a very simple story, sort of (you know, like 1Q84 is)

The Story of My Life, or, It All Fits Together (Because It Had Very Well Better Fit Together!)

[No LJ-cut, but if you want to skip this, it’s all about why we get so emotionally worked up about the stories we tell ourselves to explain the world—to the point of defending them when it doesn’t matter, or even when insisting on their rightness in the face of all contrary evidence is actually hurting us in practical terms. You have every right to say, “You know what? I really don’t care.” Or, as I so often say, “I care, but I really don’t have time for this right now, thank you very much.”]


I have been trying to figure out why I was so overexcited by a story in the New York Times about neurologist Mike Gazzaniga’s assertion that we are hard-wired to tell stories. (Actually, he says we are who we are—we are the selves we think we are—because our various competing neural circuits are constantly creating narrative patterns. Or something kind of like that, but I’d have to read the actual book to get it right.)

The good Professor Gazzaniga’s assertion that we are conscious at all because we keep telling ourselves stories is a logical outgrowth of Robert Ornstein’s statement nearly forty years ago in The Psychology of Consciousness that the mind is constructed to
“jump to conclusions”—that people with brain circuitry that overinterpreted a sound as meaning “rustling grass=dangerous animal” survived to have children more often than people who thought (wordlessly, before language) “rustling grass=just another noise,” or, worse—again in wordless emotions rather than language—“rustling grass=maybe danger, or maybe just wind, I think I’ll stand here until I figure out which one it is,” or “gee, that rustling noise sounds really pretty, I think I’ll just stand here for a minute and listen.”

And yet all four of those types of human being exist today, which suggests that the just-so story of “survival of the fittest” needs to be modified in terms of frequent versus continuous but infrequent ways that the human brain gets organized. The minority options clearly get passed on in the gene pool, they just don’t show up as the dominant option all that often because there were always lots more “heads up!” types contributing their genetic structure.

But if we are predisposed by our biological makeup not just to jump to individual conclusions (which is a tendency we have to overcome in order to function in complex circumstances) but to tell ourselves stories that have survival value of one sort or another, it would go a long way towards explaining why we are so emotionally attached to the stories we regard as true—so attached that we laugh and point at people who tell other stories to explain the world, or we kill them because we disapprove of the stories they tell, even when the stories don’t affect us in material terms, in terms of how much food or sex or personal influence we get.

I would have to read Gazzaniga’s actual hypotheses to figure out how he defends the notion of an actual biological structure for narrative—how we get from recognizing patterns (including imposing way too much meaning on patterns that aren’t that meaningful) to making sense of them by setting them in sequential order—“this happened, so therefore that happened, and this is the significance for me or for the world of the fact that this made that happen.” Story!

We would have to go a long way to figure out the relationship between simple pattern recognition and storytelling—pattern recognition seems to underlie something that puzzled me about the mathematical basis of physics, its predisposition towards “elegant solutions”—or, as my freshman physics textbook explained it for us innumerate dummies, “Notice that the more comprehensive solution to this problem ‘looks better’ than the ad hoc solution—the equations form a more pleasingly regular shape, a quality physicists like to call ‘elegance.’” It was a strange, to me, case of aesthetic regularity on the page representing the most satisfactory explanation of the regularities that underpin the irregularities of everyday experience, the apparent random condition of the world as we find it.

Of course the sequence of equations is also a story strung together by the mind’s predisposition towards narrative—a wordless story, of course, because equations are (alpha)numeric. (When some types of stories are told in words repeated in a certain order, we call them logical propositions, and this is why my college allowed us wordy types to take a course in symbolic logic to fulfill the freshman math requirement.)

The combination of brain-circuitry predispositions towards pattern recognition and storytelling would explain why most people prefer stories with a beginning, middle, and end, and why they prefer realist paintings, and photographs that make the world look more regular than it really is. (The public appreciates paintings and photos that “look like something,” but the public can’t see the artificially imposed regularities that underpin the pictures, any more than “regular folks” can see the artificially imposed regularities that keep a good novel going—the rules for telling good stories.)

It takes a lot of combined predispositions that are mostly weeded out by evolution to stop in one’s tracks and look at the visual pattern that doesn’t mean anything but is really pretty anyway (and even more so if it is pretty ugly), or to enjoy a story that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere but has all the emotional engagement and “pretty noise” that a good poem has (and even more so if all the story does is break all the rules for telling a story at all).

Those of us who don’t have children in spite of being heterosexual can testify to the extent to which tendencies that don’t foster survival are not passed along to the next generation, except as the cultural concepts that the sociobiological types unconvincingly call “memes.” (I think people who believe in memes are trying too hard to make their preferred story of genetics explain everything in the world, which it actually doesn’t.)

I guess I have previously leaned towards the pattern-recognition end of the spectrum when I talk about the various ways of understanding the world as being interpretive grids that we lay over the world. Each grid organizes the information that is put beneath it, and each grid claims to be totally explanatory. The only problem is that the grids aren’t compatible with one another. So the only way to approach a satisfactory understanding of reality is to lay a whole bunch of grids over one another and see the points at which they agree and the points at which their interpretations are at odd angles to one another.

The places where the interpretations diverge are frequently the places where none of the explanations could possibly be actual explanations, despite the assertions of the theory-makers. They’re pseudo-explanations imposed by our need to make up consistent stories, whether we know enough to make up a consistent story or not. Then we defend all the details of our stories to the death, instead of accepting that maybe there are parts of the story we can’t tell, or that there might be different ways of telling that part of the story and we can’t decide which way of telling it is better.

There are also parts of stories that other people tell that we insist can’t be true because nothing like that has ever happened to us. This does not mean that the other stories aren’t true. It means that we are predisposed to defend our own way of telling the story, and our own way of telling the story is based on our own experience—experience which includes the stories by other people to which we have become emotionally attached (sometimes for very good and defensible reasons, and sometimes not).

So if we could find some actual reason why we do all this, beyond such vague terms as “deep-seated needs,” we would be way ahead of the game. Even mystic-sounding folks like Carl Jung believed that these structural underpinnings would someday be discovered.

Some of this, we most likely have known since the Paleolithic caves, though we don’t have evidence for it before the invention of writing. Some of this, we are still a century or more away from discovering. Some of it may be undiscoverable, because the act of observing obliterates the phenomenon one is trying to observe. (Quick, open your eyes so you can give a first-person analysis of what it means to be asleep! And yet people who fall asleep during boring meetings know what it means to be having a vivid dream while being fully aware of where one is and what is being said in the room. And we have the illusion that we also know what goes on with us when we are deeply asleep, when in fact we don’t know until we go to a sleep laboratory for tests.)

I started out to say something really short and simple. Yeah, right. I wish.