• James Geary's The World in a Phrase, which explored aphorisms, was a New York Times bestseller.

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!

Metaphor is most familiar as the literary device through which we describe one thing in terms of another, as in one of Shakespeare's most famous lines in which he equates Juliet with the sun. But metaphor is much more than a mere literary device employed by love-struck poets when they refer to their girlfriends as interstellar masses of incandescent gas. It is also intensely yet inconspicuously present in everything from ordinary conversation and commercial messaging to news reports and political speeches. Metaphor is at work in all fields of human endeavor, from economics and advertising to politics and business to science and psychology. We utter about one metaphor for every 10 to 25 words, or about six metaphors a minute.
 
 There is no aspect of our experience not molded in some way by metaphor's almost imperceptible touch. And once you twig to metaphor's modus operandi, you'll find its fingerprints on absolutely everything.

"Whenever we describe anything abstract—ideas, feelings, thoughts, emotions, concepts—we instinctively resort to metaphor," Geary writes. "Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others, how we communicate, learn, discover, and invent. Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words."
  
 In I Is an Other, Geary takes readers from Aristotle's investigation of metaphor right up to the latest neuroscientific insights on how metaphor works in the brain. Along the way, he demonstrates how metaphor affects financial decision-making, how metaphor lurks behind effective advertisements, how metaphor inspires learning and discovery, and how metaphor can be used as a tool to achieve emotional insight and psychological change.
 
In this lively and informative book, Geary explains why new research in the social and cognitive sciences makes it increasingly plain that metaphor influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways. He details how metaphor has finally leapt off the page and landed with a mighty splash right in the middle of our stream of consciousness.
 
Witty, persuasive, and original, I Is an Other will open your eyes to the secret life of metaphor and its powerful influence on our daily lives.