Stories occupy an important place in human cognition. They were necessitated by the development of language, which created a huge problem. Language is sequential: a word is a sequence of sounds, a sentence is a sequence of words, and a paragraph is a sequence of sentences. But the fundamental architecture of the mind is a pattern. Think of it as a webwork. Here’s a highly schematic visual representation of the structure of the mind:
Each node represents a fact or idea. The arrows show how the ideas connect together in our minds. Those connections are what psychologists call associations. The pink square on the left might represent the fact that the sunset is red; the yellow circle above it might represent the fact that the sky is blue. The cyan circle on the extreme left is the law of physics describing how light is scattered by molecules of gas. It connects to both the pink square and the yellow circle; the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red. Our knowledge and ideas are all connected together in a vast webwork.
The physics of photon scattering is pretty straightforward, but much human knowledge is more complicated, and some of the most important knowledge — about people and their behavior — is exceptionally complicated. Imagine a wise old woman attempting to communicate the complexities of human relationships to younger people. How can she communicate this complex webwork using the sequential medium of language? Here’s the problem in visual form. Each geometric figure represents one event in the story; the arrows show the sequence of events; we call the entire structure the plotline.
Here’s the problem: how does one make a linear story like this translate into something that fits into the webwork shown above? How do we communicate a complex idea in a manner that comports with the organization of the listener’s mind?
The answer arises from the way that the listener initially organizes the events of the story in their mind. We don’t merely memorize the sequence of events as if they were independent of each other. We recognize that Luke Skywalker decided to go to Alderaan with Obi-Wan Kenobi because his aunt and uncle had been killed. He learned how to use the Force and that’s why he was able to destroy the Death Star. We connect pieces of the story together, and in so doing we internally transform it from a linear plot into a pattern looking like this:
Now, we dont’ merely stuff this new bit of webwork into our heads, because our heads would quickly fill up. We must fit it into the existing webwork. The process of fitting a new web fragment into our existing webwork is complicated and requires a great deal of mental reshuffling. It’s rather like rearranging all the stuff in a refrigerator that’s already full so as to accommodate the bottle of milk we just brought home. Moreover, all that re-arranging cannot be interrupted, lest some of the stuff we’re re-arranging gets lost or left out. But we can’t afford to just let our brains go offline while we re-arrange them; a lion might walk up and eat us while we’re occupied re-arranging everything.
This problem arose when mammals — or whomever — invented learning along with play. Learning was easy enough when it was just a matter of trial and error with muscles, but as mammals developed more complex brains with greater learning capacity, they needed a system for distilling their daily experiences into long-term lessons that could be stored compactly and applied to a broad range of situations. To put it another way, they needed to create abstract representations of reality by combining lots of individual experiences into long-term memory.
The solution might seem obvious to you. Mammals had already developed diurnal cycles. Most mammals were active during the day and inactive at night. This was not because they needed to sleep; it was because going out at night was simply too dangerous for an animal that relies heavily on vision to get around. A few mammals reversed the cycle, staying active at night and inactive during daylight hours. It was just a matter of behavioral recruitment to utilize that enforced inactivity to execute a new behavior: sleep.
We do not sleep because we are tired, at least not in the physical sense. Our bodies do not need eight hours of inactivity to regenerate. It’s our minds that require us to sleep. The experiences of the day are too much to keep in short-term memory; we need a period to re-arrange what we learned during the day so that it fits into our existing webwork. Here’s my schematic representation of the process:
This is just the first step: lining up the story with the existing webwork. Note that there are some problems with the alignment: none of the nodes quite fit into place, and there’s a completely new node, a blue circle. Adding the blue circle and setting compromise positions for the other nodes is a big task. The brain must sort through all that stuff, making all those adjustments. That process takes a considerable amount of time, the end result might look like this. I have superimposed the new webwork over the old one so that you can see the changes that resulted:
As you can see, making all these adjustments should take a lot of time, so the brain is kept busy while doing all this work. During this time, you’re asleep, but you’re not completely unaware of what’s happening. You experience a wild and crazy sequence of ideas cascading through your mind as they are rearranged. Imagine yourself as an anthropomorphized refrigerator undergoing a rearrangement in order to fit in the new bottle of milk. You might experience the process as something like this:
Ketchup is gone!
Mayonnaise shoved to the back!
Lettuce pulled forward!
Ketchup is back, but in a new place!
Chocolate milk moved to the right!
Leftover Chinese food is gone!
New bottle of milk appears out of nowhere!
Leftover Chinese food reappears at the front!
Now, if you were Mr. Refrigerator, none of this would make any sense to you. But suppose that you were blessed with the same linguistic module and the same storytelling module that Homo Sapiens has. You will try to make sense of all this by organizing it into a story:
Once upon a time, Kevin Ketchup got mad and stormed out. Mary Mayonnaise was so upset by this that she ran to hide herself while she cried her eyes out. Lucy Lettuce moved away to give her some privacy, but then Kevin Ketchup returned. He had only gone to go to the bathroom. Charlie Chocolate Milk stepped aside so that Kevin could get all the way back to Mary. Lefty Leftovers jumped out, Mike Milk appeared out of nowhere, and then Lefty came back.
This is a refrigerator’s dream. Our dreams are exactly the same. Their source is a wild and crazy sequence of memory shufflings, but story is the fundamental data structure of higher cognition, so we cannot help but cast that experience into the form of a story. Because our minds are pattern-based machines, they automatically force our experiences to fit into existing data structures.
Dreams are just one more example of how we force our experiences to make sense in terms we understand.
Thus, the story is the fundamental data structure of higher cognition.
Objection! We know that mammals dream. But mammals don’t tell stories. Doesn’t this contradict your thesis?
Sure, mammals dream. But they don’t interpret their dreams as stories. That’s a human behavior.
[Link to film of moving objects that were interpreted as a story].