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Neo: This—This isn’t real?

Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you feel, taste, smell, or see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

—THE MATRIX, 1999

I’m in a room, standing in front of five other people. For the last several minutes, I’ve been trying—unsuccessfully—to explain this new idea. It is a bit of a novel idea, but that shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve got a clear explanation. My explanation uses plain language. I even draw a visual model so people can see what I’m describing. Still, no one “gets” it. Then I say: “It’s kind of like ...” Eyes light up. Heads nod. Now, everyone understands.

What just happened?

We’ve all been in this situation, or one like it. Pitching a startup idea. Defending a design. Advocating a particular political position. Sorting out a big-picture concept. Explaining the business model. Drafting technical schemas. Explaining that niche interest we know so much about ...

By calling to mind an already familiar concept, we make it easier for others to understand what we’re talking about. Sometimes it’s explicit: “It’s like Pinterest for Teachers” (a product pitch) or “Think Pocahontas on an alien planet” (the movie Avatar). Other times it’s more subtle, as with the engineering team that talks about bad decisions building up “technical debt.” And other times it’s allegorical, from the parables told by Jesus to an astrophysicist describing “the Goldilocks Zone” necessary for life on other planets.

But this runs deeper than the associations we try to evoke in others. We all—whether we’re consciously aware of it or not—make sense of any new information by likening it to some other familiar concept. To understand, we link the unknown to what is already known.

Douglas Hofstadter, an American professor of cognitive science, writes “The human ability to make analogies lies at the root of all our concepts ... analogy is the fuel and fire of thinking.”¹ These analogies are invaluable, not only for communicating with others, but also for our own understanding. Again, whether we’re aware of it or not, we all think in concepts and patterns. Sure, we can point to the consultant who uses a picture of an iceberg to explain what is seen and (more critically) unseen by the business—the concept is familiar. But it’s more than simple, explicit “A is to B as C is to D” analogies. If we look at research from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,² we see how many concepts are so deeply embedded in our language, culture, and thought processes that the underlying associations go unobserved. Consider the spatial associations embedded in phrases like “Cheer up!” or “You seem down in the dumps.” We use this language without pausing to consider why “up is good” and “down is bad.” And yet, if we look at how the unwatered plant droops over or how our shoulders sag and our posture droops when we’re “upset”—we have clues to a set of associations rooted in biology and widespread throughout our thought processes. We can go even deeper and suggest that all thinking is conceptual in nature. Take a word like “jazzercise,” ideas like “Republican” or “Democrat,” or phrases like “The Paris of the Middle East”—we take for granted the layers of concepts and associations that have accumulated, often over many decades, to give meaning to these words; imagine explaining these phrases to someone transported from even just a few centuries ago! Even the way we express a single word can evoke a wildly different set of concepts. Consider some different ways we might utter a simple word like please: Puh-LEASE. (please). Please! Pleeeeeaaze? In this case, it is more than the word that is uttered; we’ve built up a set of prior associations—based on tone of voice—that also contribute to the message we understand.

Becoming aware of the conceptual systems that govern our own and others’ understanding is a powerful tool for understanding. This section is about the variety of ways that we might trigger, use with intent, and be aware of these pre-existing conceptual associations to help us and others understand new information.

But first, why care? How much of a difference can a simple association really make on understanding and subsequent decisions? To show how being aware of these associations can affect understanding—and decision-making—let’s explore our relationship with technology. Let’s take a critical look at the literal concepts we use to orient ourselves with something that is an abstraction.