A NEUROLOGY OF ANALOGY

1 4 4 Y A N E U R O L O G Y O F A N A L O G Y E D I S O N M I Y A W A K I A former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and the 1995 champion of a head-to-head ‘‘punslinger’’ competition named in honor of O. Henry (The O. Henry Pun-O√, held annually in Texas) has written a new book. Its subject is analogy, the perception of a connectedness or parallelism between things. The things in question often are, but needn’t be, disparate. In fact, analogy often hints at what becomes a straightforward link, or it can reveal some less-than-clear fact of a matter. Bill Clinton once remarked, for example, that ‘‘being president is like running a cemetery: you’ve got a lot of people under you, and nobody’s listening.’’ The simile has legs, and if we believe John Pollack’s claim that ‘‘those who are most nimble at seeing parallels and connections, rather than just obvious di√erences, compete best,’’ then victories await the facile analogist. When the nimble are triumphant at last, all obvious statements will be obviated; new eyes will see as never before, unlike – one shudders to write it – once a pun a time. S h o r t c u t : H o w A n a l o g i e s R e v e a l C o n n e c t i o n s , S p a r k I n n o v a t i o n , a n d S e l l O u r G r e a t e s t I d e a s , b y J o h n P o l l a c k ( G o t h a m B o o k s , 2 3 8 p p . , $ 2 7 ) 1 4 5 R What is analogy, really? Is it metaphor, simile, or a pun in the etymological sense, a ‘‘fine point’’? Is it a perspective that could be unoriginal but yields surprising rewards? (‘‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,’’ the late Steve Jobs believed; by that Zenish but trite motto he profited as few have.) Or, as Pollack calls it, is analogy a shortcut? In what way does analogy o√er a shortcut to anything? I’ll get to the author’s answer soon, but his book’s oneword title (putting his subtitle aside) invites a brief science lesson, which has to do with learning familiar to all of us because we’ve all been through it. The science might help us understand why people can have the same experiences, even get the same lessons from teachers and life, but never learn quite the same things. If one compliments a child by saying its brain is a sponge, presumably the brain is absorbing everything near the child. But a Canadian psychologist who wrote in the 1940s, Donald Olding Hebb, wondered about what children’s brains actually absorb. By age six, children might understand ‘‘right’’ versus ‘‘left,’’ but perhaps , Hebb considered, what they’re really understanding is one side versus another. As kids that age often do, they’ll still confuse right hand and left hand. Despite avidity for a concept of sides, they’ll have a problem getting ‘‘left’’ and ‘‘the other left’’ straight, at least for a little while longer. The brain absorbs concepts; getting the facts right takes time. Then Hebb wondered about ‘‘the role of analogy in human thought,’’ specifically in science (I borrow from his 1949 Organization of Behavior). Consider, for example, blood-sugar level. Sugar can be measured in blood very accurately, so what’s its ‘‘level’’? It’s an analogy. The implicit idea is lowness versus highness, and the same concept applies elsewhere, as in the level of one’s awareness, interest, sophistication, ad infinitum. Like fungible cash, analogy is coin in multiple realms. A low blood-sugar level di√ers from a discussion at a basic level, but in either case we aren’t high or up – we get the level in question. Likewise, ‘‘sides’’ for young...