What is Cognitive Framing

In the language of the brain, words and thoughts are defined relative to narrative frames and conceptual metaphors. We are not born with these complex, fractal narratives—the kinds we find in everyone’s life story, as well as in fairy tales, novels, and drama. Rather, they are patterned into our nervous system as a result of experience. Frame structures are gradually created with a variety of components such as neural binding circuitry, neural signatures, and event structures. These narrative-metaphorical structures imbedded in the nervous system serve as reference patterns with which new experience is assessed, choices made, values and behaviors established. Cognitive frames tend to structure a huge amount of our thought. Sounding remarkably like Jung who observed that dreams have dramatic action that can meaningfully be broken down into the elements of a Greek play, George Lakoff explains that each frame has roles, relations between the roles, and scenarios carried out by those playing the roles. He says, there is a protagonist, the person whose point of view is being taken. Events have valence—they are good or bad—and they evoke appropriate emotions that fit dramatic scenarios. Lakoff also observes that words are all defined metaphorically as “conceptual frames,” and “Groups of related words, called ‘semantic fields,’ are defined with respect to the same frame. Thus words like ‘cost,’ sell,’ ‘goods,’ price,’ buy,’ and so on are defined with respect to a single frame. and the roles of Buyer, Seller, Goods, and Money, form a narrative field context for the frame.” The dynamic is one of correspondence. A correspondence is a complex metaphor with a unique “personalities” that includes great complexity and extraordinary accuracy. Correspondences are as complex as the relationships of harmony and tone to be found within the study of frequencies of sound and light—music, color, or a DNA map.

In the language of the brain, words and thoughts are defined relative to narrative frames and conceptual metaphors. “The very fact that we recognize these cultural narratives and frames means that they are instantiated physically in our brains. We are not born with them, but we start growing them soon, and as we acquire the deep narratives, our synapses change and become fixed.” (Lakoff p. 33-34)