Quotes from Gilles Fauconnier

The brain is a highly connected and interconnected organ, but the activation of those connections are constantly shifting. The great neurobiologist Sir Charles Sherrington, in his Gifford lectures titled Man on His Nature, described the brain as "an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.

We ourselves are proposing a compression over many singularities of human performance, seeing all of them as effects of a single cause, double-scope blending. We do not, however, use Cause-Effect Isomorphism compression: According to our proposal, the cause was gradual, continuous, and cognitive, while the effects were singular, quick, and social.

Identity, integretation, and imagination-basic,mysterious,powerful,complex,and mostly unconscious operations-are at the heart of even the simplest possible meanings. The value of the simplest forms lies in the complex emergent dynamics they trigger in the imaginative mind. These basic operations are the key to both the invention of everyday meaning and exceptional human creativity.

Because the construction of meaning requires many kinds of integration networks in addition to simplex networks, a great deal of semantics falls outside the realm of symbolic logic.

An organizing frame provides a topology for the space it organizes; that is, it provides a set of organizing relations among the elements in space. When two spaces share the same organizing frame, they share the corresponding topology and so can easily be put into correspondence. Establishing a cross-space mapping between inputs becomes straightforward.

Conceptual integration is at the heart of imagination. It connects input spaces, projects selectively to a blended space, and develops emergent structure through composition, completion, and elaboration in the blend. This fundamental cognitive operation has not previously been studied. What would it mean to study this operation? Is it enough to recognize the phenomenon and describe it broadly? Should this book end here? What is left to do?

Because linguistic expressions prompt for meanings rather than represent meanings, linguistic systems do not have to be, and in fact cannot be, analogues of conceptual systems. Prompting for meaning construction is a job they can do; representing meanings is not.

Aristotle wrote that metaphor is the hallmark of genius.