by Ken Bell

Intriguing research continues to bind ever closer the profound linkages among human language, cognition and the structural characteristics of the human brain. University of California scientist V.S. Ramachandran believes that his research has demonstrated that “a region of the brain known as the angular gyrus is probably at least partly responsible for the human ability to understand metaphor.”

“Ramachandran and colleagues tested four right-handed patients with damage to the left angular gyrus. Fluent in English and otherwise intelligent and mentally lucid, the patients showed gross deficits in comprehending such common proverbs as ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’ and ‘an empty vessel makes more noise.’ Asked to explain the sayings, the patients tended to give responses that were literal. The metaphorical meaning escaped them almost entirely.
“When pressed to provide deeper or more general accounts, Ramachandran said, ‘ the patients often came up with elaborate, even ingenious interpretations – that were completely off the mark.’” (Sounds remarkably reminiscent of some few I’ve met on Sixth Street.)

Getting in touch with Ramachandran’s hypothesis isn’t too difficult. “Disproportionately larger in hominids than other primates, the angular gyrus, given its strategic location at the crossroads of areas specialized for processing touch, hearing and vision, Ramachandran conjectures, is critical both to conceptual metaphors and to cross-modal abstractions more generally.”

Take a gander at “Patient SJ, for example, a former physician who could maintain the flow of normal conversation and even retained the ability to correctly diagnose descriptions of symptoms, got all 20 of the 20 proverbs he was tested on wrong. Prodded on ‘all that glitters is not gold,’ he finally said it meant you had to be careful when buying jewelry because you might get robbed.’

“The patients were equally bad at matching a bulbous, amoeboid shape to the sound ‘booba’ and a jagged shape to ‘kiki.’ Whereas more than 90 percent of ordinary respondents succeed at this task – of translating one sort of sensory information into another – patients with damage to the angular gyrus performed at the level of chance.”

In other words, just a roll of the dice.