A recent New Yorker article about the biological nature of thought had an interesting aside that I want to explore a bit as it implies narratives are not merely artificially constructed aspects of literature or art, but are instead a fundamental component of memory. (You can find the article here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-science-of-mind-reading.)
In discussing the nature of memories, the article describes an experiment by Christopher Baldassano that involved putting people in fMRI machines and having them watch episodes of “Sherlock.” Baldassano predicted that brain areas associated with things like color processing would be changing all the time, while other areas, associated with things like a particular character, would be stable (so long as that character was present). This all proved to be true. What he discovered, though, was that another area of the brain also remained stable… until the show switched scenes.
Another study, this one by Asieh Zadbood, asked subjects to narrate aloud the “Sherlock” scenes they’d watched, and this narration was then played back to other people who had not seen the show. What they found was that both groups showed activation in the same “scene memory” portion of the brain. As the article states, “the scenes existed independently of the show, as concepts in people’s heads” (p. 33).
Taken together this suggests that while we do certainly process discrete sensory input, we make sense of that input by forming it into “scenes” that, taken together, form larger “scripts.” Some scenes are simple, such as the chunking of the “navigate the airport” script into the “get your boarding pass” scene, followed by the “get through security” scene, and then the “go to your gate” scene, and so forth. In our day to day lives, these scenes are bounded in any number of ways. They can be physically bounded (going from one room to the next), or bounded by an event (the doorbell rings), or, I would imagine, by a conflict (my wife and I got in a fight) or a resolution (we made up).
In other words, stories are not merely things we impose on the world in the name of literature and art, but are instead key structures of our memories themselves. Furthermore, it seems to me that such memory forms are actually more durable than almost any other. We may quickly forget the colors or the exact words of something like The Lord of the Rings movies, but we do remember the basic “script” (Frodo needs to go throw the ring in the volcano), and from this script we can reconstruct many of the scenes quite well, even if the sensory detail has been lost. The narrative script, in other words, remains as the foundational framework of our memories; it is the way we understand that event.
The article later talks about how we use such scripts to navigate new situations. When we encounter something unfamiliar, we either “lump” it into an existing scene or script (navigating one airport is much like navigating another), or we “split” it into a new category, and devise a new script. This, of course, reminds me of Piaget’s notion of assimilation versus accommodation. We generally “prefer” to use existing scripts, so we try to lump (assimilate) new experiences and see them as validating our existing narrative worldview. However, at times things are just too strange, and we’re forced to split (accommodate), and create a new narrative to make sense of this new experience.
The point of all this, though, is simply that when we talk about things like narrative frames, we’re not describing intellectual abstractions, or some poli-sci theory being imposed on the world. Instead, we’re talking about the fundamental way we process, remember, and navigate the world.
Rhetoric & Running 