Conceptual Metaphor: A Central Process in the Perception & Analysis of Music 85 ables us to successfully map structure from one cognitive domain to another: image-schemas, small spatial stories, primary metaphors.The sensorimotor grounding of metaphor is explained by the \"grounding hypo-thesis\", claiming that metaphor is grounded in embodied experience. Gibbs et al. suggest, that there is a direct link between recurring patterns of embodied ex-perience, primary and conceptual metaphor, abstract concepts and conventional and poetic language.6 Much of our ordinary cognition is not represented in propositional and senten-tial information, but our reasoning, planning and speaking is structured by patterns of perceptual interactions, bodily actions, and manipulations of objects. These pat-terns are called image schemas. Image schemas are neither rich and concrete im-ages, nor are they mental pictures. A mental picture is something that we conjure up in our imagination, for example a table or a chair. Image schemas organize our men-tal representation at a more abstract and general level than the level at which we form particular mental images. These non-propositional schematic structures emerge from our bodily experience, that is patterns of recurring bodily actions. Johnson de nes a schema as a \"non-propositional structure of imagination\".7 This non-propositional structure consists of embodied patterns of meaningfully organ-ized experience. Image schemas are non-propositional as they are not abstract sub-ject – predicate structures that express truth conditions, but their internal structure suf ces to generate entailments and to constrain inferences. This allows us to pro-positionally describe or elaborate image schemas.The application of conceptual metaphor theory is justi able, because the map-pings do not only occur in the domain of language, but also in other domains of cognition. Seitz (2005) proposes that there are four fundamental kinds of metaphor that are uniquely mapped onto speci c brain networks.8 These basic metaphors are perceptual-perceptual (e. g. a melody sounds like chirping birds, or we see the shape of a face in an object), cross-modal (synesthetic), movement-movement, and perceptual-affective mappings, that are likely to operate outside of conscious aware-ness. Thus they can be said to be prewired, informationally encapsulated, and prob-ably universal across humans. According to Seitz (2005), the standard theory of conceptual metaphor does not account for how people actually go about selecting which elements of source do-mains are mapped onto target domains.9 The standard theory does not propose that basic metaphoric relations are largely unconscious and automatic, that is, they are prewired. Seitz (2005) suggests that humans have specialized neural subsystems for metaphoric understanding and production that are enhanced through experience and modulated by genetic mechanisms. Metaphoric relations are possible because 6 Gibbs, R./Lima, P.L.C./Francozo, E. 2004. Metaphor in thought and language is grounded in em-bodied experience. Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 36, pp.1189–1210.7 Johnson, M. 1987. The Body in The Mind. The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p.23.8 Seitz, J.A. 2005. The neural, evolutionary, developmental, and bodily basis of metaphor. New Ideas in Psychology. Volume 23, Issue 2, August 2005, Pages 74–95.9 Seitz, J.A. 2005, p. 74f.