In 2011, I wrote a book, still unpublished, about how stories work called The Scheherazade Code. This series of posts draws on that book. The last post discussed the way stories shape our sense of the world. This post describes why we are so susceptible to stories.

Stories are powerful because our brains are narrative engines. We are ‘hard-wired’ to make and respond to stories. According to neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, the left hemisphere of the brain houses what he calls ‘the Interpreter’. The Interpreter’s job is to make sense of all the impressions and stimuli we constantly receive, as well as of our actions, even where they are prompted by unconscious stimuli. The Interpreter weaves this together into a coherent narrative about why things are happening as they are. Our brain hungers for pattern and meaning. When there are gaps and facts that don’t fit, the Interpreter keeps the story seamless, even where necessary inventing memories of things that never happened.

Many brain areas are required for story-making. Studies of brain injury that affect people’s ability to construct or understand narrative have identified three distinct areas in addition to the brain’s language areas. Like the Interpreter, the language areas are in the left hemisphere. Narrative seems to involve the limbic system, particularly the amygdala and the hippocampus, (involved in emotion and memory). It also involves parts of the frontal lobes (involved in assigning meaning to events) and prefrontal lobes (involved in regulating impulses). People with damage to these different areas experience different impacts on narrative.

With modern scanning technology, it is possible to watch a brain listening to a story. Different brain regions light up when a new character enters the tale, when an action is performed, when a cause is described and so on. We use many of the same parts of the brain when we listen to a story as we would if we were performing the action ourselves. The brain areas that would be involved if we kick a ball are active when someone kicks a ball in the story.

We understand a tale by mentally simulating events of the story world. This is true whether we are reading a book or watching a movie. The narrative machinery, which must have evolved before we invented written language let alone motion pictures, seems to underlie any kind of story-telling. Whatever way it is presented to us, in an important sense we become the protagonists in the tale. Moreover, when we hear a story, our patterns of brain activity become aligned with and mirror those of other listeners and of the speaker. The simulation of the events of a narrative that we run in our brains is not simply a passive inner movie. We construct it actively and predict what we think is coming next.

The narrative machinery of our brain may be linked to our ability to recall memories. Most of us have little or no memory of events before we were around age two or three. This may be linked to the age at which children are able to organise their memories into a narrative. Research shows that the age of first memory seems to be related to how complex the conversations are between mother and infant. Interestingly, while the average age of earliest memory is around 3.5 years in Europeans, it is 2.7 years for Maoris, and 4.8 years in East Asians. Might this be to do with the observed fact that Maoris have a rich story-telling tradition? And also that East Asians discuss feelings about the past with their children less frequently than Europeans?

Why and when did humans evolve this capacity for making and telling stories? The most obvious reason is that it evolved along with language to allow people to share skills and information and to forge social bonds.
My own speculation is that the narrative brain was built on the machinery that predators use to hunt. A predator has to be able to recognise its prey and to navigate rapidly the space that separates it from the prey to make the kill. To do this, predators make mental maps of their environment. A predator can kill faster and more efficiently if it doesn’t have to process information about everything it sees. Instead, its brain creates a model of what it is looking for, and only when its eye sees something that matches the search image model are the hunting routines activated. Other things in the environment are ignored.

This emphasis on important things, and ignoring of unimportant things, is exactly what stories do. Exactly the same thing happens with expert observers. Trafton Drew, a psychologist at Harvard medical school, asked radiologists to inspect chest scans for signs of lung nodules, a possible sign of cancer. Unbeknownst to them, he had superimposed on some of the scans an image of a gorilla. Astonishingly, he found that 80% of these highly trained observers missed the gorilla. Radiologists’ search image is geared to cancer growths, not gorillas.

The gorilla is in the upper right.

The brain region seems to be involved in both navigation and in narrative. This structure is the hippocampus. It is involved in making long-term memory and storing our mental maps. When the hippocampus is damaged, we have difficulty remembering where we’ve been or how to get where we’re going. London taxi drivers are required to master “The Knowledge”, a detailed grasp of the road layout of London, before they are licenced to drive the famous black cabs. And fascinatingly, they have a part of their hippocampus enlarged compared to the rest of us, perhaps as a result of all that studying of maps. The hippocampus and amygdala are involved in our ability to create and relate to stories. It is a fascinating speculation then that our story-making ability evolved from, and still shares features with, the much older machinery for making mental maps.

I have just sent off my entry to the First Drafts Competition run by Myriad publishers. Five thousand words of mayhem. The 2016 competition, open to writers who never published a novel or collection of short stories, has a Crime theme. The prize is a week-long writing retreat in the luxurious surroundings of West Dean College near Chichester, as well as detailed editorial feedback from the judges and six months’ mentoring from a Myriad author.

My aim last year was to make 2015 the year I got some short stories published. I achieved that. Now my aim is that 2016 should be the year I find an agent or a publisher. Winning the competition would be a big step towards that. By the way, I didn’t get short listed for the Costa Short Story competition.

If you want to enter, the competition closes 31st March.

This week’s chapter of my serialised book  A Prize of Sovereigns  has the story reaching a turning point in the war between two rival medieval princes. And that turning point is technological. Technology has always played a major role in war.

When medieval England perfected the longbow, it transformed the nature of war. Armed with one of these long-range armour-piercing weapons, an archer could kill an armoured knight. The invention not only changed forever the military balance of forces between England and its adversary, France, it changed the code of war. A commoner could now kill a nobleman, a deep shock to the psyche of French chivalry. Until then, the most fearsome weapon of war had been mounted shock combat, the province of the aristocratic knights on their heavy horse.

Incidentally, mounted shock combat depended on another technological change: the invention of the stirrup. Until the stirrup, which braces the rider, any attempt to charge the enemy at speed with lances resulted in the mounted warrior falling off backwards at the moment of collision. Before stirrups, horses were only a means of delivering the warrior fast to the battlefield.

One of the rival princes in A Prize of Sovereigns, Aurthur, reasons that his army is at a disadvantage because it does not have longbows of comparable range and power to his enemy, King Byrom of Ceweth. He decides that he must again change the balance of forces, and warfare itself, with a weapon of even greater capacity. This passage shows the reaction of his chancellor, Gustaff:

“A new weapon? What is it?”

“Bombards.”

“Bombards, Majesty? The cannon makes a loud bang and frightens the horses, to be sure. But it is an unreliable thing, as likely to explode and kill our own men as the enemy. And it has not the accuracy of a bow.”

“And a bow once had not the range it does today, until Ceweth’s archers perfected it. I have engaged an artificer from the east who assures me he has a way of smelting iron of greater purity, and of more precisely casting and boring cannon. His demonstrations show me that we can make a cannon less prone to destroy itself; and one that will hurl a ball further and more predictably. All I need is time for him to perfect the cannon, and build enough of them. Cannonade will be to war in the future what massed longbows were to Byrom’s father. We will be able to destroy the Ceweth army before they can engage us.”

The role of technology in military and political change is a subtext of A Prize of Sovereigns. The chapter also illustrates another subtext – how power works. To succeed as a ruler, the scholarly Authur has had to learn to become as cunning and ruthless as his rival, Byrom. He shares with Gustaff his intention to betray Marta, the Joan of Arc figure in the story. Gustaff is astounded at the way the young prince has become a king. Aurthur responds:

“It may be as you say, Gods willing. But, just between us, I mourn the boy who has gone. He was gentle, and loved the creations of art and philosophy. He was innocent of the wiles of strategy, and the vicious compromises of statecraft.”

Kingship exacts a terrible price on Aurthur. Perhaps that is a choice faced by everyone who wields power – to gain it at the cost of their humanity.

In 2011, I wrote a book, still unpublished, about how stories work called The Scheherazade Code. This series of posts draws on that book. The last post discussed the way stories shape our sense of self. This second post deals with how stories construct our sense of the world.

Scheherazade told 1001 stories to keep herself alive. The king was entranced and fell in love with her. Spin doctors, marketers and hoaxers use this same story code. If we crack the code then we can’t be hoodwinked: even by ourselves.

The history of moral panics about children illustrates the pervasiveness of narrative.

‘Thus entertained and equipped, the wide army of the children of the poor are sent on their way to take part in the great battle of life, with false views, false impressions, and foul aims.’

So said the Edinburgh Review a century and a half ago, railing against the moral influence of the Victorian ‘penny dreadfuls’. These were serialised and often gruesome pamphlets, featuring retellings of crimes, arrests and punishments, along with romances of lawlessness, and Gothic horror tales. A hundred years later, in the United States, the book reviewer of the Chicago Daily News in 1940 raised the same standard against children’s comics, writing:

‘Their crude blacks and reds spoils a child’s natural sense of colour; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories. Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the “comic” magazine.’

Modern readers will recall almost identical moral panics about the impact of satanic videos. Later came the contemporary scares about the corrupting effect of the Internet and social media on our children. The medium and the technology changes, from penny dreadfuls to the Internet, but the story persists through the centuries. We fear the way youth culture corrupts our children, and we fear the changeling children who succumb. This persistent moral panic is an example of a social narrative. The story lives a life of its own in our culture, morphing a little to fit the age, but essentially unchanged. Understanding how and why we make these stories has implications for everything from how we live our lives to how we run our world.

The rules for making stories are like a code. I call it the Scheherazade Code, after the famous narrator of the 1001 Arabian Nights stories. Decoded, it gives us critical distance and more control over the impact narratives have on us. There are many devices for structuring the meaning of a story. Among the most common devices are the ‘Alien’, the ‘Nudge’, the ‘Scales’, and the ‘Frame’.

The demon children story, which I referred to at the beginning, illustrates a standard device: the ‘Alien’. In an ‘Alien’ story, the subject is rendered ‘other’, different from us, and makes no call on our sympathies. Wartime propaganda often uses the device to demonise the enemy. But it also recurs in stories about any groups we fear. The British media, for example, uses the ‘Alien’ to describe not only ‘feral children’ but also immigrants. A Daily Mail article in March 2009 about illegal immigrants to the UK talked of a ‘relentless rise’ and a ‘massive surge’. No longer people, these immigrants are now an inundation.

The ‘Nudge’ is a device beloved by the advertising industry in its narratives of hope and fear. The ‘Nudge’ works by loading a story with an embedded cargo of other stories. This cargo surreptitiously nudges our emotional response to the facts of the main story. The metaphor of inundation in the Daily Mail article about illegal immigrants functions as a ‘Nudge’. Car advertisers combine the technical facts about the vehicle, with a nudge towards the sexual prowess, the power, the freedom, and the lifestyle the car embodies. Antibacterial soaps and handwashes are marketed by nudging mothers’ fear of the dangers surrounding their children. ‘You may not see germs. But they are everywhere’ is how an advert for Dettol begins. Advertisers don’t just tell us that soap cleans, but that it protects us from hidden perils.

The ‘Nudge’ and the ‘Alien’ are obvious ways in which the meaning of facts can be put in a different light, changing the way they are read. The ‘Scales’ operates rather differently. This device appears to offer the reader fairness and balance. It is often used in news reporting to ensure coverage of both sides of a debate. Ostensibly nothing could be more balanced than that, and indeed it often functions that way. However, the device can also be deployed mischievously. A false scale may be used, to tip the reader’s impression towards one view. The easiest way of doing this is to pit a strong account against an opponent who only mildly disagrees. Or a controversy can be manufactured where one doesn’t really exist. This is particularly misleading in reporting on scientific issues. The false Scales device is often found in portrayal of the climate change debate. Among climate scientists there is now consensus that human activity is causing global warming. But when news reports give equal weight to the climate scientists and to the deniers, the reader is led to believe that the issue is still unresolved.

Perhaps the most subtle of the devices is the ‘Frame’. Stories, just like pictures, depend for their meaning on how they are framed. The photographer can change the way we read a picture by what is included in the composition and how it is cropped. A storyteller may do the same. So, it’s important how much of context we are given. This goes to the heart of how narrative works. It has been said that ‘facts are all things that objectively exist; truth is the connection between them’. By changing the framing of a story we radically alter the connections between facts and thus the sense of what that truth is.

Street Photography Composition Lesson #6: Framing

The public debate about the English riots of August 2011 provides a fascinating example. The mass media at the time described ‘an orgy of violence’ by ‘gangs of teenagers’. But the facts were perplexing and led to varying narratives afterwards. The liberal press, predictably, focussed on underlying problems of poverty and marginalisation. But if they were riots, what was the political grievance? Of those arrested, 45% of charges were for burglary and only 26% for violent disorder, not what would be expected in a riot. If they were simply criminality, ‘shopping with a crowbar’, as the conservative media suggested, why was there so little involvement of criminal gangs?

Press coverage of the disturbances, both liberal and conservative, largely focussed on the characteristics of the social underclass. This way of framing the story cast it easily into a variant of the ‘Alien’. The perpetrators were not people like us. But there were a few notable exceptions to this framing, which located the problem in a much wider context. Peter Oborne, writing in the Daily Telegraph on 11 August 2011, argued that ‘the moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom’. He drew into his frame the public outrage at bankers’ bonuses, Members of Parliament fiddling their expenses, and the misdemeanours of footballers and other celebrities. The acquisitive consumerism that fuelled the looting of trainers and wide screen televisions, according to Oborne was connected to the looting of the public purse by bankers and MPs. In his framing of the story, the subject becomes society at large, and the example set by those at the top.

Since we naturally turn everything we know into stories, we can’t escape their influence by an appeal to the ‘true facts’. But we can use the rules of story making, the Scheherazade Code, to remain critical and sceptical and to search out different, and perhaps better, stories.

In 2011, I wrote a book, still unpublished, about how stories work, called The Scheherazade Code. This series of posts draws on that book. This first post deals with how stories shape our sense of self.

Stories are the machines through which we make sense of our world. Almost everything we think we know is a story. Even our sense of our own identity. Narrative is probably the oldest form in which humans have stored and transmitted wisdom. Our brains are ‘hard-wired’ to make and respond to stories – we are Homo Narrans, the story-making ape.
Stories are powerful because they help us organise things. They tell us what goes with what, what things mean, why they happen and how to assign praise and blame. Narratives are devices for organising events in a coherent way; they describe cause and effect; they lay out a timeline with beginning middle and end; they carry a judgement about the meaning of those events and how we should see them. Stories may illuminate and inspire, or they may deceive.

A story is more than a set of facts. The facts are arranged in a particular way. And there is more than one way to do this. This is important for how we tell and respond to stories. Stories highlight what is important in a situation and fade-out the unimportant.

Consider this statement.

‘The chief died. A month later, his wife died. The harvest was poor.’

This is a sequence of events, a diary list of a year, not a story. Now consider this.

‘The chief died. A month later, his wife died of grief.”

This second set of statements is more story-like, because it offers a reason for the sequence. It makes sense of them. And it invites our empathy: the wife died because of her grief at the chief’s death. Narrative is how we order and give meaning to unordered information. Note that it omits the fact about the harvest since it is not relevant to the story. This is an important feature of stories. They draw our attention to what is important in a situation and fade-out the unimportant. Of course, with a few more statements we could tell a different story, connecting different facts.

‘The chief died. The tribe fell into disarray, feuding over who was to succeed him. They neglected the fields, and the harvest was poor.’

In this case, the death of the chief’s wife is not included. The story has now become one about politics rather than about a personal relationship.
The same facts can be narrated in very different ways. This feature of stories makes them powerful and compelling ways of understanding the world, but it also opens them to manipulation. We can be fooled by stories. We can even fool ourselves.

The ‘I’ that each of us senses ourselves to be is also a constant narrative creation: a story which weaves together what is happening, why it happened, who is to blame and who should be praised. The philosopher Paul Ricouer argued that we make sense of own identities in much the same way as we make sense of characters in stories. We understand characters by way of the plot that ties together what happens to them, the aims and projects they adopt, and what they actually do. Similarly I make sense of my own identity by telling myself a story about my life. We are constantly bombarded by an inchoate mix of sensations, stimuli, motivations and thoughts. From these we weave a coherent story with ourselves as protagonist. Much of our motivation may be subconscious, things of which we’re not even aware. We fill in the gaps of the things below the level of consciousness with rationalizations that keep the narrative seamless.

This has important implications for our everyday lives. Narratives have to be simple. Their purpose is to select facts and throw what is important into sharp relief. By implication, what is unimportant to a story lies in shadow or is omitted altogether. In pursuit of a coherent story about our own lives and who we are, we may miss out quite a lot. We may trick other people. We may even trick ourselves. The collision of fictional and autobiographical stories is where the risk of trickery arises. We buy into other narratives. Advertisers are extremely good at selling us products through selling us self-images and aspirations.

Of course, our own life stories are not like the stories of fiction. Fictional stories have beginning middle and end, whereas ours are ongoing. We don’t know how ours are going to end. In fictional stories we understand why things are happening and what their consequences are. We don’t always know this about our own life stories. Stuff just happens. But as we pick out the elements of our own stories from the rushing torrent of life, currents begin to nudge them, pick them up and sweep them into a more stable flow. There is a reassurance once we can relate our own stories to those of literature, or those of people we admire. We develop a sense that we know why things are happening, and where things are heading. Fiction helps us structure autobiography. The world is full of Elizabeth Bennets reassessing their opinions of their Mr Darcy.

On Saturday, I attended the launch of the anthology of short stories, published by a literary magazine. The event happened in a pub in London. My connection with the magazine is pretty tenuous. My short story Zhuang Zhu’s Dream appears in their current issue. I engaged in a to-and-fro with the editor, revising the story before it was accepted. Other than that, I knew nobody there.

I’m not by nature a gregarious person, and pushing myself forward like this is my idea of hell. But, sticking my courage to the screwing point, I decided it was the Sort-of-Thing-I-Should-Do. It was a good opportunity to meet the team, and to talk perhaps to other contributors. When you’re a published author, you attend Literary Events. It goes with the territory.

I wondered whether I could get round my terror by going as a character. I could play the author, I thought, and perhaps I should polish my Literary Conversation before I attended. Maybe I should prepare some clever remarks about the Arc-of-the-Story in modern African fiction. I had, after all, just finished an eight-week course on creative writing run by the University of Iowa. So I was well up on the terminology for the Craft Skills of Character, Description, Setting, Dialogue, and so on. But the reality is I’m the kind of person who at parties avoids the People-Who-Know-Everyone, and seeks out the other Person-Lurking-in-a-Corner-Who-also-Knows-No-one.

I asked a friend in my writing group, who is also an actress, how I should go about playing an author. “Play yourself,” she advised.

Things never work out as you expect. What I expected was some booze, some standing around, and a quick speech for the launch. What I got was an organised floorshow. Fifty folding chairs squeezed into the sweaty basement of a Bloomsbury pub, facing a postage-stamp sized stage. So there was neither need, nor possibility, of talking to anyone. The bar wasn’t serving. I squeezed, late, into the only vacant chair.

Well, I say it was an organised show. The contracted musicians hadn’t made it. At the last moment, two others agreed to step in with voice and keyboard. The singer had a cold, the music kept blowing off the stand when the door opened, and the amp had a dull throb. Apparently, someone dropped it earlier in the evening. So, in the end, they unplugged the amp. Then Katie Lumsden read a story from the anthology. Next came a one-act play for two characters. More cancellations – the contracted male actor had backed out at the last minute, because he’d been offered a paying job. Which seemed fair enough to me. But it did mean that the stand-in didn’t know his lines. The playwright also hadn’t turned up, which was perhaps a mercy for him. Last up before the interval was Aliya Whitely, talking about her career as a novelist.

At the interval, I saw my moment. I approached the editor. I extended my hand. “Hello,” I said, “I’m Neil.”

There was no flash of recognition. “Neil MacDonald,” I added.

“Ah,” he replied.

I caught the next train home.