Dancing with Diagrams

Welcome back to AND THE SUN, a newsletter about creative, artistic, and inventive approaches to meditation. 🟡 ⤵️

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Have you ever had an idea that haunts you until you bring it to life somehow? This week’s post is about one of those specters, which has been following me around and wagging its finger since 2016.

What the heck is an “image schema”?

Years ago I read about something called “image schemas”.

Loosely, “image schemas” are embodied, kinesthetic patterns that become ingrained when we’re small children interacting with our environments. As we develop, our brains use these patterns to structure our sense of reality. Traditionally, cognitive linguists look for the presence of these image schema in language, by examining visual/spatial/embodied metaphors. 

A seminal 1987 book by Mark Johnson called The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason defines image schemas as follows:

For example, there’s an image schema called CONTAINMENT, which is basically the “vibe” of one thing being contained by another. The sentence fragment from the previous paragraph, “cognitive linguists look for the presence of these image schema in our language”, actually employs the CONTAINMENT image schema by making a metaphor:

Language is like a container, and metaphors are contained within language.

But it’s not just that image schemas allow us to form metaphors; it’s that our very experience of the world is composed of, or elaborates on, these image schemas. For CONTAINMENT, then, image schema theory asserts that the many experiences we’ve had of something containing something else form an abstracted sense or vibe of containment, which then actively shapes how we conceive of and experience many other things.

Another common image schema is SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, which describes the vibe or pattern of something moving along a path from its source towards a goal. You can imagine a young child encountering this pattern repeatedly when they reach for their mother (hand starts near their body, travels along a path until it reaches their mother), reaching for a toy, reaching for food, being picked up and carried to bed, and so on. From all these experiences, the SOURCE-PATH-GOAL pattern is distilled, and it then shapes thoughts down the road, such as the thought “I’ll just keep applying to jobs until I get a new one”, which image schema theory would argue is fundamentally composed with or generated from the SOURCE-PATH-GOAL schema, among other inputs. 

Moreover, image schemas are especially interesting because they actively shape our expectations. Johnson says that, “The experience of containment typically involves protection from, or resistance to, external forces” (p.22). This is interesting: for example, when I’m contained within my job, there’s some visceral sense that I’m protected from financial hardship and, therefore, the vicissitudes of life – conceptually, I feel protected because a job provides money which can pay for goods and housing. But the visceral feeling of protection is due to the expectation of protection that comes from the embodied image schema of containment. Of course, this begs the question, what happens if we explicitly call out these expectations and perhaps change them? Various psychological practices like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy explicitly aim to identify underlying expectations and change them. There’s also literally something called Schema Therapy, although this refers to a somewhat different type of schema that describes relationships, rather than basic embodiment patterns.

Image schemas for creative expression

What if we used animated diagrams of image schemas as an artistic medium? There are plenty of examples of visual languages, diagrammatic communication, and so on. The novelty here is to explicitly take the basic motifs of embodied experience and turn them into the building blocks of communication – like a fusion between dance and language, overtly blending kinesthetics and meaning. 

I made a rough little prototype of this with simple 2D animations of the image schemas CONTAINMENT, SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, ATTRACTION, COMPULSION, BLOCKAGE, and MERGE.

I figure that our experience of consuming this medium depends on our familiarity with the animations. So let’s first go through a “learning phase” together: watch each animation loop and see if you can let the sense of the concept and the visualization blend together, so that when you look at the visualization, you also get the sense of the concept, and vice versa. To do this, it can be useful to e.g. notice the rounded square containing the circle within its boundaries (CONTAINMENT), or notice the vertical bar pushing the circle forward (COMPULSION).

From these basic elements, we can string schemas together into “phrases”. We can also explore running these in parallel versus in some sequence.

Consider the sentence: When I learned how to solder, I ran into a challenge: my hands kept shaking, so it was hard to solder successfully.

There are different ways we could parse this into image schema, including nested schemas, but for simplicity let’s represent this as:

MERGE → BLOCKAGE → COMPULSION → SOURCE-PATH-GOAL.

New skill of soldering merged into my knowledge →
I got blocked by a challenge →
Something was compelling my hands to shake →
I didn’t achieve the goal of soldering.

We could also replace the objects with symbols, like emoji. This makes the meaning of the visual communication more definite, whereas generic shapes have more abstract meaning.

We can also explore more abstract expressions, regarding the schema as stamps which we use to create 2D forms.

Where could we take it beyond these simple 2D experiments?

These are just six schemas; there are several dozen that could be animated. We could also make them 3D instead of 2D, both in terms of the animations themselves, and how the animations can be positioned relative to each other. If we imagine making the schemas life-sized, they can become movements in an environment, similar to a dancer – either in VR, or as physical sculptures. We can also imagine the expressive tooling that might be used to customize each schema, for instance using intuitive hand interaction to control the size of schema components, or to control parameters of the animations. And we haven’t even begun to talk about what might be possible with image schemas and LLMs.

Moreover, as an artistic direction, since image schemas are (supposedly) core to how we understand the world, and since they operate by constraining our expectations in situations – what if we intentionally subvert elements of this understanding? For instance, returning to “The experience of containment typically involves protection from, or resistance to, external forces”: how does this shape our perception of other people? We assume other people are containers, and that they contain (some degree of) multitudes. What if this assumption breaks? What if those multitudes spill out, what if other multitudes spill in? What are the deep underlying schemas that shape our sense of our own integration vs. separation from other people, and the resulting expectations be subverted?

Meditation

In this week’s meditation, we examine experiences to see if we can sense how image schema are shaping them.