Strawberry feel forever: understanding metaphor as sensorimotor dynamics

Abstract

Metaphor is a useful way of explaining how to do things. The literature on metaphor in the learning of physical skill has generally explicated its efficacy by examining its actionable directives for motor enactment. And yet from the perspectives of phenomenological philosophy, ecological psychology, and enactivism, action is immanently intertwined with perception, so that models of metaphor-based learning should foreground the role of sensory activity modulating motor behavior. As such, metaphor is retheorized as a sensorial constraint one imaginarily projects into one's action-perception phenomenological landscape. I present two metaphors from an instructional video on cello technique. Whereas these metaphors are couched in action language (what one should do), their potential impact, I argue, lies in emergent goal sensations (what one should feel). These explorative sensorimotor accommodations may, in turn, bring forth yet new scopes of latent sensations coupled to unanticipated performance possibilities, which suggest further modifying and calibrating enactment in the target domain. Attending to, achieving, and maintaining emergent intermediary goal sensations regulates instrumented action by forging new affordances that bring forth new motor coordination. As teacher and student co-imagine images for action, they should attend to sensory perceptions. And the same goes for scholars of metaphor.

Theoretical Framework for Facilitating Young Musicians’ Learning of Expressive Performance

“…Open questions and dialogue employing metaphors can help children to make a connection between the music they are learning and action-states, feelings, narratives, or characters that may be expressed in the music (cf. Abrahamson, 2020 ). Since music has the potential to evoke affect, character, or emotion, we can talk metaphorically about the music.…”

Enacting Metaphors in Systemic Collaborative Therapy

“…Firstly, metaphors have embodied roots that can be explored. They afford talking about multi-sensorial aspects of our experiences ( Abrahamson, 2020 ). Once the embodied roots and sensorial aspects of metaphors are discovered, it is easier to find action words to explore those metaphors further.…”

“… 11 For instance, a therapeutic context might require a different kind of metaphors than ones required for learning a skill; for the latter, see Abrahamson (2020) . …”

Towards an ecological-dynamics design framework for embodied-interaction conceptual learning: the case of dynamic mathematics environments

“…Thus, the interplay of perception and action is co-constructive and mutually serving, with perception guiding action, even as action promotes perceptual vantage (Fiebelkorn and Kastner 2019;Maturana and Varela 1992;Schroeder et al 2010). Affordances, thus, come forth as the organism iteratively adapts its environmentally coupled motor action to increase access to sensory information conducive to enacting effective movement; which, in turn, reveals opportunities for greater sensory acuity and even new sensory modalities and dimensions for refining motor engagement (Abrahamson 2020). Discovering affordances is, therefore, a recursive process that gradually maximizes an organism's grip on the world (Merleau-Ponty 1962, cited in Dreyfus andDreyfus 1999, p. 103).…”

“…On the contrary, the process of constructing is constantly curbed and held in check by the constraints it runs into" (p. 33). We take these curbs and checks on action to be catalysts, rather than impediments, to learning.3 SeeAbrahamson (2020) andAbrahamson et al (2016a) for the special case of instructional metaphors as constraints on action. SeeAbrahamson et al (2016b) for the case of material artifacts used for entraining novices into physical skills.…”