Jonah Lehrer’s main argument was very similar to Ma’s in that it argues that science really needs the arts to be able to operate especially in the future. He argues that disciplines like physics and psychology are struggling to find answers to important questions like where does consciousness come from and what is dark matter and is string theory true and stuff like that and he thinks that integrating more art into science could help give us the answer. I personally was skeptical of some of his points because he sort of acted like the imagination of artists yield data as trustworthy as scientific double and triple tested data which honestly just kind of reminded me of the results of scientific studies get absolutely butchered by the media into claiming something ridiculous and it kind of scares me that those people that make those media posts would get their hands on “subjective” data from artists who are trusted with producing the truth like a scientist and having their ideas butchered into something far worse.

Glossing: Heisenberg uncertainty principle- A scientific law that states that by nature you cannot determine an electrons position and momentum at the same time

Synapse: A synapse is the space between two neurons in which one neuron sends a chemical signal to the other via neuroreceptors and neurotransmitters.

Reductanism: The process of finding the answer to a complex process by breaking it down into simpler processes

The way I have been achieving my annotation goals is by asking more critical questions about the text.

The surrounding context of this essay is that it was written by a famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma in 2014 for the World Post. Yo-Yo Ma also started preforming at only five years old and has numerous accolades as well as a Harvard degree. The circumstance of this text for me personally is that it was assigned to me to read and annotate as homework for English 110 and the themes and material of this paper is presumably important for future classes as well as a future assigned essay. The intentional context of this paper basically boils down to that it is extremely important that we apply empathy and logic to everything we do and not stray to far in either direction as well as that diversity and keeping everything connected is a good things. Three words to gloss are meridians, repertoire, and virtuoso. A meridian is is an imaginary circle and in the context of the paper it was talking about the circles of influence in science and art. repertoire means a set of skills someone has and was used in the context of what skills musicians have. A virtuoso is someone highly skilled in music and it was used to describe musicians in the text.

I personally felt right at home prioritizing global edits over local edits in part because I’m not to picky about the grammar and sentence structure I read. Luckily my partners had very few local errors to distract me anyway so it wasn’t that hard to focus. I actually really liked prioritizing global edits especially since all throughout school all of my peer edits have been focused on local edits which got old really fast and wasn’t really that helpful anyway. I actually felt like I was helpful giving advice on things like essay structure, intros conclusions, how to incorporate text into a paper exc and I got into it a lot more than I usually do. I even surprisingly think it was easier than the editing i’m used to because you look at essays more in the big picture when you only care about global edits. Having to go in depth in every sentence to root out grammar errors is time consuming and annoying and not really something you should need your peer to do anyway. I’m actually really looking forward to getting my peer reviewed essays back because I know it wasn’t exactly polished and I have a feeling i’m going to get some really good feedback.

Metaphors are powerful tools of teaching and understanding that have helped people gain and spread knowledge since the dawn of recorded history, they help us understand by making connections between things but there is a significant danger when people fail to understand the exact nature of these connections. Many reputable linguists have given their two cents on the topic and have generally come to the agreement that the language used in metaphors can have major implications in the perceived meaning of a metaphor including Michael Erard who used the example of the metaphor “upstairs (logical) and downstairs (emotional) brain” inadvertently suggesting that the downstairs brain is “bad” in his publication See through words. It is important to see metaphors as they are to avoid finding false meaning in a metaphor, the previous example may not have seemed that scary but in reality that one metaphor attempting to explain how the brain works may have caused some amount of bias in the people who internalize it against the emotional part of themselves. To avoid getting the false meaning from metaphors one must first know what metaphors essentially are and why they work. Humans think in “straight lines”, this of course is a metaphor and also helps explain why metaphors work. what this metaphor essentially says is that human minds are designed so that they can only solve one problem or make one connection between ideas in their mind at once. Think for example how you would solve a the math equation like 34+12(11)-13, I bet that you didn’t just throw all those numbers in your head and do all the adding subtracting and multiplying at once you probably did the multiplication, than added 34 than subtracted 12 which is essentially what you do all the time piecing information together. All of what i just said can be summarized in the previously stated metaphor, humans think in straight lines, but what if I told you without the right context that metaphor may be dangerous. I have a question that can be asked in the context of the metaphor or the longer explanation “can people ever grasp a concept that is “curvy”, “nonlinear” or not “straightforward”. In the context of the metaphor the easy answer would be “no people think in straight lines so how can they grasp something with a “curve”” the diction relating to straight lines suggests that you can’t make curved lines out of straight lines because you literally can’t do that with literal straight lines but in reality we use simple connections to solve complex problems every day. This is why it is important to learn how to protect your self from being unintentionally misinformed by metaphors.

Metaphors have been used by the most brilliant minds all throughout history to make the abstract ideas they had more tangible to the common people. As tools of comparative understanding metaphors are the perfect tool to dumb down complex things by comparing them to more simple things. As geary remarked in his publication, most of the theories that einstein came up with were explained and conceptualized using metaphoric methods (a train moving thru a tunnel exc). How can deny the explanatory significance of metaphors when einstein himself was so keen on using them in his theories.

In “The Trouble with Medicine’s Metaphor’s” by Dhruv Khullar the author explains how the word choice in the metaphors used to describe things to patients by medical professionals has a large role in the patients outlook on their condition and treatment. He goes on to elaborate how specifically the military diction present in a lot of medical metaphors can have a negative impact on the morale of patients especially those with cancer or chronic conditions since military language can emphasize the struggle between a patient and their disease and plant seeds of dread in patents mind when something goes wrong since the military diction suggests that there are definite winners and losers. He also briefly addresses how the military language can be empowering to someone and help them be courageous in the face of adversity.

I personally think that diction can play a huge role in peoples perception of things. This is especially true in metaphors since metaphors are tools to help people explain difficult concepts by comparing it to something easier to understand. Unfortunately in the context of “The Trouble with Medicine’s Metaphor’s” the words used in metaphors can have social contexts that have unintended consequences in the perception of the people they affect (which could be bad or good) which leads me to believe that metaphors are imperfect tools of understanding which can lead to deviations in peoples opinions on the subject of a metaphor based on the social context of the diction used.

The Trouble with Medicine’s Metaphor’s: “They can invent them (similarities) where they don’t exist, and blur the lines between literal and figurative”. This quote explains how metaphors can sometimes have unintended consequences that can either enhance on contradict the metaphors intended meaning

Metaphorically Speaking: “We cannot ignore the literal meanings of words even when they give us the wrong answer” This quote reinforces the idea that word choice in metaphors is extremely important because metaphors are an imperfect communication method that if used incorrectly can warp your message into something unintended or even flat out wrong.”

See Through Words: “Preoccupied with questions such as why aren’t metaphors reversible” Metaphor’s aren’t reversible because an idea is explained using another idea to shed more light on the first idea and the reverse would be like lighting a match with a raging inferno (it simply isn’t practical).

I think by annotating with different colors it became much easier to for me to separate out the different parts of the paper out mentally. For example I would color all of the example metaphors (not just all of the metaphors since there was a lot of them hidden in there) the same color to separate them form everything else than I would separate things like references I didn’t understand in a different color and so on. One thing that organizing my annotations like this made me realize was how packed full of content and ideas this paper was, usually when you read something you don’t necessarily have to hang on to every word but organizing the paper by color in a way sort of highlighted the outsides of the puzzle pieces for me (if that makes sense) which allowed me to see the structure of the paper more which in turn let me kind of digest each point into smaller bites which definitely helped. I am still a bit critical of all the complexities of metaphors he was talking about a lot of them made sense but it still felt like he was talking a lot of hot air with not much support for some of the points he made. One thing I had to gloss the text to find out was who Rilke was, I found out that he was a poet who was known for powerful imagery in his writing which led me to conclude that the purpose of using him as an example actually was to say that metaphors aren’t just for passionate and intense writings that are made like art but they could also be designed like machines and be a little more mundane and useful.

One thing that I noticed in the text on page two was a paragraph describing how a team of researcher apparently fixed the design of a paintbrush by designing metaphors and the metaphor that ended up saving the day was “a paintbrush is a kind of pump” which stood out as ridiculous to me as I annotated. First of all I thought “a pump? I can’t even tell what connotation of the word they even mean. the act of pumping? the thing you use to blow air in a tire? a water pump?”. Than when later in the text it is revealed that it is referring to a water pump and the connection is that they are both things that move water it still felt a little irrelevant and reaching to far until I thought about it a Little. Comparing a paint brush to a pump with the context of fixing the design of the paintbrush makes sense because when you fix a pumps design you think about how you can move water the right way, and the solution they found which was designing the brush so there was air between the bristles fits the way of thinking that you use to design a pump. A second thing I noticed was on page 4 and was the question “why are metaphors not reversible”. After some reflection I realized the reason that you can’t reverse a metaphor is because most metaphors have a subject which put in a certain context by what it is compared to. The non-subject is usually something that is well defined and has a specific connotation to put the subject in a specific light so for example something like “consciousness” usually wouldn’t make a great non-subject since consciousness isn’t something simple or well defined.