Hey, that reminds me of this great analogy...
It applies to relationships as well. You need not have experienced a person’s life to understand it. That "me too" feeling when you empathise is an abstract form of analogy.
An everyday reward of parenthood is it allows you to
get a handle on how we humans "learn to learn".
Watching your child as they construct their understanding of the world also shines a light on how we adults do it which, can in
turn, improve your communication with others, if that
sort of stuff matters to you. One of the ways kids go about this is analogy – comparing things they know, with things they don’t, building levels of comprehension, abstraction and complexity. If you’ve had a variation of this conversation, you’ll grasp my point:
"What’s beer, daddy?" "It’s like a fizzy drink for grown-ups."
New Scientist offers motherhood as a blueprint.
Kids recognise their mums very early in the piece, then slowly realise other people have them, that animals also boast mothers and then, that even their mothers have an old lady.
Eventually kids extend the idea of motherhood to objects like motherboards and mother of pearl and finally to concepts that don’t physically exist, like Mother Nature.
Douglas Hofstadter, author of the influential treatise on consciousness, the Pulitzer Prizewinning Go¨del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, rates analogy the core of human cognition: "Analogies, far from being unusual cognitive gems, are mundane events, generated several times every second, and it is through them we orient ourselves in the world," he writes.
Like children, even the oldest salt meets new, often iffy situations many times a day. We deal with them by comparing them to past experiences, creating analogies almost subconsciously. Thus, you don’t need to have navigated a foreign roundabout or driven an exotic motor to know how to do it, not to mention TV remotes, computers, lifts, forks and public dunnies.
A quick look at the desktop or your computer with its mail, folders, windows and recycle bin shows how deeply rooted is analogy, nested inside further analogies, which represent abstract mappings of the physical world (as does everything italicised so far, so I’ll give it up now, if you get my point).
It applies to relationships as well. You need not have experienced a person’s life to understand it. That "me too" feeling when you empathise is an abstract form of analogy, as is the stuttering "like" of teen conversation and tens of thousands of other words, concepts, expressions and proverbs – from "messy" to "soap opera", "slippery slope", "been there, done that" and "the new black".
Hofstadter argues analogy is also how almost every great scientific discovery has been made and explained – from the earth being round like "a ball", to sound "waves", Einstein’s theory of light "particles" (photons), black "holes" and the "Big Bang".
"An apt analogy allows a person to treat something new as if it were familiar," writes Hofstadter. Analogy, he says, "is the entire transport system of thought ... it pervades thinking, from throwaway remarks to deep scientific and artistic insights.
Through analogies made in fractions of a second we retrieve apt categories based on subtle cues that reveal what counts in a situation and what doesn’t."
And once you realise how much cognition depends on analogy, you and I can improve our communication by stitching together word pictures that other people (and our children) already understand, to explain the idea we’re trying to project. If you get my meaning.