I bookmarked an article from New Scientist this week about how storytelling shaped our evolution, and the ways in which narrative is connected to our brain development.
Of course, the obvious thing to point out here is that the ways in which we tell stories, the form they take, the types of stories they are and the ways in which we take them in also change over time – so not only do narratives and storytelling shape our brain, changes in which those stories are manifest alters the kinds of change that result.
Digital narrative differs from printed narrative, which is different again than oral tradition. The hypertextual, interactive nature of storytelling, and the more chronology-independent tales we now tell are characteristic of a digital mode. Digital stories also tend to be far more collaborative than the private world of books, or the rehearsed myths of the campfire storyteller.
And as the stories we tell about ourselves change – and as the myths that guide our beliefs and behaviours change – so too do we change. Humans are not only creatures of communication, we are completely hard-wired for narrative.
And so, we not only evolve in response to the stories we tell, but we also evolve in response to the ways in which we tell stories. This is going to be an interesting thread to watch.
I’ve been reading a lot about memory this past week, and one of the things that strikes me is that we don’t yet have a good enough model for equating the biochemistry of the brain with the experiential phenomenon of memory.