Image Schemas

Image schemas are the skeletal structures of human thought: recurring patterns of sensorimotor experience that generate the conceptual architecture through which abstract domains become tractable. They are not metaphors themselves but the pre-conceptual patterns from which metaphors are constructed, forged by the specific interactions available to a body like ours in an environment like ours. Every time a speaker says an idea is in a theory, or that an argument stands, or that a project is on track, or that she is driven by ambition, an image schema is doing the cognitive work. The schemas are acquired through bodily interaction with the physical world, beginning before language develops, and they persist as the foundational structures of cognition throughout life. The claim is not metaphorical: Lakoff and Srini Narayanan argue that image schemas are implemented in specific neural circuits recruited from sensorimotor systems.