The mind as storyteller

Jennifer Armstrong (author, The American Story) said in a talk (BookTv 1/29/07) at the Blue Willow Bookshop, "consciousness moves backwards and forwards in time." I stopped working as my mind dropped into gear and listened as she continued to talk about story telling and history. She had struck a chord in my mind with this observation. I thought how strange it is a thing to say. It seems obvious of course, since we all can move our minds back and forth over the events of our life, consider the future and reflect on the past. But it still struck me as strange.

She followed up her remark with a disclaimer reminding us that at the quantum level time is not very orderly or linear, a thought that occurred to me almost simultaneously with her first remark, a little voice rising against the implied linearity of time. However, the distinction between the mind's comprehension of time and natural time was made clear as was the capacity for the mind to create this construct of linear time in our heads out of the occurrence of events. It is a kind of tape recording of natural time in which we can move time back and forward at will. What gave rise to the strangeness is recognizing the linear conception of time and the ability to move forward and backward in it is a complete fabrication of the mind. We all think of time as obviously linear and fool ourselves into thinking that the time we move our minds back and forth over is the same as the time that exists in the natural world, but the time that exists in our mind is in reality a kind of narrative. I realized there exists a relationship between the mind's ability to move freely backwards and forwards through memory (within essentially a model of natural time) and narrative.

Although I am aware of the debate over the nature of time and that there is an argument that the mind orders time and creates it and that time may not be a physical reality, that what we know of as time is created by the persistence of memory just as a moving picture is created by the persistence of vision, the idea the consciousness moving within time was still striking. Science suggests there may be no "proper order" to the natural world and the linear way in which we perceive events may be an imposition of the mind. It suddenly seemed more important to understand this human view of time than to answer the question what time is in the physical universe, which seemed like a lesser question.

I was struck by the novelty of this idea of the consciousness moving backwards and forwards in time independent of actual time, knowing that one cannot actually move backwards and forwards in time, but the mind can, that it has the power to anticipate and reflect on time. That this storing of natural time as a mental narrative through memory, this ordering of events to comprehend them, is the basis of anecdote (the retelling of a series of events), which is the basis of storytelling. That memory ties in with narrative and natural time.

This reaffirms my belief that stories are the way the mind makes sense of the world, which consists entirely of chaotic sense perceptions. Narrative becomes the basic unit of thought. I believe stories are the way the human mind comprehends and make sense the events and phenomena of the surrounding natural world that come to it through sense perception. I believe storytelling evolved as a way for social animals to explain the world in the only terms they knew, social ones where natural events are caused by willful acts, just as in the social world all occurrences are willful acts of individuals. Storytelling is the most immediate and effective way of ordering and explaining social events. As our consciousness grew more powerful, this mechanism was adapted and extended to explain events of the nature world as willful acts powerful spirits and later people began to separate the events of nature from the supernatural actors, science slowly began to take over the job of telling the story of nature.

It might be said that the mind creates time by ordering events. I would go further than that, that not only does the mind create the ordering of events we know of as time, but that it creates "willful spirits" whose actions explain the events, which become a story. In ancient times, a willful spirit might have been a supernatural being where today the willful spirit may be a conspiracy or some other thing that may rationally be thought to exist. Since we no longer believe in capricious supernatural beings causing natural events, we choose our willful spirits carefully to accord with science and reason. Our mind still looks for the same explanations, we just sugar coat them so they acceptable to a rational society. It is interesting to note that this ability of the consciousness to move backwards and forwards in time arose, science tells us, approximately 50,000 years ago in a small group of humans who began to realize that if they found the tracks of an animal, that it had recently passed and might still be nearby. They could look forward into the future and know that if they followed the tracks they might come across the animal and make it their dinner. We take this ability so much for granted that we do not realize how significant a change this is. It is hardly imaginable, something akin to one of these experiments in simulating disability as part of making the healthy understand disability, what it must be like to not be able to perceive and manipulate time in this way. This underscores how much a part of our mind ordered time and narrative are.

When They Severed Earth From Sky

I also read When They Severed Earth From Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber last summer. This is another book in the gathering storm against rational purism. It also suggests an intriguing possibility, that when a society becomes literate that it loses certain capacities for understanding intuitive knowledge of the kind carried in myth.

The authors propose that myths function like delivery systems for messages, with an interesting story acting as an envelope for the myth, keeping ordinary people interested enough to pass the myth down generations, the useful information contained within the envelope. When at some future time, trouble erupts (literally, such as a volcano), the payload is delivered and people can be warned about a future event or danger. What literate people seem to unlearn when they make the transition from a pre-literate culture, is that the myth has a payload. They concentrate on the story, gods and their daughters fighting, etc. and miss the message encoded in the myth. The story is merely a "soap opera" designed to ensure the story with its payload intact is delivered down the halls of time, ready to deploy when the right circumstances arise.

This book relates directly to another book with similar themes: The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor, which discusses the resistance by ancient natural philosophers to include the fossilized remains of ancient creatures in their Linnean systems for categorizing biology. Yet, the myth makers and the followers of phenomenology interpreted these remains more accurately than nineteenth century science. This says much about creativity and science, about as Huxley once said, that that science advances by the investigation of anomalies, or in Mayor's terms, an interest in phenomenology, a curiosity about the strange and paradoxical, which science could well do with a dose of today. The intuitive and phenomenological may be vital to creativity in science and mathematics, if one looks honestly at the history of those fields.

If science had known about emergence then, how different the Greek philosophers systems for classifying creatures might have been. The possible bird like origin of the dinosaurs might have been recognize two thousand years ago.