Studying Metaphors and the Brain

Alumni Profile: Dr. Stephen J. Flusberg ’96

Unlike many people, Dr. Stephen J. Flusberg ’96 decided at the tender age of 18 what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. As a college freshman, he took a psychology course and immediately fell in love with the field.

“I never realized that you could scientifically study the human mind or human behavior. I just didn’t understand that was a thing,” he says. “I had a lot of misconceptions about what psychology was, that it was all clinical, that it was all treating mental health problems and that it was very intuitive and subjective.”

Stephen went on to major in psychology and religion at Northwestern University and, after graduating, worked at Harvard Medical School as a psychology research assistant. He eventually earned a master’s degree in psychology from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, also from Stanford.

Cognitive psychology, as Stephen describes it, is the area of psychology in which the mechanics of the brain are studied.

“Trying to understand the principles that enable cognitive functioning and mental life—perception, memory, learning,

attention, language—those are the major subdisciplines of cognitive psychology,” he says. “I’ve been involved in each of those.”

Stephen currently holds three roles at Purchase College: chair of the psychology department, faculty director of pedagogy development and associate professor of psychology. His goal at Purchase has been to find a balance between research and teaching. In his current role, he also helps with managing colleagues, liaising with the administration, hiring adjunct faculty and handling student issues for the largest department on campus. Despite all the tugs on his time, Stephen never loses sight of what made him fall in love with psychology in the first place.

His focus now is exploring the “relationship between language and cognition—the language we speak and the language we’re immersed in and how we think about the world,” he says. This plays out in the area of metaphors.

“I’m studying how metaphors in language reflect and shape people’s thoughts and attitudes and behaviors and trying to understand how that works,” he says. “There was this idea that if you look at pretty much every language in the world, metaphors are part of the language.”

While metaphors have been the subject of scholarship since the time of Aristotle, “it’s only in the last maybe 20-30 years that cognitive psychologists have tried actually to experimentally test [metaphors],” Stephen explains. “We look at how metaphors shape people’s attitudes and thoughts.”

Stephen’s current research focuses on war metaphors, specifically surrounding COVID. In fact, his theory paper for 2018, “War Metaphors in Public Discourse,” has gained new life because of the pandemic, leading to multiple interview requests by the national media. For example, Stephen states that Donald Trump called himself the “wartime president,” and he referred to the doctors and nurses as being on the “front line.”

“The use of the war metaphor at first was good because it got people engaged, and then it should have been dropped almost immediately because it’s not a great metaphor,” Stephen says. “If you say, ‘we’re at war now, stay at home and do nothing,’ those don’t jive, and it doesn’t match the metaphor.”

He plans to follow up with papers on disease metaphors, and metaphors around climate change and sustainability. In fact, Stephen’s current career examining words is a direct extension of the Jewish Studies classes he took at Schechter.

“We were analyzing the Torah, we were analyzing the Talmud, we were seeing how people argued over single words and what they meant in different contexts,” he says. “You wake up 30 years later, and that’s one of the things I do in my scholarship. That is a core piece of my scholarship, which is to analyze and be willing to argue about text and to view that to be part of science.”

“I think there’s a scientific lesson here too, though, which is that you can arrive at a deeper understanding of something through deep analysis and argumentation,” he continues. “That’s what science is ultimately as well. That lesson, for me as a scientist and a scientist who studies language, is deeply rooted in my early experiences at Schechter.”

Stephen’s connection to Judaism—and the ability to personalize that experience—also started at Schechter.

“My appreciation for Judaism and the varieties of Judaism, both that I’ve practiced and that I’ve seen among students at Schechter, is just that you can create your own meaning and your own rituals within a tradition,” he says. “That’s been really important in my life.”

“The ability to find grounded meaning and not feel like it has to match what everyone else is doing, that there’s space and room for difference and for individuality, even within a broader, religious community is my vision of Judaism,” he adds.

“At least that’s my vision of Judaism that I’ve cultivated.” Stephen’s dedication to academia also started at Schechter.

“When I got to high school, and I was around a lot of different people, I didn’t realize that I read books for fun, and that’s what I did all the time. I didn’t really want to go to a party,” he says. “Academia has become part of my identity and my life, and that was certainly supported and nurtured at Schechter.”

Stephen also implored today’s students not to take their Schechter education for granted.

“There’s an incredible education that’s being provided and a supportive environment for learning. You’re learning a lot more than you think,” he says.

Spring/Summer 2022 | Schechter Stories