During the first ten minutes of class, write your summary of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, Life Stories in your notebooks. Before our class on Monday, post a comment of your typewritten summary.
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This chapter talks about in 1977, the psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik coined the term “flashbulb memories” to describe photo-perfect recollections of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. People vividly remembered where they were, what they were doing, and who they were with when they heard the awful news. Subsequent research on flashbulb memory has shown that Brown and Kuilk were both right and wrong. We really do vividly remember the big and traumatic moments of our lives, but the details of these memories can’t be trusted. It also talks about how the signature flashbulb moment of our age is 9/11, which led to a bonanza of false-memory research. The research shows two things: that people are extremely sure of their 9/11 memories and that upward of 70 percent of us remembered key aspects of the attacks.
It talks about the ideas of memories and how they are inconsistent with the actualities of events in our lives. Thus embodied by the statement that ‘’our memories should come with disclaimers saying this is based on a true story’’ as they have been edited to satisfy our ego’s and establish us as the protagonists of our life stories. Autobiographical memoirs, testimonies, and the monitors of important figureheads as well as average people are analyzed to reflect that the human memory is unreliable. Even more, it is said to be faulty by design. Memoirs can’t be trusted, we fictionalize much of our own memory, and story is the central part of our past. When such filters are not in place as would be the case for a depressed person, life becomes far more difficult. Hence our imperfect memories are perfect for us.
After reading Jonathan Gottschall’s storytelling Animal ( Life Stories) chapter I learned that sometimes memories are not always real, but can be falsely installed into people’s minds by psychologist. This chapter of ( Life Stories) was mainly about how a psychologist named ‘ Hippolyte Bernheim’ who was able to install, plant memories into a young women’s mind, who happened to be his psychiatric patient. The chapter went into detail about how the women was severely convinced traumatic incidents had happened, that never existed. In my opinion this chapter was really interesting to me because I never knew that another person could implant, implement, or convince another person that an event happened once they reached a certain age past early childhood. This chapter can possibly make some people question whether or not they have ever been abused or not because we as humans can not always trust our memories. I enjoyed reading this chapter.
In the chapter “Life Stories” Gottschall write about how our memories sometimes don’t add up to the actual event. Sometimes we have memories of events that never really happen. This is really interesting to me because I do find myself questioning events that are stored in my memory on whether it really happened or not. Other times I feel like events have happened before, Deja Vu. I believe that humans often create scenarios in their heads so often and begin to believe them. This could play a big part in the memories we have that aren’t real events that have actually occurred.
THE STORYTELLING ANIMAL chapter 8 talks about Life stories. This chapter tells us that memoirists can recall scenes and conversations from their childhoods in unbelievably piquant detail. Memoirists don’t tell truly stories; they tell truly ones. 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. Life stories are who we are. They are our identity. We humans do vividly remember the big and traumatic moments of our lives, but the details of these memories can’t be trusted. The things that have been told in this chapter are very interesting. A healthy mind tells itself flattering lies and if it does not lie to itself, it is not healthy. We think of ourselves as very stable and real. Our memories constrain our self-creation less then we think, and they are constantly being distorted by our hopes and dreams. This chapter is very interesting and tells us so many interesting facts that most of us had no knowledge about. I find it very interesting that most of the time we think we know what happened in the past and we remember everything but its not 100 percent true. Even our memories lie to us.
“Life Stories” is an interesting chapter because memoirs can’t be trusted, we fictionalize much of our own memory, and the story is a central part of our past. Stories that have been heavily embedded to our minds such as 9/leave a heavy impact because of the significant trauma it caused . Memoirs, our stories are there to mislead us to make us they what happened did not actually happen at all
In the chapter “Life Stories” Gottschall wrote about how sometimes the memory we have stored in our brain might not be what actually happened. I find this extremely interesting because I can relate to this chapter sometimes I can stay up late wake up the next day and wondering what really happened. Also you can be doing something and just think to yourself like hold up I have been here and done this, is called déjà vu. We believe in déjà vu because in our mind we think about all sorts of stuff and make up so many scenarios that we just believe in things that we think that we are not conscience of.
In this chapter he explains that sometimes our memories of events that happened in the past are sometimes not the exact way how they really happened. I found interesting because agree with him. In my perspective I believe that because we experience alot of of other events between then and now we create more memories and sometimes the other events we experience are similar to the one we try to remember so sometimes it is intertwined with other memories and some events are altered due to this.
In this chapter, Gottschall talks about memoirs and discusses how reliable and accurate a person’s memory is. First he talk about memoirs and how many people create fictional situations when writing their memoirs. He also analyzes different situations whee people claim to have witnessed something happen but in reality they weren’t even there. He uses examples that include 9/11, Princess Diana’s death, and the 7/7 bombings. He also talks about how people in real life and in fiction seem to show a different perspective since their actions are based on their superego. One example of this is in the novel Misery. On one side, the main character can seem psychotic because she is holding her favorite author captive, but she can also be seen as sane since she is helping him recover from he car accident he got into.
In the chapter “Life Story” of The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall talks about the way a person’s life is told. In the beginning of the chapter Jonathan Gottschall says, “People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived.” Jonathan Gottschall supports this by talking about a guy named David Carr. David Carr was a drunkie who once had a really bad experience that involved the cops. As David Carr was telling his friend Donald, who was with him that day, he switched up some details of what happened. David Carr recalled that Donald was threatening him that day but it was actually David. Like Gottschall said, people tend to remember what they can live with. In this scenario, David had convinced himself he had did nothing wrong.
In Chapter eight of The Story Telling Animal: Life Stories Jonathan Gottschall explains that memoirists can recall scenes and conversations from their childhoods in unbelievably specific detail. A life story is a personal myth about who we are deep down. Gottschall says that the memory we have stored in our brain might not be what actually happened. Gotschall later states that life stories are who we are, they are our identity.
In the Life Stories chapter by Jonathan gottschall speaks about how life stories are our own personal myths. He then speaks about how our memories aren’t really always true sometimes are minds remembering thing that wasn’t really there or happened. he compares our memory to hackers hacking a computer that’s because he believes that our memory aren’t trust worthy and are memory’s are mostly reconstruction. “memory isn’t and outright fiction”.
In this chapter it talks about the ideas of memories. He goes to explain how life stories are our own personal myths. Sometimes in our memories were reliving experiences that happened to us in the past ,present or sometimes future. In this chapter Jonathan Gottschall says, “People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived.” I find this to be true because in psychology class I learned that when people go through certain negative things in there life they tend to block it out to not relieve that.