Our subjective mental life is enorm

Our subjective mental life is enormous in scope and richness. We make subjective judgments about such abstract things as importance, similarity, difficulty, and morality, and we have subjective experiences of desire, affection, intimacy, and achievement. Yet, as rich as these experiences are, much of the way we conceptualize them, reason about them, and visualize them comes from other domains of experience. These other domains are mostly sensorimotor domains, as when we conceptualize understanding an idea (subjective experience) in terms of grasping an object (sensorimotor experience) and failing to understand an idea as having it go right by us or over our heads. The cognitive mechanism for such conceptualizations is conceptual metaphor, which allows us to use the physical logic of grasping to reason about understanding.