Metaphors:

• Brain chemistry exchanges is like a washing machine.
• Blue moods to an improperly tuned radio
• Mental tuning=radio
• Intellect in terms of building monuments
• Brain can be fixed by correcting “traumatic scenes.”
• Thoughts and knowledge as a machine
• Hysteria leads to repression

One of the major consequences we face when we compare the brain or intellect to an inanimate object is the risk of understating the brains importance to the body. The mind is an incredibly complex and bizarre organ requiring intense study. Many of the objects in “Current Ideas about How the Mind Works” need great skill to be operated but none of them can function to the capacity of a human brain. I feel that comparing its processes to a washing machine is an easy way to explain it to a child, but when people are older, you must go more in-depth with your explanation.

I also think the ideas by Freud don’t connect with most of the population. If all people had brains like Freud believes in “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” we would be an arrogant society. He talks about erecting buildings, saying “when [the inscriptions] have been translated, yield undreamed-of information about the events of the remote past, to commemorate which the monuments were built.” The small clip of the article immediately made me think of an intelligent entrepreneur who uses the rubble in order to build a town as a monument to himself and his abilities.

Overall though, I believe these metaphors can do more good than harm. They provide us with an easy way to explain multiple ideas about the brain, such as its processes, how we think, and psychoanalysis. We need metaphors like the ones given in the reading in order to help us think in simpler ways about problems.