14 DAY TRIAL // According to the conclusions of a new scientific investigation conducted by experts at the Emory University, it would appear that hearing metaphors causes the human brain to display weird neural activation patterns. Specialists found high levels of activation in areas controlling sensory experiences.
The team was very curious to learn how the brain reacts when it processes and comprehends metaphors. These figures of speech have been with our species for a very long time, yet somehow no one analyzed their deeper effects on our brains until now.
We are using metaphors every single day. Some of them may be more common than others, but the thing is we are using them without thinking about it; these are simply our patterns of communication.
What researchers began wondering was whether using these verbal constructs somehow led our brains into exhibiting increased levels of activity in areas of the brain that normally provide us with data on sensory experiences.
Scientists found that people who listened to a textual metaphor displayed increased levels of neural activation in the parietal operculum, a region of the human brain that is commonly associated with our ability to sense the textures of objects through touch.
Even more curious, the neural pattern disappeared when test participants heard a sentence explaining the previous metaphor. Details of the new research effort were published in the latest issue of the scientific journal Brain & Language, PsychCentral reports.
“We see that metaphors are engaging the areas of the cerebral cortex involved in sensory responses even though the metaphors are quite familiar. This result illustrates how we draw upon sensory experiences to achieve understanding of metaphorical language,” says Krish Sathian, MD, PhD.
The expert, who was the senior author of the new research, says that the research was carried out using a brain-scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This approach monitors blood flow through the brain as a function of how active certain areas are.
“Interestingly, visual cortical regions were not activated by textural metaphors, which fits with other evidence for the primacy of touch in texture perception,” first paper author and Emory research associate Simon Lacey, PhD, adds.