Mathematical modeling and the neuroscience of metaphor

We look at a characterization of metaphor from cognitive linguistics, extracting the salient features of metaphorical processing. We examine the neurobiology of dendrites, specifically spike timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), and the modulation of backpropagating action potentials (bAPs), to generate a neuropil-centric model of cortical processing based on signal timing and reverberation between regions. We show how this model supports the basic features of metaphorical processing previously extracted. Finally, we model this system using a combination of euclidean, projective, and hyperbolic geometries, and show how the resulting model accounts for this processing, and relates to other neural network models