Metaphors can change our opinions in ways we don’t even realize

April 3, 2018

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When we think about metaphor, we might think about how we typically learn about metaphor in school: as a poetic device or a rhetorical flourish. But, metaphors are not simply confined to the world of poetry—they are all around us. We describe time as money (“spending time”), arguments as war (“you attacked my argument,” “I defended my argument”), love as a journey (“their relationship hit a dead end”), and emotional states as directions (“he was feeling down,” “cheer up”).

By some estimates, we use metaphors every 25 words, but because metaphors are so embedded in our language, they often go unnoticed.

Source: qz.com

Studying how the brain relinquishes childhood memories

We called them fairy rocks. They were just colorful specks of gravel—the kind you might buy for a fish tank—mixed into my preschool’s playground sand pit. But my classmates and I endowed them with magical properties, hunted them like treasure, and carefully sorted them into piles of sapphire, emerald, and ruby.

Breakthrough study reveals how LSD dissolves a person’s sense of self

Hacking the Brain with Adversarial Images

This is an example of what’s called an adversarial image: an image specifically designed to fool neural networks into making an incorrect determination about what they’re looking at. Researchers at Google Brain decided to try and figure out whether the same techniques that fool artificial neural networks can also fool the biological neural networks inside of our heads, by developing adversarial images capable of making both computers and humans think that they’re looking at something they aren’t.

Metaphors can change our opinions in ways we don’t even realize

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