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 D371 English Composition I, SPR2015
Official site for ENG1101 D371
My life story,Wow! I can remember a couple of times where this happened to me, but it is pretty much the same theme. There was this one time when I came into contact with a childhood friend, that was younger than me. We never hung out when we were younger,he was my little brother’s age. I remember him speaking about this one instance that happened in my neighborhood. I was involved in it and it is really infamous. It is just that when he started to describe it,I did not remember it like that. I felt like I did not know the person he was talking about. I just kept thinking to myself I was not that bad.
In Jonathan Gottschall’s, “The Storytelling Animal, Life Stories,” Gottschall discusses how we tell our life stories in our own truths, whether it is accurate or not. A memoir is an account of one’s life experiences and how they recount it. James Frey’s memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” tells his accounts as a junkie and, through his highs and lows, finally getting straight. Frey’s memoir received a lot of attention, seeing he was featured on Oprah. With that attention came scrutiny. Frey was under fire. It was revealed that his book was “based on a true story”, merely fiction. Frey is not the only one who has embellished in a memoir. There are many others out there and critics believe because of this, memoirs should be classified as fiction and not non-fiction. Gottschall tells us we are just like memoirists. We tell our own life accounts in our own truths with a smudge of false information. Not because we want to be untruthful but because our memory fails us. To explain in more detail, Gottschall talks about “flashbulbs memories,” life long emotional events. For example, the attack on 9/11 is a flashbulb memory. We all can remember where we were and what we were doing during this time. When asked about the attacks, President Bush accounts were truthfully to him but were inaccurate based on facts. Even based on a flashbulb memory research, our most sure thought memories are made up. Gottschall also informs us of psychiatrists who used hypnosis on their patients by adding false memories to their mind. By doing this, psychiatrists found that our memory was weak against allowing corrupt information to takeover, once again, failing us. With that being said, our minds are constantly telling story, our life story to be exact. Being the writer with faulty memory, our life story is forever evolving into our own “truths,” whether fact or fiction.
In Jonathan Gottshall’s The Storytelling Animal, Life Stories, Gottschall writes about how our mind does not recall memories precisely. He mentioned that memoirs are made up stories about the author’s life but people complain that the artists writing memoirs are liars and cheats. People usually make up memories from the past because our brain tends to do the Sherlock Holmes; it mixes information of other events and paste them together. Gottschall discusses that people also make up stories of events that never happened. He mentioned Hippolyte Bernheim’s test on Marie to infer that memory is very vulnerable and unreliable. Many times I have found that a recollection of an event in my past with someone did not match what the other person remembered. My brain tricked me by recalling pieces of other events. What caught my attention in the chapter was how our brains make us believe that we are heroes or innocent of something we have done wrong. Gothshall stated, “studies show that when ordinary people do something wrong — break a promise, commit a murder — they usually fold it into a narrative that denies or at least diminishes their guilt”. There were times when I had done something wrong but in my mind I made myself believe that I was the victim or protagonist to protect my ego and make me feel good about myself. I believe people do that because no one wants to think of themselves as the bad person; we all have egos that we protect.
In Jonathan Gottshall’s “The Storytelling Animal, Life Stories”, Gottschall writes about how our mind does not recall memories precisely. He mentioned that memoirs are made up stories about the author’s life but people complain that the artists writing memoirs are liars and cheats. People usually make up memories from the past because our brain tends to do the Sherlock Holmes; it mixes information of other events and paste them together. Gottschall discusses that people also make up stories of events that never happened. He mentioned Hippolyte Bernheim’s test on Marie to infer that memory is very vulnerable and unreliable. Many times I have found that a recollection of an event in my past with someone did not match what the other person remembered. My brain tricked me by recalling pieces of other events. What caught my attention in the chapter was how our brains make us believe that we are heroes or innocent of something we have done wrong. Gottschall stated, “studies show that when ordinary people do something wrong — break a promise, commit a murder — they usually fold it into a narrative that denies or at least diminishes their guilt”. There were times when I had done something wrong but in my mind I made myself believe that I was the victim or protagonist to protect my ego and make me feel good about myself. I believe people do that because no one wants to think of themselves as the bad person; we all have egos that we protect.
While reading Jonathan Gottschall’s, “The Storytelling Animal, Life Stories,” Gottschall discusses how we tell our life stories in our own way, whether it’s actually real or not. A memoir is a persons life experience and share it with the world to know their life story basically. According to Gottschall, we are just like memoirists. We tell our own life stories that can sometimes be mixed with the little things that has not occurred during that life experience. As we discussed in class of how our brains fills in the gaps as we try to tell a story most of us have a hard time remembering exactly everything that has happened. So what do we do? We fill up those mini gaps with lies. It’s not really a bad thing to some because many of us fill this gap with something that actually makes sense with the story you’re telling and make others believe that all of it is true when it’s not. According to Medina and Gottschall our brains does this to our memories too. We wouldn’t exactly remember our first experience in Kindergarten or the time we went to an amusement park in the 5th grade. Our brains would fill certain parts up that would make sense to us.
In Jonathan Gottschall’s “The Storytelling Animal” on “Life Stories” chapter, the author explains that our memories are not always truthfully embedded in our brains even though we are quite vivid about that specific time of the event. It is true that, our memories starts to fade when we grow old, but the author focuses the type of memories that we think we remember about, but not completely right. Gottschall explains, that we are the storyteller ourselves. Our memories tend to alter with false information to make us look like the protagonist in our own memory. This is because, our memory isn’t capable of remembering that specific time of the day with such precision. Instead, our brain tries to pick bits and pieces from different scene that we have observe in life, and insert it in the false memory. In my life, I have experienced several incidents where I knew I was absolutely positive, but my friends said otherwise. Few years ago, back in my country, my friend and I used to play soccer at a field, just ten minutes walk from my house. However, when I went back to my country, my friend told me that it was a ten minute bus ride from my house. It indeed was a ten minute bus ride. I was left puzzled. Till this day, I have no clue as how wrong I was.
The chapter “life stories” is about the many possibilities a story can go, either it can be true or not, it’s our story and we describe on how we perceived the situation. This never went through my mind, how a story can become completely untrue to some, but true to the author because of the difference experience, and the different ideas people have with how life is. A villain can be a hero for others depending on what story you tell to them. It’s just the matter of believing in a logical way, because without logic, our mind cannot understand or relate to the particular story. There were many times were I was put into a situation that I was telling a story, and people didn’t believe me due to the over exaggerated things I put to make the “story” more interesting. I have learned that putting emphasis to detail can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on who you’re telling it to.
In Jonathan Gostchalls book “The story telling Animal” in the chapter “Life Stories” he tells us about how we tell our stories and how sometimes our memories fail us to remember what another person might. From my point of view not only does it depend on time but also the age of a person to how much they will remember. For example I wouldn’t remember something that happened during my childhood, I would remember parts of it and not all of it. We usually have those things captured in our minds that mean a lot to us. He also mentioned memoirs and how some people judge them as true or fake. They could be written about someone and that someone might not remember every detail written in it but the other person did. If my mom were to write about me I wouldn’t remember half of those things because they are a part of my childhood which I wouldn’t remember clearly but that doesn’t make it fake. But our mind likes to make of stuff also said in John Medinas book “The brain Rules” in chapter “Vision” that when we want to recall something and cant the brain would make a guess by putting all the little pieces together that we can remember. And based on that it would give us a guess to what it is or what the brain wants us to think. There also have been times for me as well that I couldn’t recall something about one of the events I had in my life but my other friends did and thats how we filled in the information we couldn’t recall.
According to Johnathan Gotschall’ chapter “Life Story”, people have their own way of telling a story or thinking about a story. He talk about how age has an effect on our memoires. The older you are getting, the more memoires goes away. Although we might not remember what really happened, our brain has this wonderful habit to make an incomplete story into a good and complete story. How does that happen? Well, after reading this chapter of Gotschall, I found out that although we cannot remember the full story, we use idea from our life experience to put them into that incomplete story. Sometime it does it well and sometime it does not work perfectly. Plenty of time I have tried to tell a story to a friend, but I got stuck and did not know what really happened, because some part of that story had faded away from my memoire. Although at times I do forget some part of the stories but still I manage to complete them, since my brain put together all the part I do remember.
In the chapter life stories from “The Storytelling Animals” by Jonathan Gottschall. Gottschall talks about how we tell our life stories to people weather we remember the story completely or just lying about it, like sometimes we tell our life story to people but we do not remember completely and we have to lie about it but at that time we do not think it is a lie to us that is what exactly happened but we do not remember. As Gottschall mentioned that a villain could be someone hero depending on the story he told them, It all depends on our brain how it works at that time. Sometimes people makeup additional stories to attract more audience, like James Frey’s memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” where he wrote about his life experience and ups and downs in his life, Frey’s memoir received a lot of attention, seeing he was featured on Oprah, he got attention from everyone. Some journalist decided to go in depth of the information provided in his book and he found out that he made up some stories about what happened to him in jail, after that he was criticized by the public when it was not his mistake because he wrote a memoir which allows you to add stuff different than truth to make it more attractive, later he had to go on T.V again and had to apologize for the thing that was not his mistake. In this chapter Gottschall talks about a study that shows that when an ordinary person does something wrong it tries to blame it on someone else or put himself in a situation where he denies to be guilty for what they have done. Yesterday morning when one of my worker was not at work on time and I called her to ask and she said it is her day off and she informed me about it few days ago but I did not remember and I kept denying and when I checked my phone later I saw a note about her day off, I was so embarrassed and decided not to say anything about the whole situation.
Most of our recollections of a past experience are made up lives. Gottschall’s “Life Stories” chapter discusses this subject. We may think that the stories we tell ourselves or others are true but in reality they are not 100% accurate. Gottschall spoke about the differences with memoirs and autobiographies. I didn’t know that memoirs are in a way true but the person makes up stuff along the way to enhance the story in a certain kind of way. Some stories are even complete frauds. I found this interesting because I never really thought about how people can remember such stories so vividly without a couple of lies in there. It makes me wonder how many of my past memories I actually remember and how much of them are actually lies. One example of this was the statement of then president Bush about the 9/11 attack and where he was. One he said didn’t actually coincide with where he really was. He stated that he heard about the first plane before reading a story to children that day but he hadn’t actually heard it until he was telling the stories to the kids. Another example would have to be when researchers asked people what they were doing at the time of the 9/11 attack. When asked a few days after the attack compared to two year later, there was a lot of differences. It shows that we usually fill in the gap we forget with made up lies to make sense out of what happened during a past event.