During the first ten minutes of class, write a summary of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, The Mind is a Storyteller chapter in your notebook. Then, type, edit, and add your summary as a comment to this blog post before our next class.
ENG1101 D340 English Composition I, SPR2015
Official site for ENG1101 D340
Reading Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, “The Mind is a Storyteller” confused me. I didn’t quite understand what the story at the beginning of the chapter was about. Moreover, it is like many stories told at the same time. However, I enjoy the point about Mathews. In other words, Mathews is pauper living at the very center of history known by the Air Loom Gang and his worst fears was that the prime minister of England is the Gang’s puppet. In addition, Mathews is the only one who knows the truth about the government so the Duke and King are moving against him. This causes a grave error for Mathews because he lets his worries distract him, forgetting he have to hide himself. More important, Mathews was confined as an incurable lunatic who often hears voices. Thus, Mathews’s vision is a work of fiction that I really enjoy and found interesting.
The mind is a mysterious thing, and it is amazing how it works sometimes. I always wondered how is it that the mind enables us to think and create all kind of things, resulting in both positive and negative outcome. For example, my mind allows me to envision good and bad stories all the time. According to Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, The Mind is a Storyteller, “The storytelling mind is a crucial adaption.” He declares that, it allows us to experience our lives as coherent, orderly, and meaningful. In addition, Gottschall believes that it is what makes life more than a blooming, buzzing confusion.
However, Gottschall thinks, “The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, Randomness, and coincidence. Also, that it is addicted to meaning.” He proceeded to say, “If the storytelling mind cannot find fine meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them.” For example, when looking at the clouds, we tend to recognize shapes and patterns, such as people, animals, and different objects that we might interact with in our day-to-day lives.
From reading “The Mind is a Storyteller”, I didn’t quite understand it fully. I think it talks about how our brains naturally tell stories. Without stories our experience of life would be incoherent and meaningless. It also talks about how our minds hate directionless plots, unmotivated characters and pure coincidence which will leads to our storytelling mind to create meaningful patterns in the world even when no such patterns exist. In the words of Jonathan Gottschall,”the storytelling mind is a factory that churns our true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.” I believe what it mean is that when there’s no more true stories to tell, we often use our mind to make up the stories.
After reading storytelling animal chapter the mind of a storyteller I swear I thought I was having déjà vu. I have always had some similar thoughts to some of the thing that I read in the chapter like when someone is telling you a story not everything they are saying is absolutely true, because they begin to tell you a story. I found it very interesting to know that when the story gets boring we begin to lie, whether it is subconscious or not. I actually do this all the time when telling a story and it begins to bore me I like to lie. In my opinion I think what the author was saying was that we tell stories as we perceive them.
This chapter really threw me off balance, it seems a bit complicated. The Brain is very interesting, the brain can create things out of the blue making you think there’s someone or something there in your face. The brain that hears many stories seems to be against uncertainties and randomness and when the brain tries to make sense of something it creates an illusion. Basically Gotschall explains that our brains process the truth, but when it can’t process the truth it processes lies and it can throw you off.
I have to admit that it’s kind of hard to understand Gottschall writing. I finally got to understand the chapter “The Mind is a Storyteller” after reading it two and some paragraphs three times but it was worthy. On this chapter Gottschall is making a point which is that us humans see something and immediately create a story about it in our brains. To support his point Gottschall wrote about a story in which I guy saw another guy with camouflage cargos and the first thought on the other guy’s head was that he just came from Afghanistan. Another thing Gottschall wrote which I kind of got confused with was the the slip half brain people see something with their right eye and that image is going to be seen on the left side of the brain and that left side of the brain would tell the right side (leg or arm) to take actions (move, walk). What I didn’t understand is if this only happens to people who have 2 sides of the brain or to everybody. I think I confused myself I don’t know but I surely didn’t get that part.
From Gottschall’s “The Mind is a Story Teller”, I learned that our minds can think in a way that sometimes we don’t even fully understand. Our minds do not adapt to us, on the contrary, we adapt to our minds. In other words, through our experiences, our minds may think a certain way which may confuse our bodies. Also, our brains work in a specific way for a reason. Gottschall states that our minds are “allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence.” This means that our minds go a certain way for a reason. This stood out to me because a lot of times our minds and hearts don’t agree and they said to always listen to your heart. However, after reading this chapter, it makes me feel differenly towards the idea of listening to our hearts because in reality, our minds make more sense.
In this chapter, Jonathan Gottschall explains the process of the brain when it generates stories and all the components that involve this procedure. First, he introduces this story entitled “the air loom gang” which is a bizarre and very extravagant story about a series of villains that uses a very complex and insane machine in order to punish people. At first, this story sounded very unrealistic and confusing for me, however, this story came from some called Matthew who suffered schizophrenia which is a mental illness that cause hallucinations and bizarre beliefs to the person that possess this disorder. This story made by Matthew was study by several psychologists and publish in many books related to this topic, and some researchers made further investigations about how mental disorders and creativity are very close to each other. For this, Gottschall expounds with some examples how creativity and these mental illness are related such as that a certain amount of poets and illustrated people can actually suffer for this disease and write an excellent literature. The author also mentions that modern literature was touch by madness referring about this topic. In addition, the author mentions how structure of the brain itself can affect the story by explaining a little bit of background about the hemispheres of the brain which is the left and the right. The right hemisphere is in charge of recognizing faces, focusing, and motoring tasks. On the other hand, the left brain’s duty is for speaking and generating hypothesis. Some brain scientists such as Joseph Bogen performed a surgery that actually divided these hemispheres to not be able to communicate to each other. At the beginning, the patient suffers from seizure which is when your body became unconscious and moves in a violent way. After that he did not show any other symptom. Moreover, the author explains about how the brain interprets stories or something really abstract because the brain tries to make sense of everything. For example, the face of Mars and the video about the shapes forms that moves around and depending of the observer the story can actually change, in other words, there is no right or wrong the story vary from person to person. It is really fascinating how the brain can actually be a pretty good storyteller.
For me this chapter was a little hard to understand what Gottschall was talking about. Jonathan Gottschall talks about conspiracy theory in this chapter. Conspiracy theories are feverishly creative and lovingly plotted fiction stories that some people believe in. They exert a powerful hold on the human imagination. Like in the story where Matthew thinks that the government of England has been taken over by a powerful conspiracy. Gottschall also says that “The human mind is tuned to detect patterns and it is biased toward false positive rather than false negative.” Our hunger for meaningful patterns translates into a hunger for a story. Like the picture taken by Viking I in 1972 was thought as a evidence of martian civilization. But as years passed by and as the place was observed the face was just an ordinary martian hill. This is a very good example of our mind as a storyteller because we only saw that Martian hill and we made our mind as that is a face a creature and there is a martian civilization. Also watching heider and Simmel film every person has a different explanation although there is just three geometric shaped being moved around. I thought big triangle was a villain and he was bullying the small triangle and circle and at last when they escaped he became made and destroyed the room. We all know that our mind makes something from nothing but this proves it.
Justin Echevarria
While reading the “Story Telling Animal” The Mind is a Storyteller chapter I was a bit confused. Jonathan Gottschall writing is a bit complicated in some parts of the story, but throughout this entire chapter I did not understand nothing. It could have been that I wasn’t so interested and engaged in the book as I should, but I will definitely go back to read the chapter.
Reading, “The Mind is a Storyteller” from Gottschall’s book The Storytelling Animal was a journey to the land of “concentration”. It is required to follow very deep Gottschall’s ideas to understand his final point. He starts the chapter with a quirky story related with schizophrenia (the central mystery of psychiatry). This illness is one the hardest ones because as Mathews (the main chapter of the story presented at the beginning of the chapter) “people prey to a variety of bizarre beliefs, delusions, and hallucinations. They often hear alien voices muttering in their ears.” Based in some researches, it is been said that many talented writers and poets have psychiatric disorders. In addition, the author says that we all are more like Mathew than we know. Something that was new and interesting for me is that the visual information that enters the right eye is fed to the left-brain, and information entering the left eye goes to the right brain. Gottschall also exposes that human mind is tuned to detect patterns. The same mental software that make us very alert to human faces and figures causes to see animals in clouds, and what helps us to perceive meaningful patterns in our environments is part of a “mind design”. Furthermore, the author says that our brains have natural affinity not only for enjoying narratives and for learning from them but also for creating them. In addition, there is a dark side to our tendency to impose stories where they do not exist, and nothing reveals it like a good conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are in fact fictional stories that someone believe.
In “The StoryTelling Animal” the chapter “The Mind Is a StoryTeller” by Johnathan Gottschall the chapter was not an easy one to decipher because sometimes when I read a book, passage, or any other work of literature I try to find the meaning of it. But, it turns out to be something else when I seem to overlook what the true meaning was. However, in this chapter I hope I didn’t overlook what Gottschall true intentions were and to me this chapter was slowing trying to tell us that our minds itself can make a story even when there is no detail being told on what going on. This is when I had thought about it and it was true because even in my high school my brain was able to make up stories even when I have 10 minutes and there was nothing but just a blank sheet of paper. In addition to that, I had started to think about people and their theories on how the big bang theory which they had their brain make up a story that makes sense and when told to everyone else they had began to make their own version to the story. So I believe in what Gottschall was trying to prove because to me it seems that our brains can make up a story and tell it to us.