corporeal boundaries’ (Blanke et al. 2004; Blanke and Arzy 2005). Given the importance
of the relation between self and the body in the context of religious experience many
neuroscientists and philosophers have argued for a possible connection between AP and
the origin of the proto soul-concept and of other religious experiences characterized by
feelings of expanding one’s body beyond its physical limits or by a sense of splitting the
self (Metzinger 2005).
Anthropomorphism as metaphor
Anthropomorphism can be broadly defined as the attribution of human characteristics to
nonhuman things, and according to Guthrie, similarly with the case of animism
previously discussed, ‘we anthropomorphize because guessing that the world in
humanlike is a good bet’ (2003, 3; cf. also Barrett and Keil 1996). For our purposes here
however, I want to explore anthropomorphism from a different angle. Specifically,
drawing on the general principles of Embodied Cognition and Metaphor Theory (e.g.
Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1980) I suggest that anthropomorphism should be
understood as a metaphoric projection. A metaphoric projection is essentially the
conceptual mapping between a familiar or concrete and an unfamiliar or abstract,
phenomenal domain. Obviously the crucial function of metaphoric mappings is to project
- and not represent - the structure (spatial, perceptual or other) of a concrete and directly
meaningful domain of experience (e.g. the embodied experience of weight) upon a
meaningless abstract conceptual one (e.g. the concept of weight). Given that the human
bodily experience offers the most intimate source of pre-conceptual structure, it follows
that the human body will serve as the most basic source domain for such metaphoric
conceptual mappings:
Our brains are structured so as to project activation patterns from sensorimotor
areas to higher cortical areas....Projection of this kind allow us to conceptualize
abstract concepts on the basis of inferential patterns used in sensorimotor
processes that are directly tied to the body (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 77).
Until very recently little was known about the possible neurological foundation of the
above processes and about how imagining and doing might use a shared neural substarte.
It was primarily in the last decade that new exciting discoveries like the so-called ‘mirror
neurons’ and the development of ‘simulation’ and ‘neural exploitation’ theories that
provided for the first time a mechanism with a clear neurological foundation for
grounding the general premises of embodied cognition (Gallese and Lakoff 2005; Gallese
2005). Moreover a recent neuroimaging study led by V. S. Ramachandran showed the
brain area known as the angular gyrus is most probably the ‘metaphor centre’ of the
human mind (Ramachandran et al. 2005). Lesions in the angular gyrus have been
consistently associated with a deficit in methaphoric thinking, a fact which may explain
the strategic location of this region at the crossroads of the temporo-parietal areas
associated with touch, hearing and vision (occipital). This finding is important not only
because of the close anatomical proximity between the temporo-parietal junction TPJ and
the angular gyrus AG, but also because the latter is disproportionately larger in hominids
than other primates.