Logjam Metaphor for Concepts

Concepts accrete around words the way a logjam accretes around a snag in a river.

In his 1997 book, *Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again *, Professor Andy Clark hypothesizes that concepts grow around words in a way similar to how logjams form in rivers. A logjam starts when something – perhaps a log – floats down a river and gets stuck on something. The original obstacle has now become larger, so it’s more likely that something else will get stuck. And so on, until you have a pile of logs tangled up together. Importantly, it’s not just logs that get stuck. It can be twigs, leaves, or any other junk that floats. Plants might take root and grow. And so on. A logjam grows into a complex structure.

To Clark, a word or phrase gets learned, then accretes associations based on the brain’s later experiences with that word. For example, consider the word “dawn,” as in Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” – that is, sunrise. For the longest time, that was my main association with that sound-pattern. But, having been married to a person named Dawn for so long, associations to her are irretrievably wedged into the logjam labeled “dawn.” I read her all 20 volumes of the Aubrey-Maturin seagoing novels, which are *filled* with sentences like “We sail at dawn.” When I read such sentences, 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 her name. She has the same experience with her own name.

Note: in the book, Clark's actually metaphor is to a mangrove island . I like mine better.

See also Distributed Logjam.