In May of this year I presented some of my research at the annual Narrative Conference (ISSN) with a paper called "Causality as Mnemonic Accommodation." Because the conference was online only, all of the presentations were pre-recorded and uploaded three weeks prior to conference time. When we went live, each panelist offered a 2 minute summary of another panelist's video so the rest of the session could be given to Q&A. I had a great time and got some positive feedback. Because of this unique format, I made the following video.
The video is 10 minutes long and the transcript below is 1385 words. Enjoy.
Emplotment
facilitates memory. Aristotle said life stories and histories lack coherence
but a unified sequence of causality is easy to remember. It may not always be
memorable, but it is altogether rememberable. Homer’s Odyssey has a
chronological fabula because our minds can remember that storyline easily. There’s
a natural logic that makes the event sequence cohere. Now, contrast that with
the events of Joyce’s Ulysses. If the fabula of Ulysses is whatever one happens
to remember after reading the novel (which is Mieke Bal’s definition) then the
fabula of Ulysses is rarely chronological. Portions of that novel are certainly
memorable, but the overall sequence as a whole is not easily rememberable.
Why does causality enable coherence? My answer
to that question begins with a brief survey of cognitive science on remembering
time and temporal context.
[SLIDE 2] For the purposes of disambiguation, I should
clarify that previous research in cognitive narratology, by and large, has focused
on mental processes during the reception of a discourse. How do personal
memories help readers fill gaps in the narrative and build mental models of
story world situations? How do scripts and schemas and predictability (based on
familiarity with statistical patterns) enable the reader to participate in
co-constructing the story while engaged with the text? In contrast, my presentation
today is about how we remember entire storylines coherently, after the fact. How
do we reconstruct a temporal sequence from a narrative without consulting the
text? How do we remember stories days, weeks, months, or years after reception?
In my research so far, I have not found narratologists pursuing questions like
this.
[SLIDE 3] Sequences challenge our memory, especially
sequences that are unfamiliar and arbitrary. Children sing the alphabet song countless
times before they know it. Learning numbers gets easier once the pattern repeats
and times tables are also predictable but complete mastery of spelling requires
years of familiarity with the patterns of a written language. When older kids
need to learn sequenced information, teachers use acronyms like PEMDAS or they
set information to music. Professional actors spend weeks of daily rehearsal
learning their lines. Homer used rhythm and meter and other techniques to help perform
his recitations. At the upper limits of human performance, highly trained “memory
athletes” compete to memorize 100 random words or digits or multiple decks of
cards. These illustrations prove one simple point. The challenge of remembering
information sequentially always stretches our cognitive limits.
[SLIDE 4] The brain’s mnemonic limitations have been scientifically
measured. In a famous 1956 paper, “The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,”
psychologist George A Miller determined that most human subjects could hold
approximately six to eight “items” in mind at once in what cognitive scientists
refer to as “working memory” (a.k.a. “short term memory”) but that same capacity
expands when information is organized in some way. Miller’s subjects could
memorize seven two-digit numbers about as easily as seven one-digit numbers,
and thus recall fourteen digits. Miller called this “chunking.” Recall seven
words and you’ve recalled dozens of letters. Joshua Foer remembers a sixteen-digit
string (12/07/1941/09/11/2001) just by thinking “Pearl Harbor and 9/11.” The
same kind of chunking (a.k.a. “information compression”) also explains
memorized acronyms, familiar spelling patterns, expertise in chess, and even the
cognitive schemas we use for gap filling. Unfortunately, none of this helps us
remember narrative emplotments. What Miller’s research does helpfully
demonstrate is that human remembering capacity is enhanced when mnemonic
content happens to be organized.
[SLIDE 5] Cognitive science also tells us that remembering
is constructive. According to memory researchers from F. C. Bartlett to Daniel
Schacter, the term “constructive remembering” indicates (1) that we typically recall
“bits and pieces” of information and (2) that each act of remembering requires
us to reassemble those bits and pieces in order to “constructively remember”
one coherent whole. So, for example, you might remember Beowulf fought three
monsters, but which ones? In which order? And how do you know? Without
referring to the text, our minds can only work with whatever pieces we happen
to recall. If we need more than the magic number seven, we are pushing the
limit… but it does of course help when one bit can remind you of another.
[SLIDE 6] The final obstacle to overcome is time. How
do we reconstruct memories chronologically? How does one mentally reconstruct a
timeline? According to William Friedman (1993), remembering the time of an
event depends upon whether or not recalled information happens to include some
aspect of temporal context. If you drove to the airport and met someone at their
gate, that memory belongs before 9/11. If a big birthday party took place in
your old living room, you can date that event to before you moved out. If you had
a big gathering of friends and no one was wearing masks, that was at least a
year ago. Even false memories with specific temporal context can be self-sequencing
in constructive remembering. But whether true or false, memories which do not
imply their own sequence (in relation to some other memory) are extremely
unlikely to be sequenced during constructive remembering. At least one recalled
event must remind you of what happened before and/or after itself. Otherwise,
we are back to rehearsal, memorization, and familiarity, none of which are
granted via narrative emplotment.
[SLIDE 7] On that note, we return to causality.
Although Friedman’s research did not examine causality, per se, we can
demonstrate that a chain of causalities works according to Friedman’s model. Recalling
one single cause or effect evokes the rest of the chain, which maximizes
recall, and consequences logically imply their own sequence. That facilitates mnemonic
reconstruction. Recalling for example that Paris sees Helen in Sparta can
remind us that Troy burns to the ground. In our minds, one domino knocks down
all the others. It’s not whether Paris arguably *did* cause Troy to burn, but
if our minds once encoded that information as such, we can utilize the inherent
structure. Thus, causality accommodates our natural cognitive limitations for constructively
remembering a storyline.
[SLIDE 8] To examine this more precisely, consider E.
M. Forster’s classic formulation, “The king died and then the queen died of
grief.” Recalling the queen’s death without recalling her grief provides
too little information. Did the king also die? Which one of them died first?
The pieces must all be recalled before working memory can rebuild the whole puzzle.
Without recalling her grief, we must either recall the words “and then” from
the original discourse, or we must recall the fact that we once read about
these two deaths in the same sentence. We can labor greatly to sequence these
events and not achieve coherence. In contrast, recalling the grief can
remind you of the griever, the cause of her grief, and its result. The one bit
of recall implies all the others, and causality provides structure—explaining
the unity. Aristotle said this is what narrative requires. Bal said it may not
always happen. Both are correct.
[SLIDE 9] In summary, emplotments convey coherence because
causality optimizes the constructive remembering of chronological sequences. An
authorial narrativization organizes information in a way that happens to enable
human remembering but causality must be perceived by the reader, encoded into long
term memory, and later utilized by working memory. From the author’s vision, to
reception, to remembering, this is how emplotment works cognitively. If we
consider the days before written literature, when stories without plots were more
likely forgotten, stories featuring causality had a survival advantage. In the
evolutionary sense, it would seem, storytelling developed by natural selection
to favor content which accommodates our cognitive limitations.
[SLIDE 10] Of course, further questions remain. Is Plot
unique in this way or do other conventions accommodate chronological
remembering as well?? Well, characters demonstrate developmental progress, settings
register movement across distance, and conflict indicates a disruption of
expectations (the traumatic loss of potential). The memories of such content
may therefore imply their own temporal sequence. Further research is pending,
but it seems possible that all four of these narrative foci have evolved for
the same reason. If so, then perhaps all of storytelling originated as the
natural byproduct of attempting to remember actual human events. Perhaps story is,
quite simply, what memory makes after paying attention to change.
No comments:
Post a Comment