What metaphors say about the mind

An interview with Keith Holyoak

Of the link between poetry and psychology, Keith Holyoak says, “The word ‘psychology’ (from its Greek root ‘psyche’) originally meant ‘the study of the soul’, which I suppose might also describe poetry.” A poet, translator, and cognitive scientist teaching at UCLA, Holyoak describes his deep-rooted research into metaphor and the mechanisms of creativity. What mental processes do we use to discover and describe a feeling’s essence? How can metaphor enhance—and hold back—our ways of thinking?

Fittingly, Ivan Turgenev said, “A poet must be a psychologist”—a quote that tracks closely with your career. How did your interest in both disciplines take shape?

The word “psychology” (from its Greek root “psyche”) originally meant “the study of the soul”, which I suppose might also describe poetry. In the modern era psychology was rebranded as the study of the mind and behavior, and adopted the methods of science. You can think of psychology as a way to understand people by looking at them from the outside, while poetry tries to express the inside view of the poet. In different ways, both grapple with what it means to be human.

Of course, poetry more than psychology is bound up with a love of words. I grew up on a dairy farm in British Columbia, where I spent my spare time reading as much as I could. I knew that some of my distant ancestors in Scotland (on my mother’s side) had been poets, and as a boy I tried writing poems myself. Later, as an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia, I was drawn to psychology, which seemed to offer a clearer path to knowledge about the mind. And to be honest, as a young man with limited experience of life, I made a better psychologist than poet (though better poet than farmer).

By the time I became a graduate student at Stanford, I was immersed in cognitive psychology, focusing on topics related to concepts, word meanings, and the nature of ideas. A few years later, as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, I started to study reasoning by analogy—the recognition that things apparently different are nonetheless alike in important ways. Analogy is closely connected to symbolism and metaphor—building blocks of poetry. After a few decades, by then a professor at UCLA, I started writing poetry in parallel with my psychological research. It’s as if I divided myself in two and tried to follow both paths at once, trusting they might somehow lead toward the same destination.

We were struck by your description of “metaphor in poetry as a microcosm of the human imagination—a way to understand the mechanisms of creativity.” Could you share more about the relationship between metaphor and cognition? 

Metaphor is a kind of “small-scale” creativity. Metaphors usually rely on language, but there are also many visual examples, such as when a movie signals a flashback by switching from color to black-and-white. Regardless of the specific modality, finding a good metaphor requires breaking something down into its parts and their relationships, then using this new and richer conceptualization to connect with something obviously different, yet similar. Creativity involves divergent thinking—exploring many pathways between concepts—followed by convergent thinking—identifying a concept at which different mental pathways intersect. That’s what it takes to find an original metaphor—one that captures the “essence” of what you want to communicate.

At the Napkin, one of our interests has been how poetry benefits the mind, from sharpening cognition to improving mood. Throughout your research, what have you discovered about poetry’s impact?

Like all mental processes, creativity is maintained and strengthened by use, so both reading and writing poetry are likely to benefit the mind. In fact, work in our lab has shown that healthy older adults—in the range of mid-fifties to mid-eighties—are actually better able to interpret novel poetic metaphors than are younger adults. Even though normal aging is accompanied by a decline in working memory and related cognitive abilities, people who stay mentally active—especially by reading and writing—can maintain and enhance their comprehension skills as they age. 

There is also a lot of evidence that writing poetry (or engaging in other forms of artistic creativity) can be therapeutic. Many people have found that the act of turning sorrow into art helps to cope with negative emotions. In writing a poem that expresses their feelings, a person may regain a sense of control over them. Painful experiences are to some degree redeemed if they inspire the creation of a work of art.

Conversely, when might poetry—and analogy in particular—have adverse effects on our thought processes?

Analogies and metaphors are useful in suggesting new ideas, or offering a new perspective to consider. But though a “poetic truth” may evoke intriguing emotions and ideas, it should not be uncritically accepted as an indisputable truth about the world. The danger is that metaphors can be mistaken for actual evidence that something must be true. Particularly for well-worn metaphors, a comparison may insidiously promote conclusions that lack any rational basis. For example, autocratic rulers have often justified their demands for obedience by comparing the state with a patriarchal nuclear family. Long ago, the Victorian philosopher Herbert Spencer deflated this feeble excuse for a rational argument: “The only justification for the analogy between parent and child, and government and people, is the childishness of the people who entertain the analogy.”

We’re curious about your translations of Chinese poetry, especially given the trickiness (or impossibility) of keeping metaphors intact across languages. What drew you to this endeavor?

It was first of all a labor of love. Years ago, Hongjing Lu, my future wife, gave me a bilingual book of translations from classical Chinese poetry. It was the work of a native Chinese translator and had been published in mainland China. Hongjing told me these were considered the greatest poems in all of Chinese literature. I don’t know Chinese at all, but I thought the English translations made terrible poems. Naively, I wondered if I could do better. So over the next couple of years, Hongjing helped me translate some poems by the two greatest poets of all, Li Bai and Du Fu, who wrote over a millennium ago during the Tang Dynasty. To overcome my obvious handicap—ignorance of Chinese—Hongjing helped by tracking down the originals and generating literal translations, character by character. She also found some of the commentaries that have been written over the centuries (also in Chinese), and used them to help me understand how the poems had been interpreted. I then tried to create English versions that captured what I felt to be the essence of the originals.

Along the way I discovered that I was far from the first non-Chinese to attempt translations of these poems. Most famously, in 1915 Ezra Pound published a little book of translations of Li Bai, called Cathay. Besides not knowing Chinese, Pound didn’t even have access to the Chinese originals, and instead worked from versions in Italian. His translations are not very accurate, and partly for that reason they became a major influence on the development of English free verse. In fact, the Chinese originals honor specific formal constraints based on rhyme and meter—not “free” at all. Since I have an affinity with formal poetry, I started to view my own efforts as a kind of private tussle with Ezra Pound.

Along the way, I sensed that some of the poetic devices prominent in classical Chinese poetry could be adapted to write poems in English. For example, a short poem might begin by gazing outward on a natural scene, then suddenly shift its focus inward to the personal emotions of the poet. Or two images might be juxtaposed in a way that invites comparison, without any explicit mention of a connection:

A line of cranes / flies past on a silent hunt;

A pack of wolves / howls around its prey.

My translation project eventually resulted in a small book, Facing the Moon: Poems of Li Bai and Du. I followed that up with a volume of my own poems written in the style of my English translations from the Chinese, called Foreigner: New English Poems in Chinese Old Style. Translation is itself a form of analogy, and one that operates at multiple levels—not only specific poems, but also aspects of style.

Across your multi-pronged career, what projects do you have on the horizon?

I’m currently working on a new book tentatively entitled The Human Edge: Analogy and the Roots of Creative Intelligence.  I think of it as a kind of companion to my most recent book, The Spider’s Thread: Metaphor in Mind, Brain, and Poetry. This time the focus is on analogy and the human ability to think about the relations between things, beyond just things in isolation. Besides covering work in psychology and neuroscience, I’m also grappling with new developments in artificial intelligence—our lab has found that an artificial system can solve a range of analogy problems at roughly the same level as college students. But despite claims that current computer programs can even “write poetry”, I still see a huge gap between what computers actually generate—derivative imitations of published work—and our human ability to express unique inner experiences through creative metaphors.