The theory of conceptual blending

The creation and processing of metaphor is one instance of what has become known as ‘conceptual blending’. This theory explains how the brain integrates information, and accounts for how the combination of ideas can be more than the sum of its parts. This theory is probably the most important concept to cross over from Cognitive Science to Literary Studies, both because of its capacity to explain central, complex issues, and also its broad applicability. Blending theory accounts for how our brains are able to learn through the selection and combination of the old with the new: how structured schemas and background knowledge are integrated with emerging contextualised information in the formation of new concepts. It relies on the idea that sets of characteristics are mapped across into new contexts, where they are blended and integrated with other mappings, resulting in new meanings. In this way, conceptual blending shares structure with the closely allied conceptual metaphor theory, but goes beyond the latter's account of unidirectional mapping from source to target domain, to provide a way of understanding networks of cross-domain mappings in the construction of meaning. Like conceptual metaphor theory, this account of analogical conceptual projection is ideally suited to linguistic contexts, but applies more fundamentally to all human cognitive processing, and holds particular promise for theories of literary comprehension. In addition to accounting for figurative language use, it also provides a means of accounting for how counter-factual or hypothetical scenarios are created and integrated in information processing, and even more interestingly, allows structures of cultural knowledge to be identified in literary texts.