Bad writers mix them

Usage examples of metaphors.

And within it, the brain became first a telegraphic signaling system and later, at the start of the present century, a telephone exchange, one of the several metaphors favoured by the great neurophysiologist Sherrington.

But it is the metaphors of Cartesian clockwork and hydraulics rather than Cartesian dualism which concern me at present.

But Al needs to know its place, which is never to reverse its metaphors by privileging the model over the biology, but instead to show some humility in confronting that marvellous object of its study, the brain.

Yet, as I have also argued, such is the powerful interaction of our technology with our very biology that the fact of creating a technology-driven society in which metaphors for memory have become central changes the very nature of our memory itself.

For example, to express our ideas concerning their physical basis we use different metaphors - stored up ideas, engraved images, beaten paths.

As I pointed out in Chapter 4, there is a very important way in which science proceeds by metaphor, and metaphors can illumine - or they can mislead.

Critics of science - especially the new feminist critics - have spent some time analysing the way male scientists speak of these cognitive triumphs, with their dominating metaphors either military or sexual.

These metaphors, from philosopher Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century to physicist Richard Feynman in the twentieth, make a depressing catalogue.

Evolution and selection are poor metaphors to describe the processes of interaction, feedback, stabilization and growth of cells and synapses occurring during development - and indeed throughout an entire lifetime.

In the very first chapter of this book I introduced my own metaphors, of translation and the search for a Rosetta stone, to describe the task that I believe we face in moving between the languages of the brain and those of mind, between those of molecular events and those of meaning.

Ho, M-W, and Fox, S W Evolutionary Processes and Metaphors, Wiley, 1988.

The noblest, including those time-honoured metaphors that draw their patent of nobility from war, love, religion, or the chase, in proportion as they are strong and of a vivid presence, are also domineering - apt to assume command of the theme long after their proper work is done.

So great is the headstrong power of the finest metaphors, that an author may be incommoded by one that does his business for him handsomely, as a king may suffer the oppression of a powerful ally.

One thing only is forbidden, to treat these substantial and living metaphors as if they were elegant curiosities, ornamental excrescences, to be passed over abruptly on the way to more exacting topics.

But la Gorda and the little sisters had turned my obscure metaphors into real possibilities.