"Spam & Eggs"

Another article, this time in the Guardian, discusses the recent disclosure by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) that they will be analyzing the metaphors discovered in communications in order to detect potential terrorist activities and discern their plans. As the author of the article writes:

The spooks’ conjecture is that understanding how humans use metaphors might provide an efficient way of extracting meanings from messages. So the project’s goal, says its programme manager, Heather McCallum-Bayliss, is to “exploit the use of metaphorical language to gain insights into underlying cultural beliefs by developing and applying a methodology that automates the analysis of metaphorical language”. Dr McCallum-Bayliss’s presentation explaining the project makes fascinating reading. “Understanding the shared concepts and patterned behaviours of a culture is a significant challenge,” she writes, “because cultural norms tend to be hidden. Even cultural natives have difficulty defining them. Having a system that could discover and structure cultural beliefs and perspectives would be valuable to novice and seasoned analysts alike.”

As noted in a previous post on this topic, metaphors are the bread and butter of the Denovo detective methodology, especially conceptual metaphors, those that function around basic discoveries of the world made during infancy, such as over/under, in/out, before/behind, and so forth.

It’s nice to see research that has been used to discern commercial viability for new products and analyze customer belief systems for years finally find its way into the intelligence community.

Image via Wikipedia

One of Johnny Denovo’s main tools in understanding and thwarting criminals is the fact that people think in metaphors, and express these metaphors in actions. It’s a subtle insight that isn’t much appreciated outside neurolinguists, qualitative researchers, and neuroscientists, to name a few. But it’s becoming more widely appreciated.

A recent study underscored this fact. It was a study of escalators,  stairs, and relative positioning. The basic question hit at one of those primal metaphors: up-down.

In short, people headed up an escalator were more generous when they reached the top, while people headed down were stingy. People who walked up a short flight of stairs were more likely to volunteer than people who walked down a short flight of stairs. And people who were up above others were more considerate of others than people who were below others by relative position.

“Up” is a metaphor for happiness (upbeat, things are looking up, on the upside) while “down” is a metaphor for disappointment (he’s looking down, there was a downturn, she’s down about her job). Here’s more proof that we think in metaphors, and reveal the basic metaphor set through our behaviors.

Why must we dream in metaphors?
Try to hold on to something we couldn’t understand. – Seal

The Johnny Denovo Mysteries

The Johnny Denovo Mysteries are based on emerging theories of how we think, how we reconcile internal realities with external stimuli, how we make decisions, how we blend rational and emotional thought, and how we express ideas, both intentionally and unintentionally.

The Boston Globe recently published an excellent article by Drake Bennett that provides an overview of the research and hypotheses fueling these explorations of the human mind. As he writes:

Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people’s personalities to behave accordingly. What’s more, without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature–or position, texture, size, shape, or weight–abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us.

In my professional life, I still recall vividly my first encounter with these theories and findings. I’d become frustrated at traditional approaches to gain insights into how people were thinking about our products and services. Then, with the help of some gifted practitioners of these new approaches, I was able to see just how powerful and meaningful they could be.

Picking up the paper today, I wasn’t expecting to encounter these theories yet again, so it was exciting to see an excellent overview of these theories in the mainstream media. These approaches to understanding human thought have real pragmatic value in everyday life, as well as providing a very interesting substrate for some mystery stories.

As an author, the issues of literacy and book purchasing always interest me. And since I write mysteries, I also like a good detective story. So when the two combined this morning, I had to write a quick post about it.

Yesterday, a friend pointed me to an article decrying the lack of literacy in American culture. The article cited what it called a “University of Dayton” study, in which researchers found:

• One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
• Forty-two percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
• Eighty percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

These statistics seemed shocking, and they would be — if they could be validated. The problem is that in tracking down the source, the significance, academic validity, and overall validity come into question.

First, the source of the statistics seems to be the Jenkins Group, Inc., a custom book publishing company in Traverse City, Michigan. However, among their services, population research is not mentioned, and I could find no link to the research in question.

Next, the “University of Dayton” confusion seems to arise from the fact that the Jenkins Group is cited as a source of statistics in a blog post on Erma Bombeck‘s Writers Workshop. The post was written by Robyn Jackson.

Next, the Wikipedia entry on “Literacy in the United States” cites these same statistics as, “University of Dayton, Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop.” The person who entered this citation in Wikipedia is Robyn Jackson.

And so we have research that can’t be verified and certainly wasn’t academic being mixed up as academic research because an academic blogged about it, a newspaper carrying this over as legitimate research, and social networking software spreading the misinformation.

Who is to blame in this? Who’s the perp? I think Robyn Jackson bears a lot of the blame. She didn’t link to actual reports in her initial post or later, and didn’t carefully delineate the line between academic validation in her Wikipedia reference, so it looks more like it came from the University of Dayton than is justifiable. She contributed two sources of confusion into this. As for the newspaper in Seattle that allowed an opinion writer to perpetuate the mistake, it just shows that these errors lie not only in the digital realm, but have haunted communication from the beginning.

The ultimate lesson? Literacy means more than reading. It also means validating that what you’ve read is true, especially when it beggars belief (e.g., 42% of college graduates never read another book after college).

Yesterday, Johnny received an alert from the New York Times about an article on the topic of metaphors. He handed a copy of it to me later in the day with the brief statement, “They don’t get it. Prescriptive. They aren’t detectives.”

I read the article he’d printed out, and I think I understand what he means. In grammar, one of the fundamental differences lies between people who prescribe rules or those who describe usage. In the deployment of metaphors, a sin in the eyes of the prescriptive school is to mix metaphors. Mixed metaphors are, in their eyes, a sign of sloppy writing.

But to a detective who works with metaphors, the mixing of metaphors is not only natural and welcomed, but it can be revealing. Often, something slips through in the free use of metaphors, the person’s thoughts unconstrained by schoolbook self-consciousness.

One thing this article confirmed for me is how much of our communication is based on metaphor, mixed or pure. And since that’s Johnny’s stock and trade, I foresee a long career.

One of the goals of writing “Spam & Eggs: A Johnny Denovo Mystery,” was to produce a very good mystery book. It’s been in the top 5% of books sold on Amazon.com most days, which is nice.

However, recently, I’ve been reading a book a friend recommended, one that proves that truth can often be stranger than fiction, and one that is a great mystery book itself. This book, entitled “Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea,” details the history of the concept (void and infinity) and realization of zero.

It’s an amazing story well-told, with excellent illustrations and examples. The mystery is what zero will reveal over the centuries as you follow its adoption and evolution, and how it will send various powers over the cliff into the abyss.

An amazing book. I highly recommend it.