It can be quite revealing to tune in to the kind of imagery people use when talking. Consider, for example, how people speak about the current economic crisis. Some view the economy as a complex ...

Sometimes a complex health concept is best explained through an analogy—an easily understood comparison of two different ideas. A medical analogy can be an effective communicative tool for any ...

Thomas Edison famously said that genius requires “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Edison’s third criterion for would-be innovators is less well-known but perhaps even more vital: “a logical mind ...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach inspired legions of computer scientists in 1979, but few were as inspired as Melanie Mitchell. After reading the 777-page tome, Mitchell, a high ...

Richard Fontaine and Vance Serchuk consider the different historical examples that policymakers and politicians cite in their foreign policy arguments: In their choice of historical analogy, ...

We have plumbed the depths of abstract words, but what about abstract ideas? Abstractions are a fact of professional life. The law is littered with them. Think of the legislative process, intellectual ...

Here is a simple proposition: human thinking is conducted in one of two ways. Either we categorise, building upwards from a mass of phenomena to fewer and more inclusive categories, or downwards from ...