Narration-Direction-Memory

Will Self: Are humans evolving beyond the need to tell stories?

This is the part of brain concerned with way-finding, but it's also strongly implicated in memory formation; neuroscientists are now discovering that at the cognitive level all three abilities - memory, location, and narration - are intimately bound up. This, too, is hardly surprising: key for humans, throughout their long pre-history as hunter-gatherers, has been the ability to find food, remember where food is and tell the others about it. It's strange, of course, to think of Pride and Prejudice or Ulysses as simply elaborations upon our biologically determined inclination to give people directions - but then it's perhaps stranger still to realise that sustained use of satellite navigation, combined with absorbing all our narrative requirements in pictorial rather written form, may transform us into miserable and disoriented amnesiacs.

3 comments:

Story:
Will Self contrasts (wrongly) picture and story. (See me pointing to Aborigine song lines).

Direction:
I don't drive but I have been present in a vehicle when satellite navigation was operating. I recall there being voice as well as graphic elements. It is an occasion of mixed media. Pictures are rarely consumed in monosensual environments.

Memory:
To give direction one must also be able to know how to receive directions.

And so for day 2325
25.04.2013