Everyday Canvas

Thinking in the Stories-Mode

Prompt: Lisa Cron, author of Wired for Story claims our brains are hard-wired “to think in story.” She adds, “Without stories, we are toast.” Do you believe she is correct and do you find yourself thinking in stories?

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I read Lisa Cron’s book. She seems to know what she is writing about as far as the craft goes. As to our brains being hard-wired to think in stories, I have my doubts. A brain is a complex organ and even the most meticulous researchers and experts of it admit to not knowing everything about it. Plus, I think people are diverse in very many ways, and this diversity must echo in the way their brains operate, and to claim to know that the human brain works this way or that way would be taking it too far.

On the other hand, when using the tricks of the mnemonics, coming up with funny or outrageous stories help me to recall stuff like the car’s license plate or any sequence of things. For example, when I am people watching, I do invent stories; case in point, this morning in the lab’s waiting room, I told my husband a man had just come from a Safari because of the hat he was wearing. Now that we are home, I’ve probably forgotten the many other people filling up the waiting room, except that man’s visual picture is vivid in my mind alongside the three other people to whom I attached some kind of a fictional background in my thinking.

This is probably because emotions resulting from the analogies of our earlier experiences determine the meaning of what or who there is. If I didn’t know about safaris and the safari outfits, I would probably think that the man wore a hat a bit different than anyone else’s. Then, another person might liken the same hat to a cowboy's hat. This may be proof that most any story is emotion based, which shows we see the world not as it is but as we believe it to be with our brains converting raw data into meaningful patterns whose meanings are determined by our personal experiences and information.

Still, this isn’t to say we reject that any new or alien information. We do accept new data, be it on a need-to-know basis. For example, with me and the man wearing the safari hat, I didn’t focus on his shoes or shirt all that much. I recall those in a blur. Yet, I know his facial gestures and the way he walked. This may be because the brain filters out the unnecessary information. After all, as a writer, if I put that man in a story, I can always make up the parts about what I fail to recall or what I remember in a blur.