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 D371 English Composition I, SPR2015
Official site for ENG1101 D371
In Jonathan Gottschall’s, “ A Storytelling Animal, The Mind is a Storyteller,” this chapter speaks on how our minds are the ultimate storyteller. Our minds crave story so much, that it will make one up when there’s not a story already there. With communication being verbal and nonverbal our brains are constantly trying to figure out “the story,” or our interpretation of it. Gottschall gives many examples in this chapter on how the mind is a storyteller. An excerpt from “The Air Loom Gang” by Mike Jay, tells of a man named James Tilly Matthews who believed his mind was being controlled by terrorists. Matthews was deemed a lunatic and exiled because of his illusions. This fiction story highlighted schizophrenia, a brain disorder in which one’s reality is viewed abnormally. With such imagination and creativity one has with a mental illness, it is not surprising to hear that the majority affected by these illnesses are fiction writers and artists. Gottschall talks about confabulation. There are individuals out there who tell false stories, not intentionally, because their minds believe it to be real. Confabulators, to me, are people who lie so much they start believing that lie to be true. Conspiracy theories are another way in which our minds insist a story to be true. I will admit I have fallen into believing some conspiracy theories like JFK, Tupac and the 9/11 attacks. Our minds have an obsessive need for important experiences and conspiracy theories gives us answers to these mysteries. In conclusion, whether we know a story to be true or false, leave it to our minds to become the ultimate storyteller.
in johnathan Gottschall’s “The Storytelling Animal: The Mind Is A Storyteller” , Gottschall explains different ways our mind tells stories. He discusses that the minds of people with mental disorders such as schizophrenia, are no different than every other individual. He supports it by stating that Arnold Ludwig’s study found that there is an 87 percent rate of psychiatric disorders in poets and 77 percent rate in fiction writers. Poets and writers suffer from bipolar disorder, depression and schizophrenia. This may result in drug abuse, alcohol, psychiatric hospitals, and suicides. Gottschall uses Stephen King’s memoir as an example. Stephen King wrote that he is skeptical of the “myth” associating substance of abuse and literary creativity, but King overuse alcohol while writing The Tommyknockers and abused drugs such as cocaine and coke. Gottschall also discusses how we are all pathological confabulate without catching ourselves in the act. People are usually in denial when they refuse to believe something that is true. We create stories that are logical to our reasoning of certain actions or what we say, which Gottschall refers to as “lies, honestly told”, or confabulations.
The mind is really a storyteller. I witnessed this first hand with my mother. She suffered from schizophrenia. I thought she suffered from multiple personalities until I got older and did some research of my own. I remember she was really paranoid a lot. She would always say “they are out to get me”,but I never knew “who”they were. I recall one time my mother and I were walking down the street,and she seen two police officers. Out of no where she started screaming that “they better leave her alone”,and”why are you all always looking at me funny?”. Mind you the officers were not paying her any attention at all the whole time.
So when I read Jonathan Gottschall’s chapter”The Mind Is A Storyteller”, I understood the different ways the mind can make up stories to justify what it believes to be true,even if there is no truth to be justified. The part about conspiracy theories was very interesting, because I could understand how when all the smoke clears it is just a story. But at the same time there are some facts incorporated to draw certain conclusions. And the more facts incorporated makes the conspiracy theory that much stronger.
From what I understood in this chapter, the mind itself lies. The brain interprets things differently, and sometimes it is wrong, which is why people are deemed with mental disorders. But this would be similar to how the brain reacts when it is under the influence of drugs. For everyone, it depends on how their brains develop, what they were exposed to as they were growing and things similar to this. This is shown in his example of the heider and simmel project, where everyone sees it in a different light even though it is simply shapes moving. The mind will come up with danger around it as well.
According to Jonathan Gottshall’s chapter “The Mind is a Storyteller”, the mind is known for storytelling. Even if we got nothing to say, our mind finds a way to make up a story. This is why some people lie. Instead of saying somebody lies, I prefer saying that their brain misunderstood the story or whatever we are talking about. Since everyone’s brain is different, everyone’s brain tends to interpret things differently. The only reason why everyone’s brain is different is because no one in this world experienced exactly what another person experienced. We all have different background so we all see things differently. For example: In the Heider and Simmel’s project, although it was a bunch of objects moving around, people relate different thoughts or stories to the video.
The Mind Is a Storyteller chapter by Gottschall, talks about mental illness and the splitting of the brain. The brains are split into left and right connected by a corpus callosum. Information travels through the corpus callosum into these two hemisphere and the interesting part is each side controls their opposite. Another interesting thing is what each hemisphere does;the left side is the more logical side and the right side is the more creative and recognizes faces side. The cutting of the corpus callosum leads to the brain doing two different things but at the same time. He also mentions us having a “Holmes” in our brain that see the “clues” we are given in the situation and making an assumption about it in other words a story. This leads to people creating conspiracy theories. But what I want to know is what he is trying to say with the sock experiment. Does that mean we are lying all the time? or is what we consider logic a lie? or am I interpreting this part wrong?
This chapter speaks about how it is natural for our minds to come up with and tell stories. The mind is always coming up with different ways to come up with stories. Depending on our life experiences we also interpret other people’s stories or just things in general very differently. This is why our brains always differ from one another. The most interesting thing about this chapter was the story about the shapes. It was interesting because in some people’s perspective this video about the shapes just moving around were simply that, shapes moving around. In my perspective there was a kind of violent story to these shapes,but thats just me. Someone else might have interpreted it differently. Another interesting fact about this chapter was about the reasons we lie. One of the reasons we lie consistently is because of our storytelling ways. We are always trying to tell a story and grasp the attention of our listener, so we decided to add lies from here and there. Honestly I lie all the time when I feel like the story I am about to tell is dull.
In Jonathan Gottschall’s, “ A Storytelling Animal, The Mind is a Storyteller,” the chapter talks about how the brain interprets things based on the things we see. It makes up stories to go with what we are looking at. All the stories that the brain makes up are based on our experiences from my point of view. We would think of what we have been through and we would connect that. Like in class we saw a animated video with shapes. The video displayed different stories for everyone such as, a guy said that it was parents and their kids fighting, or what I thought was that the smaller shapes were friends and they were being bullied by the larger triangle. So we make up stories from what we have seen in the past as well. We create stories that are logical to our reasoning of what we have seen or done and Gottschall refers to as “lies, honestly told”. Also in this chapter he discussed different mental illness such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other illness and how they affect us and how some people suffer from them.
In the chapter “The mind is a storyteller” Gottshall talks about many ways how humans perceive their brain, and how the mind tells us a story through various ways. Stories made by our mind can be chained through many different ways. Gottshall show’s us many examples but, the one example that intrigued me the most would be the face in mars. When that picture was released I thought at first there was an actual civilization living in mars or a sign of past civilization. As the years past, due to the amount of people intrigued with this phenomenon, they have captured better pictures, and it ended being a shadow making the illusion of a face, also the low resolution image made it look like a face. Our mind wants to think about the highest possible outcome of an event, and it makes a story, because ideas are spread around through stories, that’s one of many factors how human’s evolved very rapidly, and our intellectual skills are at the top of life in our planet.
While reading Jonathan Gottschall “Storytelling Animal, The Mind is a Storyteller”, the chapter discusses how our brain tells us stories in various ways especially while we’re asleep. These stories could be something we have experienced, something we fear, something we desire, or something hilarious. Gottschall used in example in this chapter about the face on Mars. Most people really believed that there was a face on Mars leaving them believing that maybe alien live there when really it was just the shading of the rocks on Mars. The quality of camera’s back then wasn’t really that great. In class the other day as we was watching the video of these shapes our minds have all made up different stories from just watching these shapes move around. It’s so great how each of our minds individually could be so creative and imaginative and that is why our minds especially are storytelling animals.
The human mind is a place where thoughts memories and dreams are created and stored. Is it really the mind that thinks of ways to modify and/or shape our lives. I say yes as the mind is a complex bit of electrical and chemical function. Our brain is like the CPU of a computer, one thing at a time, no multitasking. The mind likes to envision things, to picture things. Humans tend to hear and see many things every single day. What it is important here is how the information is interpreted and reflected. People tell stories, to gossip and to learn. The stories contain bits of information which have been heard previously. These bits of information are enclosed in chatter, the chatter been the unimportant bits. Humans tell stories, that is a fact of life. It is how we tell stories using verbal and non-verbal means that is most important. A person can tell a lot about a person by listening to what they are saying and what body language they may be displaying. A person could be lying, it is up to us to say, hey, this guy is lying, do I tell him? Evidence of lying may include stuttering in speech and swaying of the body. When the story is true, we extrapolate the important information and discard the rest. The human mind is finite and cannot remember vast amounts of information. How can one tell difference between a crazy person and an artist? A crazy person uses non-verbal means as those in artistic professions, it is what they are expressing that bears importance.
In Jonathan Gottschall’s, “ A Storytelling Animal , The Mind is a Storyteller,” Gottschall talks about how every individual mind react different on the same thing that they see at the same time , It all depends how their brain develops and what experiences they had in their life . For example in class professor showed as the heider and simmel project and asked us what we see in it and every one gave different review about the video when on the screen it was just two triangles ,a circle and a rectangle . In other words I would say that our mind lies about the things that we see like the photos from mars that looked like face but actually it was just a mountain that we discovered later with batter pixel lens and from different angles . Basically my mind kept lying to me the whole life that the face was made by some living creature .
In the reading “The Mind is a Storyteller” by Jonathan Gottschall it talks about how people with mental disorders are the ones who are most likely become writers. Psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig said it could be something that the person is dealing with that causes them to write such as loneliness or frustration. It was a way to ease their mind because their minds are always coming up with creative and artistic way to express themselves. In 1962, a neurosurgeon named Joseph Bogen conducted an experiment on a patients where he split the brain to see how the brain would work split and he waited to see what would happen. He discovered that this where humans gets seizures and he tried to fix it. It did not completely stop the seizures but the frequency and severity was not so bad after. Micheal Gazzinga called the structure of the left side of the brain “the interpreter”. The brain shows that if you are left handed the right side of your brain is working and if you are right handed the left side of your brain is working. For example, GazzInga and his colleagues showed a patient a picture of a chicken (the picture was in his right hand) and a picture of a snowy place (the picture was in his left hand). The patient’s brain on the left side showed that he was thinking of a chicken foot which relates the picture in his right hand. However, the right side of his brain showed a shovel which did not relate to the picture in his left hand. When the doctor asked him to explain why he thought of the shovel and he could not explain. They came to the conclusion that the hand that you are more dominant with is working with the opposite side of your brain.