Counterpoint: spatial metaphors are so deeply embedded into human cognition that getting rid of them is likely to massively impair your ability to think clearly, rather than enhancing it. Lakoff’s work on cognitive metaphors, and the whole field of cognitive linguistics more generally, have shown that mapping concepts onto experiences of space (and related bodily metaphors) is central to linguistic communication and all forms of abstract thought.
Refusing to use spatial metaphors may be an interesting training exercise, much like walking around your house blindfolded, or making things with your non-dominant hand. Trying this out might be a good way to develop other cognitive modalities and notice ways in which you were misusing the spatial concept. However, I find it unlikely that this makes your thinking as a whole clearer or more accurate. The things you make using your non-dominant hand are probably objectively worse than the things you make with your dominant hand, but the practice of doing it makes you more capable once you remove the restraint.
(Tentatively, I endorse the strong view that there is no such thing as abstract human cognition; instead, all human thought is based on metaphors from embodied sensory experience.)
I didn’t want to derail the OP with a philosophical digression, but I was somewhat startled to find the degree I found it difficult to think at all without at least some kind of implicit “inner dimensionality reduction.” In other words, this framing allowed me to put a label on a mental operation I was doing almost constantly but without any awareness.
Also, we have a huge amount of mental architecture devoted to understanding and remembering spatial relationships of objects (for obvious evolutionary reasons). Using that as a metaphor for purely abstract things allows us to take advantage of that mental architecture to make other tasks easier.
A very structured version of this would be something like a memory palace where you assign ideas to specific locations in a place, but I think we are doing the same thing often when we talk about ideas in spatial relationships, and build loose mental models of them as existing in spatial relationship to one another (or at least I do).
Counterpoint: spatial metaphors are so deeply embedded into human cognition that getting rid of them is likely to massively impair your ability to think clearly, rather than enhancing it. Lakoff’s work on cognitive metaphors, and the whole field of cognitive linguistics more generally, have shown that mapping concepts onto experiences of space (and related bodily metaphors) is central to linguistic communication and all forms of abstract thought.
Refusing to use spatial metaphors may be an interesting training exercise, much like walking around your house blindfolded, or making things with your non-dominant hand. Trying this out might be a good way to develop other cognitive modalities and notice ways in which you were misusing the spatial concept. However, I find it unlikely that this makes your thinking as a whole clearer or more accurate. The things you make using your non-dominant hand are probably objectively worse than the things you make with your dominant hand, but the practice of doing it makes you more capable once you remove the restraint.
(Tentatively, I endorse the strong view that there is no such thing as abstract human cognition; instead, all human thought is based on metaphors from embodied sensory experience.)
I didn’t want to derail the OP with a philosophical digression, but I was somewhat startled to find the degree I found it difficult to think at all without at least some kind of implicit “inner dimensionality reduction.” In other words, this framing allowed me to put a label on a mental operation I was doing almost constantly but without any awareness.
Also, we have a huge amount of mental architecture devoted to understanding and remembering spatial relationships of objects (for obvious evolutionary reasons). Using that as a metaphor for purely abstract things allows us to take advantage of that mental architecture to make other tasks easier.
A very structured version of this would be something like a memory palace where you assign ideas to specific locations in a place, but I think we are doing the same thing often when we talk about ideas in spatial relationships, and build loose mental models of them as existing in spatial relationship to one another (or at least I do).