The Mind
It has been said the mind can move mountains. Then again, it was a poet who said that and poets are not exactly famous for speaking literally. Also, as most people know, the mind cannot move mountains. An excellent metaphor puts into sharp relief just exactly how unlimited—and limited—the mind really is:
“The mind, when it dealt with uncertain situations, was like a Swiss Army knife. It was a good enough tool for most jobs required of it, but not exactly suited to anything.”
What the Mind can Conceive...
The 1950’s were, apparently, a golden age for Israeli psychology students. The best and the brightest were treated like royalty and even those barely registering on the intellectual scale could still write a ticket to an education in that particularly department. A comparison is about to be made here that puts this situation into perspective, but keep in mind that just because something can be conceived in the mind doesn’t mean it can be conceived as a reality:
“Israel without a psychology department was like Alabama without a football team.”
Categorization
The trade jargon for arriving at categorizations of things is “similarity judgment.” People make judgments based on similarity and differences all day, every day and usually do so without any rational awareness they are doing so. This process is so fundamental, it is described as the most essential to the experience of being human:
“It’s like the thread that is woven through everything in the mind.”
Not as Easy as it Looks
Throughout the book are demonstrations and examples of how things that seem simple turn out to be much more complicated. Or, alternative, things that seem complicated enough from the outside wind up being almost too impossibly complex to even imagine understanding when seen from the inside. One such example of running a professional sports franchise:
“This job of running a professional basketball team had turned out to be a bit different than he had imagined, back when he was a kid. It was as if he had been assigned to take apart a fiendishly complicated alarm clock to see why it wasn’t working, only to discover that an important part of the clock was inside his own mind.”
Metaphors
Even the very concept of metaphorical thinking is up for grabs in this text. A significant chunk of narrative is handed over to one character’s penetration into the study how metaphorical thinking actually works versus how it generally assumed to work. The conclusion arrived at is, quite naturally, put in the form of a metaphor:
“metaphors are vivid and memorable, and because they are not readily subjected to critical analysis, they can have considerable impact on human judgment even when they are inappropriate, useless, or misleading. They replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.”
