"My Sistine Chapel"

Thanks to Joe Plummer for sharing this very incisive blog post about how metaphors spark innovation and sell ideas. 

There probably are no brand new ideas for any of you who are into brain science and metaphor, but it does include many thought-provoking examples, along with teasers from a new book on metaphor that I had been unfamiliar with.

The coolest story for me was that of a man named Bruce Reynolds, who pulled off the heist of $60 million in cash from a train in 1963 without using a gun.  He described his act as “my Sistine Chapel.”  Suddenly, with that metaphor, we start to think of Reynolds not as a stone-cold criminal but as an artist – a brilliant, eccentric rapscallion rather than a thug. As the post points out, lots of ideas and perceptions get implanted in our heads in this way.