Symbolic Cognition

For years, I’ve been grappling with a question: Why do we expect life to make sense like a story? Why do we try to piece together the events of history and our lives in ways that make narrative sense, rather than logical sense?

I have a hypothesis about this, which I call symbolic cognition. When we see something or think of a concept, we don’t just see it as it is, but also with layers of symbolism. Today, we are going to discuss symbolic cognition through four types of associations: aesthetics and metaphors, memorization, objects with morality, and facts with meaning.

Before we move on, I want to take a moment to talk about the term, symbolic cognition. While contemplating the ways we construct our views of the world through symbols, I searched for an official field of science devoted to it. The closest I could find is a sociological theory called “symbolic interactionism.” However, as far as I could tell, symbolic interactionism is specifically focused on how we view our identities through our relationships with others, whereas symbolic cognition is a framework by which to analyze one of the ways we construct our knowledge and worldviews. If there is an official term for symbolic cognition, or if symbolic interactionism does indeed cover it, I apologize.

Aesthetics and Metaphors

What is it like to hear the murmuring of a crowd? Is it soothing like a babbling brook? Eerie like a flock of squawking crows? Perhaps it’s full of energy, all the people as busy as bees. But a crowd is not bees or crows or a brook, it’s people. The comparisons come to mind because they stimulate our aesthetic senses in similar ways.

When we bite into a strawberry, we sometimes describe it as an explosion of flavor. Why an explosion? It’s because the flavor of a good strawberry can be as intense to our sense of taste as an explosion is to our senses of sight, sound, and touch. Few people are confused when we describe it this way.

When we think and experience concepts and sensations, the information gets all mixed up in our brains. As a result, our entire conceptualization of the world is a web of connections, many of which are not logical, but a this-is-like-that relationship. This is why abstract art and music without lyrics can be so powerful to us. The associations between the colors and the strokes of the brush evoke within us the same emotions as a sunset or a beautiful day in the city. Our unconscious minds make the connections, even if our conscious minds don’t understand it.

Associative Memorization

Our ability to associate logically disconnected concepts gives us an ability for memorization so incredible it might as well be a superpower. Let’s consider the strawberry we mentioned in the previous section. When we bite into the strawberry and experience its explosion of flavor, we see a firetruck drive by, its sirens blaring. This reminds us of a time we were walking by the river and a firetruck drove by, rudely interrupting our peaceful contemplation. Looking at the ripples on the river, we think of mountains being formed and crumbling from the long-term forces of plate tectonics in the Earth’s crust. With this sequence of associations, we can remember the list, “strawberry,” “fire truck,” “river,” “Earth’s crust,” despite the fact that these items have no logical connection with each other.

With practice and creativity, we can remember lists of hundreds or even thousands of items for long periods of time. A great technique for this is to use a memory palace, a place or object we are familiar with enough that we can see it vividly in our mind’s eye. This could be our house or a walk around our neighborhood, or even something like a statue we can hold in our hands. When we want to memorize something, we walk through this palace, associating every item with something we see.

For instance, the hallway leading out of my apartment has five doors. I could mentally walk past each of the doors, assigning something I want to memorize with each of them. Then, when I want to recall that list, I could mentally walk through again, picking up each item from its assigned door. If I want to memorize more than five things, I could open the doors and assign items to the features inside. For another example, my stove has four dials, each with twelve settings: OFF, LO, 1-9, and HI. With these four dials alone, I could memorize 48 things by assigning them to the positions of the dials and associating them with the items on either side.

Associations can also be made by a process called operant conditioning. When we are presented two things together enough times, we tend to associate them with one another. This is most often discussed in the context of creating a physiological reaction by an association, such as a dog salivating to the sound of a bell after being presented with food accompanied by a bell ringing enough times.

Advertisers take advantage of operant conditioning in us. For example, they condition us to see cars as sexy by repeatedly showing us car ads with attractive women in them, and they condition us to see beer as manly by repeatedly showing us ads of beer being enjoyed by strong, bearded men.

Perceiving Objects as Symbols of Morality

Picture the Holy Grail, the Cup of Christ, be it a jeweled golden chalice in your minds eye or a wooden carpenter’s mug. Now push that image aside and imagine you pick up a piece of furniture to find mold growing in a big stain where the carpet meets the wall. Most likely you saw the cup as good and the mold as bad. Not only do we associate concepts with one another, we also associate concepts with value. We feel like objects can be good or bad.

Moral symbolism can be beneficial when it helps us make healthy choices, but it can be bad when we make moral associations with types of people, forming stereotypes. For example, if you perceive smoking as bad, and you see a lot of tattooed people smoking, you might come to see tattooed people as bad by association. You then might go on to see someone with a tattoo as bad, even if you know that this person does not smoke. Moral stereotyping is, unfortunately, something we humans do very naturally, and we must work hard to train ourselves out of it.

Religions utilize moral symbolism with concepts of the sacred and the profane, worthiness and unworthiness. In the best cases, this can lead us toward fulfilling, positive lives, but it can also be used by religious authorities as a means of control.

Perceiving Facts as Symbols of Meaning

How many constellations are there? What message does a rainbow send? What is the meaning of the existence of natural evil? These questions do not have real answers. Constellations are made up. A rainbow is what happens when water droplets refract sunlight like a prism. And natural evil is just things happening naturally that result in people being harmed. There is no meaning inherent in these things, at least not when there isn’t someone causing them on purpose. But out minds imbue them with meaning by treating them as symbols.

There are a few ways in which facts mean something. If someone organizes things, such as words in a book, with the intention of conveying a message, then the objects used for communication carry the meaning of the communication. Also, we can find logical meaning in an object or place by observing and investigating it, which can tell us about what happened there in the past. However, we have a tendency to see symbolic meaning in things when it isn’t there.

For example, the idea that Earth is the center of the universe feels right, and the idea that there is no center of the universe can make us feel sad. The idea that our ancestors were crafted by the loving hands of God can make us feel much happier than the idea that we evolved from common ancestors with monkeys and apes. Yet we have no reason to feel this way. We are what we are regardless of how our ancestors came to be, and the Earth is our home whether it’s at the center of the universe or somewhere else.

This tendency to see facts as symbols with meaning has an upside: it can make stories more compelling. An author, songwriter, or poet can put objects and imagery into their stories with the intent that they be interpreted to have meaning, and that meaning contribute to the themes and aesthetics of the story.

The dark side of this is, unfortunately, very dark. When bad things happen to us, or we are confronted with the human condition, we tend to assume there must be some meaning in our suffering. We convince ourselves that without this suffering, something essential to the enjoyment of life will be lost.

If there truly is nothing we can do about it, this can be comforting and help us cope with our circumstances. However, if things change and it becomes possible to work toward changing our circumstances and getting rid of our suffering, then the story we tell ourselves of the meaning in that suffering can hold us back. We might remain chained to our suffering, even when the opportunity to get rid of it presents itself. Even worse, we might fight against those who try to move forward and make things better.

Final Thoughts

It is likely that we are not blank slates, that we are born with predispositions for certain associations given to us by evolutionary psychology. Things such as character archetypes, hero stories, and dragons, which have been found all over the world in completely disconnected cultures. On top of these templates, we build our models of the world, both symbolic and logical. Being common to all of humanity does not make them objective to the fabric of reality, but they do give us something by which we can all relate to one another.

Symbolic cognition can make it hard to learn true things, because in each instance there may be something we must first unlearn. On the other hand, symbolic cognition gives us the ability to appreciate a rich banquet of stories, arts, music, and philosophy. The symbolic meanings we see in nature may not be real, but properly cultivated, symbolic cognition itself can be a source for the meaning we seek.