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Monday, January 22, 2018

Story Telling - Who Knew?

I love stories - I'll bet you do too. The evidence is pretty clear. We sat around fires for hundreds of thousands of years and told each other stories. We did it in rhythm and rhyme, with poetry and music and dance. It is how we formed ourselves into families and tribes of shared values. It is how we passed on wisdom and knowledge. Now neuroscientists are trying to figure out just how this storytelling thing works.

When we interact with other people, we create a storyline in our head about them. We are ourselves this one continuous story line. We plan ahead by creating a story into the future. We empathize with others by participating in their story. One thing is for sure, those Artificial Intelligence things we are creating do not tell stories - at least not yet. And other animals do not seem to have much of this story telling ability. Dolphins may, but other animals do not seem to be that complex.

This entry is all about stories or narratives. Let me tell you a couple.

You may not realize this, but that sacred book of sacred books, the Bible, is a collection of oral stories that people loved and shared for hundreds or thousands of years before they were written down. They were used in rituals and celebrations to create our people, our tribe. Why do you think the psalms were sung? Rhythm and rhyme made stories much easier to remember. The New Testament is the same, but those stories were written down in just a few decades, because we knew how to write. But, remember, MOST people could not read, and had never even seen a book or parchment. That is why the oral storytelling was so important. It was why they gathered together - to share the stories.

Creation
The creation story is about origins and values. You know that Genesis tells the story of creation. This is the tale that the Church used for millennia to "prove" that the world was 7,000 years old. The Jewish people created these tales to give themselves a shared understanding of the meaning of life. If the deity was all powerful and wonderful, why are there are so many BAD things about human life and death. Why is there evil in the world? What sort of deity would condemn its beloved children to death? The story of Adam and Eve helped explain that. The deity set things up perfectly - the garden of Eden provided everything humans needed. But we sinned - we offended the almighty, and this vale of tears is the result.

Most people do not know this, but there are TWO creation stories in Genesis. The first one is the majestic tale of the 7 days of creation. The 7 days, of course, gave rise to our week, and to the Jewish veneration of the 7th day - the Sabbath - as a day of rest. The second creation story follows immediately in the second chapter of Genesis. There are no seven days here - God created Adam, MAN, first. Then he gave the earth rain, and created Eden, and caused plants to grow there. Then God created a partner for the man. The rest of this story is about the fall from Eden - the "original sin" of later Christian or Pauline theology.

A Missionary Story
In the 1960s, an old friend of mine was a newly commissioned missionary. He was sent to Africa to the Maasai people. He was excited to have this opportunity to bring the good news to this people. The Maasai had not really had the gospel preached to them to this point. They were the fertile field waiting for the seed. Every Saturday, my friend went out to a small town with an interpreter, and he began to tell the stories of salvation. He told the story of creation, about the fall of Adam and Eve, and the many other tales in the Old Testament. We have Noah, and the Exodus, and slavery in Egypt, and Moses, and the promised land of Israel, and many other tales. As the Bible stories have it, the Jewish people are the chosen people of God. When he came to the New Testament, he told about the birth of the Savior, about his life and his stories. He spoke about the promise of forgiveness, and about resurrection.

Each week the crowd of listeners would grow larger. He spoke of his church and religion, and he invited people to join him - but no one would come forward. He began to feel despondent. He mentioned to his translator and some of the elders that he was going to stop coming. They told him, "NO, you have to keep coming. We love your stories?" He was the Saturday night entertainment in this small town on the Serengeti. He said, "But no one ever wants to join my church." They replied, "Oh, those are YOUR stories". We have our own stories." He was dumbfounded. All this time, and he had not heard of their stories. So they proceeded to explain to him how the deity, a woman, had given birth to all living things. They explained how the deity gave all of the cattle on earth to the Maasai. They explained how the jealous wife had broken the promise of resurrection, and why death was in the world. They told the story of how houses moved with the Maasai at one time and the evil deed that caused that to stop. So, they had their own creation story, their own fall from grace. Their stories explained how the Maasai were God's chosen people.

As it turns out, every people has an origin story, and a story of how evil came to be. When there are multiple deities, the problem is a bit easier - the deities generally do not get along well. We have a shred of that in the Judeo Christian heritage with angels and devils, but they are all subject to the supreme being. These stories help a people become a tribe, an entity of mutual commitment and belonging because they have a shared mythology - a shared history of values and events that give their life meaning.

Family Stories
My lovely wife's dad, Wayne, loved to tell stories. And our kids always loved hearing them. When he died, we all gathered in our living room and repeated his stories to each other. We still remember this fine, gentle man, and his stories about growing up in a log cabin, about the first automobile, about using the farm horses to get the car out of the ditch, about fishing with dynamite - and many, many more. His stories gave us a feeling for what it was like to grow up in northern Minnesota in the 1920s.

Disney
We have a preeminent story teller in our world - Disney! This was a surprise to me, but Disney has a chief scientist! That person's mandate is to keep an eye on where things are going, and make sure that Disney has a hand in it. I attended a talk he gave in about 1991. It's hard to believe that the WWW is less than 30 years old. The internet was around for a while - but it consisted of some arcane languages, and you communicated with people via commands of various types. CompuServe was one of the first commercial providers that tried to make it easier to use. And the University of MN invented something called a Gopher - if you used it, it would create a usable structure or index of the information that each internet address had available. It was a great boon to research.

And then came Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and the WWW!
https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/

He invented this whole idea of linking, and naming, and graphics, and the whole ball of wax called the World Wide Web. HTML was a simple way to build formatted information that was really, really easy to use. URL gave us a standard way to identify websites. And HTTP a standard protocol for the retrieval of linked information across the internet.

At this talk the chief scientist told us that Disney's whole task and focus is on telling stories. And they know that people love stories - we have been listening to them for thousands of years. So he asked the audience - what do you think of this World Wide Web business? Is this CB radio? Here today, gone tomorrow? Or is it FIRE! Will it change everything? Disney thought then that it was FIRE! He predicted that within 15 years, everyone on the planet would have a hand-held gadget, with live video, and simultaneous translation, for the price of a paperback book. Well, he was a bit optimistic about the price, but you can, today, buy a FIRE from Amazon that will do all of that, for less than $50.

I'll add more stories later. I've been sitting on this draft for a few months. I'll come up with some more stories later! Hang in there - remember, I'm pulling for you.

Cognitive Science and Mindfulness

That last little piece in the this blog was pretty good, but I just found a wonderful 'little' essay that does it even better. See:
https://aeon.co/essays/are-you-sleepwalking-now-what-we-know-about-mind-wandering?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=98d44d51c9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_21&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-98d44d51c9-68782273

I just posted this to Facebook, hoping that a few more than 8 people will read it. And thank you very much for reading here as well.

I have been reading a lot about neuroscience lately - since I read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman. This essay is a wonderful compilation of the latest neuroscience research, with a philosophical cast to it. It gives me hope. Realizing we ourselves and mostly everyone else are not really rational most of the time is one thing - finding a way to actually do something about that is a tremendous insight. Guess what - mindfulness. I had the good fortune to spend a decade or so in an institution that forced me to do this for 30 minutes each day - I continue it at a somewhat shorter pace - but it is enormously powerful. This essay lays out the biological research, and a philosophical framework for understanding that and doing something with it.

If you find that interesting and exciting, read it. If you can't get your wandering brain to pay attention to the end of this note - you REALLY need to read it!

I just wonder how long it will take for this to become a fundamental part of our education and literature understanding of human kind. With the type of fearless leaders we have now, we may be at this a long time.

Hang in there - I'm pulling for you, and we really are all in this together.