"Analogy is the core of all thinking."
This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer
Prize-winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist
Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been
grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over thirty
years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making
complex ideas vivid, he has partnered with Sander to put forth a
highly novel perspective on cognition.
We are constantly faced with a swirling and intermingling multitude
of ill-defined situations. Our brain's job is to try to make sense
of this unpredictable, swarming chaos of stimuli. How does it do
so? The ceaseless hail of input triggers analogies galore, helping
us to pinpoint the essence of what is going on. Often this means
the spontaneous evocation of words, sometimes idioms, sometimes the
triggering of nameless, long-buried memories.
Why did two-year-old Camille proudly exclaim, "I undressed the
banana "? Why do people who hear a story often blurt out, "Exactly
the same thing happened to me " when it was a completely different
event? How do we recognize an aggressive driver from a split-second
glance in our rearview mirror? What in a friend's remark triggers
the offhand reply, "That's just sour grapes"? What did Albert
Einstein see that made him suspect that light consists of particles
when a century of research had driven the final nail in the coffin
of that long-dead idea?
The answer to all these questions, of course, is
"analogy-making"--the meat and potatoes, the heart and soul, the
fuel and fire, the gist and the crux, the lifeblood and the
wellsprings of thought. Analogy-making, far from happening at rare
intervals, occurs at all moments, defining thinking from top to
toe, from the tiniest and most fleeting thoughts to the most
creative scientific insights.
Like "Godel, Escher, Bach" before it, "Surfaces and Essences" will
profoundly enrich our understanding of our own minds. By plunging
the reader into an extraordinary variety of colorful situations
involving language, thought, and memory, by revealing bit by bit
the constantly churning cognitive mechanisms normally completely
hidden from view, and by discovering in them one central, invariant
core--the incessant, unconscious quest for strong analogical links
to past experiences--this book puts forth a radical and deeply
surprising new vision of the act of thinking.
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