The Logjam Metaphor for Concepts is perhaps too neat. The brain is even messier than that.
I like the logjam metaphor because it evokes the messiness of biological solutions to problems. In Associations of Dawn, I recounted how my logjam for the word "dawn" has, in the last ~40 years accumulated an association such that:
> When I read [a sentence like "The ship sails at dawn], almost invariably I’d get what I can only describe as a little flash of recognition that I was not just describing a time of day but also saying [Dawn's] name.
That's good, but it suggests there's a single *place*, the logjam, where a bunch of associations hang out together. It's a bit too much like a data structure with properties hanging off it, ready for lookup.
I doubt that’s right, because it doesn’t capture how *associative* and *distributed* the brain is.
Consider: some estimate that the average neuron is being fed impulses from 1000 other neurons. When I say “network” it’s easy to imagine a compact cluster of neurons. Some on the exterior are fed impulses from “upstream” neurons, others on the exterior feed impulses “downstream,” and the majority interior neurons are connected only to other cluster members.
Instead, your average neuron will be part of many networks, and networks overlap a good amount. There *are* large-scale structures in the brain, and neurons come in different types with different roles, and neurons aren’t the only cells with a role in neurotransmission and the formation of memory, but I want to emphasize that very many of the brain’s actions seem to require a whole bunch of networks activating, reinforcing, or dampening each other. William James describe a child’s first experience of the world as a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” and that also describes the brain that has to deal with it.
So a concept is less a place than **a pattern of activation** that lights up a bunch of neurons smeared through and overlapping with other concepts.
DOT strict digraph rankdir=LR node [style=filled fillcolor=lightyellow penwidth=3 color=black fontname="Helvetica"] HERE NODE node [style=filled fillcolor=lightblue] WHERE /^Next/ LINKS HERE -> NODE node [style=filled fillcolor=white] HERE NODE WHERE /^Next/ LINKS HERE -> NODE node [style=filled fillcolor=white penwidth=3 color=black] LINKS HERE -> NODE node [style="filled,rounded,dotted" fillcolor=white] edge [style=dotted] HERE NODE BACKLINKS NODE -> HERE STATIC strict digraph {rankdir=LR node [style=filled fillcolor=lightyellow penwidth=3 color=black fontname="Helvetica"] "Conceptual Metaphor" node [style=filled fillcolor=lightblue] node [style=filled fillcolor=white penwidth=3 color=black] "Conceptual Metaphor" -> "Metaphor System" "Conceptual Metaphor" -> "Conduit Metaphor" "Conceptual Metaphor" -> "Lakoff and Johnson" "Conceptual Metaphor" -> "Target Domain" "Conceptual Metaphor" -> "Source Domain" "Conceptual Metaphor" -> "Understanding the Crossroads Metaphor" "Conceptual Metaphor" -> "Problem-Solving in the Crossroads Metaphor" "Conceptual Metaphor" -> "Extra Source Element" "Conceptual Metaphor" -> "Missing Source Element" "Conceptual Metaphor" -> "Conceptual Metaphor as Metaphor" "Conceptual Metaphor" -> "Propositional Metaphor" "Conceptual Metaphor" -> "Comparison: Conceptual and Propositional Metaphor" node [style="filled,rounded,dotted" fillcolor=white] edge [style=dotted] "Conceptual Metaphor" "Accept's \"Balls to the Wall\" Song" -> "Conceptual Metaphor" "Comparison: Conceptual and Propositional Metaphor" -> "Conceptual Metaphor" "Dijkstra on Metaphor" -> "Conceptual Metaphor" "Generative Metaphor" -> "Conceptual Metaphor" "Lakoff and Johnson" -> "Conceptual Metaphor" "Metaphorical Reasoning" -> "Conceptual Metaphor" "Propositional Metaphor" -> "Conceptual Metaphor" "Source Domain" -> "Conceptual Metaphor" "Target Domain" -> "Conceptual Metaphor" "Missing Source Element" -> "Conceptual Metaphor"}