In blending theory, conceptual integration is held to be motivated by an overarching goal and a number of notable sub-goals. The overarching goal and primary motivation for the process of conceptual integration is to achieve human scale. As the creation of a blended space is an imaginative feat that allows us to ‘grasp’ a relatively complex idea by viewing it in a new way, this can be best achieved by reducing the complexity of ideas captured in input spaces to the level of readily understandable human experience. The sub-goals of conceptual integration, which facilitate the overarching goal, include compression of diffuse structure in the input spaces, obtaining global insight and strengthening (by compression) of vital relations in the input spaces into an inner-space relation in the blended space. This thereby provides a narrative, a ‘story’, which reduces complexity by decreasing the number of distinct elements into a single element in the blended space.

To illustrate, imagine that you are attending a lecture on evolution, and the professor says ‘The dinosaurs appeared at 10 pm, and were extinct by quarter past 10. Primates emerged at five minutes to midnight, humans showed up on the stroke of 12.’ This represents an attempt to achieve human scale by blending the vast tracts of evolutionary time with the time period of a 24-hour day. This is achieved by ‘compressing’ diffuse structure (over 4.6 billion years of evolution) into a more compact, and thus less complex, structure (a 24-hour day). This achieves human scale, because the 24-hour day is perhaps the most salient temporal unit for humans. This conceptual integration achieves global insight by facilitating the comprehension of evolutionary time, since we have no first-hand experience of the vast timescales involved. The goals of blending are summarized in Table 5.