At a deep level, we create narratives to bolster a sense of continuity in almost everything we do. The fact is that our brain receives lots of information, in small packets. Think of watching a movie (at 30 fps), the fact is that we are watching a series of photos at a very fast rate, and we ‘smooth’ this discontinuous series of images into a steady stream of vision. We do this all the time…for instance, as I type this sentence, my eyes are looking at the screen, sometimes at my fingers (I know, this is a bad typing habit…), I am at other levels dealing with distracting noises of people talking (I’m sitting in a coffee shop…). But as I recall writing this previous sentence; I am left with a sense that of mostly some sort of internal soliloquy…I don’t recall exactly what I was watching.
We ‘smooth’ many things over in our lives in this manner. We seek to find some semblance of ‘sense’ in things. We like to see meaning in cause and effect. This is where our sense of narrative comes from.
In a landmark 1944 study, 34 humans — Massachusetts College students actually, though subsequent research suggests they could have been just about anyone — were shown a short film and asked what was happening in it. The film showed two triangles and a circle moving across a two-dimensional surface. The only other object onscreen was a stationary rectangle, partially open on one side.
Only one of the test subjects saw this scene for what it was: geometric shapes moving across a plane. Everyone else came up with elaborate narratives to explain what the movements were about. Typically, the participants viewed the triangles as two men fighting and the circle as a woman trying to escape the bigger, bullying triangle. Instead of registering inanimate shapes, they imagined humans with vivid inner lives. The circle was “worried.” The circle and the little triangle were “innocent young things.” The big triangle was “blinded by rage and frustration.”
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/why-do-we-tell-stories
I have coincidentally done a few experiments which might relate to this idea. Long ago I was a language student (Russian) and in the throes of studying for some test I was looking over a Russian verb dictionary. This was an alphabetical list of Russian verbs in their infinitive form (i.e. to eat, to jump, to cry, to sleep, etc.). I started reading this list of infinitive verbs as quickly as I could, and as with an old movie projector slowly speeding up, I could see the individual verbs slowly morph into a stream…the result for me was that this stream of verbs turned into a ‘story’ (i.e. a narrative) as my mind tried to integrate this information into some coherent whole.
It seems strange to me that while this may arguably be innate in humans (quite likely), and the meme of ‘narrative’ has been gaining currency with regard to how news is presented, we seem to be moving further from narrative in the areas where it used to rule (namely: literature). A lot of the current ‘post-modern’ novels tend toward masking, hiding, scrambling, and even encrypting this ‘old’ notion of merely ‘telling a story’.
The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secrets-of-storytelling
Why do we tell stories? Because we want to be immersed
http://www.dosageconsulting.com/questions-collaborators-answer/why-do-we-tell-stories-because-we-want-to-be-immersed
