During the first ten minutes of class, write a summary of your reading of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, Life Stories. Also, think about what we’ve discussed regarding how the brain fills in the gaps when something is missing. According to Medina and Gottschall, our brain does this with our memories, too. Have you had an experience where your memory or recollection of yourself or something that you have done did not match what others remember? Borrowing from Gottschall, have you experienced a time when we might not be the heroes we think we are in our own epics?
ENG1101 D340 English Composition I, SPR2015
Official site for ENG1101 D340
In my mind, life stories are the human condition that after generation it gets better. There’s always a hero in a story and our experiences in life makes us think we were one once. I always said that if I could go back in time I will be a hero with no regrets because I always will be there with my hundred percent. Moreover, during my English class in highschool I get the nickname “Anecdote” by my teacher MS. Danley, because that fact is the that the hero in my life is myself which I deeply like to express when it comes about life experiences. In other words, my autobiography is my life story. On the other hand, Gottschall said “Our life stories are who we are. They are our identity. A life story is not, however, an adjective account. A life story is a carefully shaped narrative that is replete with strategic forgetting and skillfully spun meanings.” In other words, the story of our life is always true and our memoir travels along with that because it is a trustworthy system. Besides that, memoir is important because if we can’t trust our memories we will not be able to believe that anything in our lives was as we remember it. However, it’s not true the things we remember because is inaccurate like when we are confident in our false memories. Equally important, memories for sight, sound, taste and smell are stored in different locations, meaning that we recall data from all around the brain. Sometimes along all this process, people see themselves as protagonists or antagonists without knowing it. As Gottschall said, “Hitler, for example, thought he was a brave knight who would vanquish evil and bring on a thousand years of paradise on earth.” In my mind, heros of our own epics can manipulate our own nature self and change our thoughts into something we think is true. I usually think that I have to be bad or really cold in the future and if I continue believing it, it will be a false creation distorted by memory, dreams and hopes. Thus, life story is vital since we are living the story of our lives until the day we die. Yea, until the day we die we spill our hearts for ourselves and our family.
In Jonathan Gotschall’s Life Stories chapter of The Storytelling Animal, I learned a lot about how my memory of things may not be correct and how everyones brain is configured based off of the things they want to remember. In David Carr’s memoir he writes “People remember what they can live with more often then how they lived”. This powerful quote made me think a lot about how I may have altered my own thoughts to fit what I would like like to believe of myself, rather than what took place and how others may have perceived me and the situation. Gotschall told the story of a couple of people in this chapter but the experience of Hippolyte Bernhein stood out to me. Ternheim made a person completely change their memory to what he wanted them to believe was true.
In my childhood days, I thought that I was an amazing nail artist. I believed that I always stayed inside of the lines of my nails and never painted my flesh like other children. When I was about 15 years old, my aunt explained to me that my nail painting was horrible! This goes to show from my point of view that Gottschall’s findings were correct.
It’s really impossible to bring a memory back, without altering it somehow. It’s like something might happen to you but then when explaining it to everyone else its said differently than how you experienced it. Our brain only pays attention to certain surroundings around you but, doesn’t remember it clearly. This reminds me of a time where a friend of mine would real stories about something that with us and when were getting to the main plot of the memory we would both have different points of view of that happened and we would say to each other “no you didn’t do that” or “that’s now how it happened” and the story would just be thrown off and we’d get into a discussion on who did what. It’s very humorous and entertaining. It’s funny how 2 people with the same experience had different thoughts.
After all the reading we been doing this semester, I highly prefer Jonathan Gottschall writing style. I feel like it’s easier for me to understand his writing over medina with all this smart writing he started doing all of the sudden. On this chapter I found a couple points that were very interesting. The first was the fact that our memory is never 100% accurate and that we never remember events as how they happened, our mind always invent false details of events in our lives without our own concern. An example Gottschall used help the reader in this case me understand this important fact was an interview president Bush had just two months after the tragic 9/11, Bush mentioned that he remembered seeing when the first plane hit the first towel and that he thought “oh what a bad pilot”. Well according to Gottschall there is no videos of the first plane hitting the first towel so there it goes, bush mentioned a lie that he himself didn’t caught saying and that’s exactly what happens when we tell a story. Second and last point that caught my attention was a quote Gottschall said “healthy minds tell flattering lies to itself.” When I read that line I thought to my self well my mind is healthy but am I really as attractive as I convince my self I am, am I the person I think I am. Gottschall answer to these questions is no, other people do not see me as attractive as I see my self, other people think I am average when I actually think I am not and that’s the case with all of us except for depressed people. Depressed individuals know the real truth that they not attractive, smart or important to the world, therefore their minds are unhealthy and they don’t tell flattering lies to themselves.
Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, Life Stories chapter is intriguing, because in the chapter Gottschall speaks truthfully about different life stories. Gottschall argues that “Memoirists don’t tell true stories; they tell “truthy” ones.” When I come to think of it Gottschall is right, because Memoirists tell stories which evaluates to True. Take Guyana Tragedy, The Story of Jim Jones for example. This movie was based on articles of a factually event that occur in Guyana back in 1978.
However, Gottchall declares “MEMORY, OF COURSE, IS NEVER TRUE.” This is indeed a fact, because I have encounter some instances where people would tell me something and later they would forget and tell me something else in regards to the same thing. For example, my mom would ask me to drive her to laundromat at a specific day, but when the time comes for me to take her she would say,” I thought we were going to laundry tomorrow!”
On the other hand, in my past, I have done something that I have no memory of doing. A few years ago, I was walking in a street named Regent Street, back home in Guyana. I went to the market to buy some groceries, and I went back home. As soon as I entered my house, the phone rang, it was one of my friends on the line. She say,” I can’t believe you walked right past me just now on Regent Street and you never said a word to me, even though I was calling out your name.”
Many people have different opinions on same thing and on their memories. I would remember the same event differently than another person that was with me. It is like a telephone game we used to play when we were a kid. I start with a story and one person passes the story to another at the end the story is completely different. Same thing happened to David and Donald in the book. David wrote a memoir and one day when he interviewed his friend Donald, Donald said that David’s account was right except for one detail: David was the one with the gun in his hand. Carr writes in his memoir “People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived.” In 1977, the psychologists Roger Brown and James kulik coined the term “flashbulb memories” to describe photo-perfect recollections of JFK assassination. People vividly remembered where they were, What they were doing and who they were with when they heard the awful news. Subsequently research on the flashbulb memory has shown that Brown and Kulik were both right and wrong. We really do vividly remember the big and traumatic moments of our lives, but the detail of these memories can’t be trusted. Psychologist Carol Tarvis and Eliton put memory is “unreliable, self-serving historian memoris often pruned and shaped by an ego-enhancing nias that blurs the edge of the past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.” Put differently, we misremember the past in a way that allows us to maintain protagonist status in the stories of our own lives. Research shows that we are the great masterworks of our own storytelling minds figments of our own imaginations. We think ourselves as very stable and real. But our memories constrain our self-creation less than we think, and they are constantly being destroyed by our hopes and dreams.
Justin Echevarria
When reading this chapter I personally did not enjoy it as much as the previous chapters I’ve read. He was explaining the different types of writing that are used: memoir, autobiography, novel etc. A memoir is something that had happened in the past or a biography written from personal experience. He explained someone had written a “memoir” which was soon proven he had never experienced anything he wrote. Just from thinking I imagined he lost everything; respect, his editors, money, literally everything that made him a writer was gone. I do not plan on writing any type of book, but if I do I now know that I would have to be very cautious.
Life Stories
By Jonathan Gottschall
Summary
This particular chapter was really long in terms how Gottschall explains everything. In this chapter, the author explains stories are not always what it seems, and might be a little different. For example, the case of the book The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams which tell us the story of Nasdijj who is a native American and his adventures. What it makes this book interesting is that it was acclaimed to be a memoir that is when a writer talks about his or her memories and it is published in a book. However, the author of the book that was mentioned before was written by Timothy Barrus a white guy from North Carolina, so the memories did not come from an actual Native American. Also, the author mentions that we cannot rely in our memory in a 100% and people perception can actually change. For instance, the author mentions the case of David Carr who was an addicted to drug who works for a magazine. One day, he was so drug and with a lot of alcohol in his body that he went to his best friend house, Donald, and force the entrance and then his best friend points at him with a gun. However, years later, Donald told to Carr that he was the one that point at him with a gun, so who was right? This is a lost memory since Carr was suffering by the consequences of the drug. In addition, Gottschall defines autobiography which is different from memoir because in an autobiography the author has to show prove of what he or she did and in a memoir not necessarily. Finally, our memory is like scatter pieces that when we put them together tell the story of our life and our memory is like a guardian that protect these pieces in a sequential order which tell us the past about good or bad memories and how we learn from them.
After reading the chapter and getting some more knowledge from the powerpoint presentation, I feel as though people have selective memory and choose what they’d like to remember or forget. Although, in some scenarios, memories are fabricated and overtime can change but I feel like this happens only to those certain memories that aren’t necessarily deemed as important to the person, his/herself. When a particular thing has happens, either it being scarring or essential to one self, it will never be forgotten. I guess our life stories are pretty complicated. But just because you can’t remember every little detail on the past doesn’t mean that your mind is playing tricks on you to make you forget!
The Life Stories chapter talked about how sometimes we may not necessarily remember a entire story as we thought we did. An example of this is when we are telling someone a story and someone else disagrees with what you said in terms of what happened. And it’s not that you are lying about what happened but a lot of times we remember some things differently. It could even be that our brain cannot help itself but to fill the gaps of what our brain can not remember as well. In my own experience I have had times where I was telling a story to someone and the person that was in my story would say it did not go as I explained it and he/she would explain the events that took place a bit different. Now, who’s lying ? Who know, it’s safe to say that one of your brains filled the gap or maybe your brains filled both of you stories.
Reading “Life Stories” chapter from Jonathan Gottschall’s book, The Storytelling Animal, Kept me very absorbed with the content. Contrasting previous chapters, I felt very engrossed for the reason that it put into words things that I can identify with. Until know, I used to think that all my memories were completely accurate, right know I do not know if I should argue myself about the things my “mind” thinks I have experienced through the years. According to Gottschall, A life story is a “personal myth” about who we are deep down, where we come from, how we got this way, and what it all means, our life stories are who we are. “We really do vividly remember the big and traumatic moments of our lives, but the details of these memories can’t be trusted.” Roger Brown and James Kuilt talked about “flashbulb memories”; some of the most confident memories in our heads are sheer invention. What the author overlooks is that they might be less trustworthy than we could suspect. Moreover, I understood why I remember the big and traumatic experiences of my life. I could not agree more with Gottschall, because I have argue for days with my mom about things I remember about the past and even though she has her own version of them, I am still completely sure of how I remember everything. After reading Gottschall statements, I am not sure if I should believe in my own memories, what if I have been so confident with my life experiences but they might be false. According to Gottschall, we do not directly access to our memory as it is. Pieces of the memory are scattered through the brain. Memories for sight, sound, taste and smell are stored in different locations. We recall data from all around the brain and then is sent forward to the storytelling mind. Furthermore, the author talks about what psychologists have called “the Lake Woebegone effect”: we think we are above average when it comes to just about any positive quality. In addition, this is something that starts very early, since we are small children. “Until the day we die, we are living the story of our lives. And like a novel in process (a work of fiction), our life stories are always changing and evolving, being edited, rewritten, and embellished by an unreliable narrator”.
Zahirah Hutton
ENG 1101
4/28/2015
This chapter showed me that even though I may have experienced something in the past that I was physically there for I can give an accurate description of what happened. It’s not until time comes into play that our memories can be altered. Whether it be the next day or the next month if you were to ask me what happened during that experience I was physically there for a month later I guarantee my recollection of the event will be different. Not to the extreme will the memory change but there will be slight alterations. Now you may say how can it change if you was there to witness it? It’s because as humans we think were more advanced than our own self but the brain has a way of slowing us down. Jonathan also mentions the difference between a memoir, autobiography & a biography. I didn’t know people tend to mix up a memoir & an autobiography. A memoir is a collection of writing that is based on true information about someone’s life written by someone else but a autobiography is the actual person writing about events that they went through.
is funny how we remember things at a young age but cant remember thing we do during present year for example when I was about 3 year of age my mom fell down a ride and I can remember her falling and hitting her knees and my self laughing as I was telling her the story she was shocked how I remember that event perfectly. but it is strange that I recalled 2 month ago at a party wasn’t really what happen, which I found weird at first I though my friend was lying but ask a few other friends and it match what my friend was saying, meaning what I recall was wrong. But as I read Jonathan Gotschall’s Life Stories chapter of The Storytelling Animal, I learned how are brain actually function when it comes to our memories. who we are without memories.
Answering the question for this chapter I want to share my life story. As it said here some stories, that happen to us earlier in life can make a huge influence on our future behavior and actions. I always knew as a kid where my grandmother was hiding alcohol from my grandfather. And as a kid I was “smart” enough to barter alcohol to sweets, instead of caring for my relative’s health and their relationships. I thought it was smarter and sneakier of me back then. Now I will definitely do opposite, have no alcohol in the house and pay more attention to my grandfather health who passed away because of the health issues. This story taught me a lot and made a huge impact on my behavior.