How did people describe the brain before computer metaphors? Charles S. Sherrington in 1942 called it "that enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern."
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Is there a good book on the history of technologies as metaphors for the brain? Really want to read alternatives to the dead end “brain is a computer” one that’s become prevalent in applied linguistics.
Dr Adam Toon’s variety of mental factionalism argues that folk psychology moves from using such metaphors drawn from material culture to talk of mental content and functions to forgetting that they are metaphors. We start to use them as guidebooks.
“The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.”
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https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/matthew-cobb/the-idea-of-the-brain/9781541646858/?lens=basic-books
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/27/why-your-brain-is-not-a-computer-neuroscience-neural-networks-consciousness
https://www.nms.ac.uk/discover-catalogue/the-jacquard-loom-innovation-in-textiles-and-computing
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.”
—Andrew Marvell
https://poets.org/poem/garden