Quotes About Frames

One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors—conceptual structures like those we have been describing. The frames are in the synapses of our brains, physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts don't fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.

Progressives need a collection of proactive policies and communication techniques to get our own values out on our own terms. "War rooms" and "truth squads" must change frames, not reinforce conservative frames.

Prototype frames. Among the most important of the commonplace frames are the prototype frames, where you reason about a category on the basis of some subcategory (real or imagined). The best known is the social stereotype. For instance, both conservatives and progressives use stereotypes of immigrants, though very different ones.

The myths began with the Enlightenment, and the first one goes like this: The truth will set us free. If we just tell people the facts, since people are basically rational beings, they'll all reach the right conclusions. But we know from cognitive science that people do not think like that. People think in frames.

The scientific facts about global warming are stated and restated day after day around the country, but they fall on conservative deaf brains—brains with frames that don't fit those facts.

Reframing is social change. You can't see or hear frames. They are part of what we cognitive scientists call the "cognitive unconscious"—structures in our brains that we cannot consciously access, but know by their consequences. What we call "common sense" is made up of unconscious, automatic, effortless inferences that follow from our unconscious frames.

Since language is used for communicating thought, our view of language must also reflect our new understanding of the nature of thought. Language is at once a surface phenomenon and a source of power. It is a means of expressing, communicating, accessing, and even shaping thought. Words are defined relative to frames and conceptual metaphors.

Because language activates frames, new language is required for new frames. Thinking differently requires speaking differently.

Facts matter enormously, but to be meaningful they must be framed in terms of their moral importance. Remember, you can only understand what the frames in your brain allow you to understand. If the facts don't fit the frames in your brain, the frames in your brain stay and the facts are ignored or challenged or belittled.

Progressives need to learn to communicate using frames that they really believe, frames that express what their moral views really are.

don't just negate the other person's claims; reframe. The facts unframed will not set you free. You cannot win just by stating the true facts and showing that they contradict your opponent's claims. Frames trump facts.

when our thinking is informed by diverse logically consistent, empirically validated frames, we are more likely to make wise choices.

I guess the basic difference is that animation is sequential in time but in spatially juxtaposed as comics are. Each successive frame of a movie is projected on exactly the same space--the screen--while each frame of comics must occupy a different space. Space does for comics what time does for film!

The jokes in the previous section can all be described as universes of discourse colliding, frames getting entangled, or contexts getting confused.

Here's what I've learned about soon; it's short for someday. We make space in our lives for what matters, now. Not in promises and soons, but on mantels with sterling frames, in shelves we clear to make room for our now. Everything else i talk.

The example of Jesus Christ is the only perfect example that ever existed in human nature. It is therefore, a rule by which to try all other examples; and the dispositions, frames and practices of others, must be commended and followed no further than they were followers of Christ.

I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.

This relationship is learned over hundreds if not thousands of examples; what is consistent across examples is not the content of the answer but rather the context, or perspective, from which the answer occurs. That is the case with all other deictic frames, such as I/you, we/they, and now/then.

Day-to-day political debates are also contests between metaphors. Citizens are not rational and pay no attention to facts, except as they fit into frames, and the frames are fixed in the neural structures of [their] brains. In George W. Bush's first term, for example, he promised tax relief, which frames taxes as an affliction, the reliever as a hero, and anyone obstructing him as a villain.

The flexibility of the human mind - its ability to flip frames, shift gestalts, or reconstruct events – is a wondrous talent. But it makes it difficult to predict how person will think and talk about a given situation. When I hit a wall with the stick, am I affecting the stick by moving it to the wall, or affecting the wall using the stick as an instrument?

This uncovered a number of basic features of our thought processes: that the mind deploys a set of rival frames that can construe even the most plodding everyday event in more than one way; that a frame for thinking about a change of location in real space can be metaphorically extended to conceptualize a change of state as motion in state-space; and that when the mind conceives of an entity as being somewhere or going somewhere, it tends to melt it down to a holistic blob.

For a cinematographer, every frame has to be important.

Photography is truth...and cinema is truth 24 times a second.

Goethe's poems are like tiny paintings in beautiful frames.