Chapter 2: What is Story?
December 2, 2024·29 comments·In Brief
Humans have spent 1.8 million years telling stories, yet we rarely ask what a story fundamentally is or why our brains are so uniquely wired to seek them out. We assume story is built from language, but language itself may be the younger sibling. The gap between what we understand about story and what story actually does to human consciousness is about to matter very much.
• Story is older than language itself. Humans acquired the capacity to build and interpret symbolic sequences (dance, gesture, visual representation) long before structured grammar. Yet most of our thinking about story remains trapped inside the assumption that it requires syntax and vocabulary to function.
• The human brain evolved specifically to handle symbolic systems. Our oversized prefrontal cortex and its neural connections give us a capacity no other species possesses: the ability to see multiple meanings in the same thing, to delay concrete interpretation, and to manipulate abstract symbols with flexibility.
• Symbols are not arbitrary even when they seem untethered from reality. A skull emoji meaning "I'm dying laughing" may have lost its original connection to actual death, but that doesn't mean the path from meaning to symbol was random. Every symbol carries traces of the process that created it.
• Cultures move rapidly to incorporate and mediate new stories. The same brains that can acquire symbolic systems are embedded in social structures that constantly reinterpret and assign fresh meaning to those symbols, creating layers of significance that shift across time and context.
• This superpower has made humans capable of science, art, and beauty. But the same trait that lets us absorb and create meaning through story may now be the mechanism through which eight billion minds lose autonomy. What happens when the systems that amplify story are designed not to illuminate but to capture consciousness?
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Comments
An elegant, eloquent, and powerful start! Gonna be a great read.
It makes me consider the overwhelming power of AI taking over social networks.
And binge drinking, which likely hasn’t reached a pinnace yet.
At what point does binge become baseline, and powerful cannabinoids, ketamine, and (perhaps) other soon-to-be-available psychotropics dull the wider population even more than their smartphones already have?
Smartphone sports gambling probably gets there first.
When it goes Orwellian and is referred to as “Victory Bingeing”.
I got a small shudder when your autocorrect killed some humor when you simply copied and replied to part of my comments. That was not expected at all. Did you make a manual change?
“Pinnace” was intentional on my part, being part of the semantic meaning wordplay like Rusty and Shakespeare were having fun with in the article.
Spooky
I did make the change, thoughtlessly assuming that your autocorrect left intact a marine reference. I’m sorry - went right over my head. Hardly spooky, anything that goes on in there.
Rusty, do you think what you’re describing is a new field of study?
I don’t think so. It’s a multidisciplinary application, to be sure, but I think as we progress you’ll see that many of the underlying topics have pretty robust fields of scholarship to call upon.
May it bring scholars from around the world to a major university in Nashvegas.
Jim
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Stepping down from the empyrean heights of the Gospel of John: humans have not done well when new media - new ways to tell the stories - have become widespread. Whether it was the printing press and the subsequent Reformation and Wars of Religion, to the newspaper and the revolutions in America and France, to broadcast media and the rise of both communism and fascism, to apparently social media today, it seems the less savory actors tend to harness the system first, only to unleash havoc that eventually settles into some sort of new, purportedly wiser order. That is, until the next form of media comes along.
Reminded me of this:
Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories
David Comberg 1.34K subscribers
2,050,888 views | Oct 30, 2010
Short lecture by Kurt Vonnegut on the ‘simple shapes of stories.’
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