email address.
” When your friend looks at you in confusion, you may realize the error in your naive analogy and remember – with a fair amount of embarrassment – that email addresses aren’t the same as postal addresses.
But this also shows the way in which naive analogies help us learn, or at least get a foothold when new developments arise.
There’s a good reason that the computer age arrived with a whole host of familiar terms like opening windows, using an address book to send emails, and moving files onto a desktop or into folders.
We learn through analogy, by having someone describe something in terms we’re already familiar with.
The tech industry knows as well as any product designer that “the best interface is no interface at all.
” The aim is to make things as intuitive as possible, so that if you see something new for the first time, you can pick up on the analogy – the experience you’ve had in the past that tells you how to use it.
Ironically, now that computer technology has become so prevalent in our culture, we’re now making new analogies by using tech terms in our everyday conversations.
Terms like “cut-and-paste” and “debugging” can now serve as shorthand to help us communicate abstract ideas by connecting them to something familiar, even outside the realm of technology.
Learning through analogy is so ingrained in us that it even applies to the seemingly logic-defined realism of mathematics and science.
Most people can solve a division problem where the answer results in a smaller number, like “If grandma has twelve apples and three grandkids, how many apples does each kid get?
” But ask even an undergrad student to come up with a similar question where the answer is a bigger number, and you’ll get a lot of confused looks.
This happens because we all tend to learn division as analogous to sharing.
When you share something, you divide it up, right?
Not quite – this is a naive analogy.
The real concept behind division is measurement.
So when you ask a question like, “How many cookies can grandma make with one pound of flour?
” it’s suddenly obvious how you can divide and end up with a bigger number.
Einstein’s universe of analogies
It may seem funny to think about now, but there was a time when negative numbers were considered an unacceptable idea.
They were imaginary and simply too abstract.
It wasn’t until these numbers could be visualized geometrically that they were broadly accepted.
This was the kind of analogous learning experience that was needed.
Time and time again, as we gain more concrete experiences, our understanding improves.
We move past surface analogies that a novice understands to the essence of a concept that the expert understands.
Whether it’s a simple rule or a complex theory, analogy-making is central to the process.
This can be seen in the work of both Newton and Einstein – but it’s by no means limited to them.
Breakthroughs happen all the time when scientists draw analogies that connect seemingly unrelated phenomena.
At the end of the nineteenth century, one of the big, open questions in physics was the blackbody spectrum.
In simple terms, a black body is like a hollow container filled with electromagnetic waves bouncing around.
Think of it like ripples spreading across the surface of a swimming pool.
The splash creates waves of different sizes, depending on the object’s weight.
The same idea applies to black bodies, except instead of water, the waves are electromagnetic – like visible light, X-rays, or radio waves.
Now, here’s the interesting part.
Albert Einstein made a breakthrough by noticing a key similarity between black bodies and a system that was already well understood – an ideal gas.
Both systems, despite seeming different, have a container full of energy.
This was like comparing a swimming pool with a pool table filled with bouncing balls, so it’s easy to see why most physicists were skeptical of the link!
But Einstein saw past that.
He noticed a mathematical similarity between the formulas for the energy distributions of a blackbody spectrum and an ideal gas spectrum.
And one of Einstein’s guiding beliefs was a confidence that there was an overall harmony to the universe.
Drawing this connection led to more breakthroughs, such as his theory of light quanta.
Later, he looked at Galileo’s theory of relativity and wondered if it could extend beyond mechanics to include electromagnetism.
This shift was a profound leap that set the stage for his theory of special relativity.
In Einstein’s work, analogies weren’t just tools to solve specific problems; they were central to his conceptual shifts.
His famous equation, E = mc², started as a speculative analogy between energy and mass.
Likewise, his work on general relativity was born out of his ability to recognize analogies within analogies as it pertained to gravity and different frames of reference.
As with negative numbers centuries before, many of his ideas were put forth into an environment of fierce resistance, and some took years before they were finally validated.
No matter what the problem is, analogies are the core part of the solution.
Drawing connections from the past and applying them to the present – this is how we think, how we learn, and how we come up with ideas that future generations will likewise build upon.
Final summary
The main takeaway of this Blink to Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander is that complex analogies drive our thinking, from recognizing everyday objects to making groundbreaking scientific discoveries.
The categories we create aren’t fixed – they shift based on context and connect in unexpected ways.
Exploring these links can give us a deeper understanding of the world.
Even idioms, proverbs, and fables serve as mental shortcuts, expanding our thinking.
In the end, intelligence really comes down to how quickly and accurately we grasp the essence of something through analogy.
OK, that’s it for this Blink.
We hope you enjoyed it.
If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback.
See you soon.