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Krasnow Institute > Monday Seminars > Abstracts BLENDING AND THE BRAIN Mark Turner The basic cognitive operation of conceptual integration, also known as blending, apparently plays an indispensable role in all areas of thought and action, including framing, deciding, judging, reasoning, and inventing. It is evident in grammar, semantics, visual representation, mathematics, jokes, cartoons, and poetry. Blending is dynamic, supple, and active in the moment of thinking. It yields products that frequently become entrenched in conceptual structure and grammar. It often performs new work on its previously entrenched products. For the most part, it is a routine, workaday process that escapes detection except on technical analysis. It is not reserved for special purposes, and is not costly. Recently, researchers such as Steven Mithen have proposed that conceptual integration was the "big bang of human evolution," the cognitive capacity that phylogenetically separated modern human beings from other species. This talk will give an introduction to the theory of conceptual integration and ask some questions about its neurobiological substrate. Work on blending can be reviewed on the web at http://www.wam.umd.edu/~mturn/WWW/blending.html
The Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study |
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