Any given musical note gets its meaning from those before and after it, as French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) introduced: “the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future,” which he called “duree.”
That insight from a book review reminded me of the role storytelling plays in the human experience. As universal as storytelling is, it is often overlooked.
“The antagonism toward storytelling may have reached a peak in the twentieth century with the determined effort to reduce all knowledge to analytical propositions and ultimately physics or mathematics,” as one academic put it in in 2001. “I found that the resistance to rethinking the role of storytelling was considerable,”
That reference is from Kendall Haven’s 2007 book “Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story,” which I recently completed. It’s part of my long-love of understanding the science of story, which coincided with my own contribution to the cause. Haven’s short book boasts 120 credible studies and references to more than 800 to argue it plainly: information structured in story form are received and retained more effectively. Haven was a science researcher in oceanography in the 1990s before leaving to argue science and story are compatible.
Many of these books don’t make a clear line between whether the story is from real life or fabricated because our brains make no such distinction. Nonfiction gives a truth; fiction creates a truth, goes the thinking. Elsewhere though I’ve seen it’s less about the category than the approach. Still, we do open our minds wider in a fictional landscape.
My notes below for future reference.
My notes:
- Humans have 100k years of story, before the development of language: We invented language to advance storytelling
- Jerome Bruner: “Stories are surely not innocent: They always have a message”
- They help us remember and learn: preschoolers with more storytelling do better in math
- “Language was created to express stories”
- Gordon Mills 1976 book Hamlet’s Castle: why does a Danish castle change once you know hamlet supposedly lived there?
- “Processes (activities) are easier to study. So we study reading and writing with only minimal regard for what is being read or what is being written. We study and promote storytelling without pausing to examine the characteristics of effective stories to tell and the impact of those stories on the success or the failure of the process of telling. A story is a thing, a specific narrative structure. It is the framework – a narrative architecture. Story is not the content, but the scaffolding upon which some content (fiction or nonfiction) is hung. All stories are narratives, but most narratives are not stories..”
- Roger Schank in 1990: “Stories form the framework structure through which humans sort, understand, relate and file experience into memory”
- Jean Paul Sarte (1905-1980) wrote in 1964 that “A man is always a teller of stories. He lives surrounded by his own stories and those of other people. He sees everything that happens to him in terms of stories, and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it .”
- “Organizational and knowledge management researchers K. Dalkir and E. Wiseman summed up their frustration by writing, “Storytelling suffers from one of the major obstacles still encountered in KM [knowledge management]: namely, reaching agreement among practitioners and scholars about what storytelling is and what it is not” (Dalkir and Wiseman 2004).
- “The authors of fourteen of the eighteen articles I have read from the field of narratology felt obligated to define what they meant by the word story for the purpose of their study. So did over 60 percent of my sources from narrative therapy and a significant number of my sources from organizational management, knowledge management, and cognitive sciences. Did they all define it the same way? No, not even close.”
- A story, a sewer pipe and a peanut butter sandwich all have a beginning, middle and end
- Stern 1997: “ stories uniquely contain and present both our beliefs and our knowledge about the world”
- Taylor 1996: “we live in stories the way fish live in water”
- “Any human event can be turned into a story and presented in story form”
- Levi Strauss’s theory of binary opposition means we want story to be defined as truth vs lies or fiction vs nonfiction
- Applebee 1978: by age 7-8, kids transition from believing stories are true to believing they are fiction (tell me stories versus tell me the truth)
- “Story is not the formation, the content. Story is a way of structuring information, a system of informational elements that most effectively create the essential context and relevance that engage receivers and enhance memory and the creation of meaning.”
- Author was in oceanography as science researcher and now tries to argue science and story are compatible
- Denning 2001: “The antagonism toward storytelling may have reached a peak in the twentieth century with the determined effort to reduce all knowledge to analytical propositions and ultimately physics or mathematics…. I found that the resistance to rethining the role of storytelling was considerable”
- Dictionary definitions of story that author thinks are incomplete: “Story: n.: a narrative account of a real or imagined event or events. Is that what you mean when you say story? Do you agree? Many researchers do.
- Blythe et al. (2004) define story as: “The narrative accounts of events and experiences, real or fictitious. They can be spoken or written, vary in length, and depict past, present, or future events.”
- Dalkir and Wiseman (2004): “Story may be defined as the telling of a happening or a connected series of happenings, whether true or fictitious.”
- Booth (1979): “An implied author, who may differ from the narrator, presents information about characters and events to a reader.”
- Ricoeur (1984): “A story describes a sequence of actions and experiences done or undergone by a certain number of people, whether real or imaginary.”
- Level 1 story is a dictionary definition of story as a narrative with plot: Effective story is something more
- Northrop Frye (1957): “We have no word for a work of prose other than story, so story does duty for everything, and thereby loses its only real meaning as the name of a specific genre, or structure of narrative”
- Brain corrects delay in sound and sight, “now is always a delay”
- “The brain converts life experience in a story form and then considers, ponders, remembers and acts on the self created story, not the actual input experience”
- Brain creates highly processed story based experiences
- Gropnik 1999: ”Our brains were designed by evolution to develop story representations from sensory input, that accurately approximate real things and experiences in the world. Those programs… Let us predict what the world will be like and so act on it effectively. They are nature‘s way of solving the problem of knowledge.”
- Hardcastle 2003 reviews Miller 1994 and Miller et al 1990: 2-4 year olds learning story basics from their parents
- By age 6, kids know the benefit of trouble / threat to main character
- Abstract thought not common in non literate societies: Kotulak 1999. “All bears in Yellowstone are black. Bernard is a bear in Yellowstone. What color is Bernard the bear?”
- His 7-11 framework (more)
- Mental ordering and connecting between facts
- Bruner 1990: story elements are pre-linguistic and from birth we use story to extract meaning with plot and sequence
- Heider and Simmel 1964: dots are given meaning by humans
- Bransford and Stein: sentences with characters whose actions have meaning are easier to remember
- Kanizsa triangle : incomplete information creates meaning
- 11 techniques: assumptions, cheat, sheets, expectations, inference, pattern, matching, prior knowledge, binary, opposition, blending, language, and syntax rules, emotions, rule, and details
- Chomsky (1991) used a computer application to find words that never followed each other: “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”
- Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) advised to write about the everyday commonplace details because “that is where the magic mountains .. begin” (because we have common knowledge and we can surprise readers)
- “Information is remembered better and longer, and recalled more readily and accurately, when it is remembered within the context of a story.”
- Schank 1990: “The goal is not merely to say the information, but to lodge that information into the mind and memory of the listener, and to convince them to believe and use the content information. This is accomplished by linking content information into stories that will trigger memories and index labels in the mind of the listener”
- Kotulak (1999) described the bioelectric-chemical version of memory this way: Prompted by some neuron, a neurotransmitter (glutamate) races between neural cells like a bicycle messenger yelling to the gateway controllers on other cells (called NMDA signal boxes), “Pay attention, there’s something coming you might want to learn!” That causes the signal box to open a door into the cell. An electrical charge from energy-carrying sodium atoms surges through those doors. Other cell doors open to allow a squirt of calcium to enter and, like a car’s spark plug, ignite the sodium-based electrical charge into a streaking bolt that slams across the cell. This prompts the cell to alter and adjust its synapse connections forging new memory pathways to record the new information. In 1984, Northwestern University’s Aryeh Routtenberg discovered a chemical inside brain cells called PKC that forms short-term and long-term memory. Once a cell is alerted (by glutamate) that it needs to form a memory, and as so dium and calcium rush in, a second chemical messenger notifies PKC. PKC then runs over to another protein, F1, and pitches a phosphate molecule at it. The phosphate wakes up F1 and, as an electrical charge explodes across the cell. Fi trundles down the branches of the cell (axons) to make those appropriate changes in the synaptic connections. Presto, memory!”
- Human memory circuits don’t distinguish betweeen real and imagined memories— only conscious reason can
- Smith 2003, Korte 1996: “Vivid memories have four features: they break a script (an expectation), they are consequential (have impact), they involve emotional charge and they have value meaning for the person remembering.”
- We only remember the gist of things — a book or car accident — because we add our own narrative and prior knowledge: Schank 1990, Pinker 2000
- Zaltman 2003: “storytelling is central to memory”
- Neimark: “memory is experience”
- Schank 1990: human memory is “story-based” — it offers more “ index labels” for memory to attach to
- 5 elements of effective story: character, intent, action, struggle, details (to facilitate blending and memory)
- Egan 1997: “the crucial feature of stories is that they end.” … “ we know we have reached the end of a story when we know how to feel about the events that make it up.”
- Ricouer 1984: seven structural elements of a story:
- Goals: What the narrator or agent wants to achieve.
- Agents: The individuals or entities interacting within the story.
- Motives: Why the agents desire or pursue their goals.
- Circumstances: The conditions or context in which the narrative takes place.
- Interactions: The events and actions involving the narrator and other agents.
- Outcome: What the narrator does, or what happens to the narrator as a result of the interactions.
- Temporality: How the narrator orders events and describes them in relation to time.
- Author’s definition of story: “A detailed, character based narration of a character struggling to overcome obstacles and reach an important goal.”
- Narratives are plot; stories are about characters. A narrative can be a story but not all are
- McAdams: redemption stories help people heal
- This book ends with a gathering of research arguing that stories boost comprehensive and memory via prior knowledge and surprise; helps kids develop logical thinking and for emotional healing and development , and community and in group identity
- Egan 1997 oral cultures identified values can be transferred through story
- Author did his own small study on a series of school assemblies and found oral storytelling was more effective than reading stories
- His book: 120 credible studies including references to more than 800
- Morris Chang, a Taiwan director of education: “Research shows that people are genetically coded to have a close relationship with stories”
- Parable and allegory