In the previous two sections I discussed the magical aspects of reading. Here I wish to not only delve into what our minds do when we are perusing the pages of a book, but also the personal narratives we construct. Analytical thought has left behind a highway of debris. As reality started to take shape, forming solid matter from the oral tradition's mist, mans' mind was left in a hematic, raw state. The world was seemingly reduced to stupid matter bumping off each other, following laws, obviously, like any rules of a game, but doing so with no conscious thought. This is the world which I will describe here--indeed, a somewhat sterile world devoid of true mystery. There are answers, but not ones which will satisfy the mind's intuitive nature, the feeling which rings through the whole body when we discover something true. As I examine further, I wish to show the danger of the ego, the left brain, and how as modern science discovers more about the natural laws, the closer it returns to the realm of myth, of story, and of magic. In the section after this, I will take these thoughts and transform them into images of the Mother, Saturn, Apollo/Dionysus, Lucifer, and the Moon God (you may recognize some of these as days of the week), but for now, let's begin with some modern experiments.
According to the writer, Annie Paul, in the New York Times, "brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life" (Paul). Is this revelation surprising to anyone who has enjoyed a good book or movie at some point in their lives? Reading stories frees us from the tyranny of the analytical left brain, letting us communicate with the gods and demons which existed so long ago. We can truly believe in ogres, witches, heroes, and princesses within the frame of the story without being called a lunatic. Paul goes deeper in her article, relating that not only are the 'classical' language areas of the brain activated while reading words (Broca's area and Wernicke's area), but other sections as well. When we see words like 'blue' or 'dog', the same parts which are used when we experience them in the physical world are also utilized. Books can, of course, also be highly left brain dominant. In a textbook, analysis, or review for example, we are using the left brain’s power of understanding an abstract concept; however, in a narrative the brain is not limited in this way. We really experience with all five senses the worlds which a great author can produce.
A study performed by Spanish researchers in 2006 came to a similar conclusion. When the experimenters asked their subjects "to read words with strong odor associations" and other, more neutral words, they discovered that the part of the brain associated with olfactory functions "lit up" when the smelly words were read but not when the neutral ones were. Metaphors when read or heard, according to Paul's article, had similar reactions in the brain when another experiment was done at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. A metaphor will cause the brain to create the object in the mind. "A monkey on your back." “The elephant in the room." The power of imagination is forming images in your head as you read these, whether you like it or not. “The brain” according to Paul, "... does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley [...] has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that ‘runs on minds of readers just as computers simulations run on computers.’” In the same way that hypnotists override the program of personality, so can books. Reading, in its own little way, is magical. It is the power to create worlds and to enter another’s thoughts and feelings. Walter Ong mentions a man in Orality and Literacy who literally believed that the written word was magic. And it is; we just forgot it is. Each texture, hue, smell, or image we create while reading becomes alive inside us as our perfect representation of what that thing is. In this way, the world inside us is far more perfect than the world outside.
The author, Stanislas Dehaene, in Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read, is also interested in the psychology of what most of us in the West do every day of our lives. What he suggests is that reading is not so easy after all. It is a complex process which entails chopping up parts of the word into ‘morphemes’ and reordering it inside our heads. "At first sight," Dehaene says, "reading seems close to magical: our gaze lands on a word, and our brain effortlessly gives us access to its meaning and pronunciation" (12). This is the first sentence inside the first chapter, and the author spends the rest of the book trying to disprove it by unlocking the 'algorithm' which we use to read. It begins with the fovea, "which [...] is the only part of the retina that is genuinely useful for reading" (13). The great difficulty with the fovea, however, is its inability to perceive beyond the 15 degrees within the 'visual field'. That means most of the words surrounding the one pin-pointed in your vision are indecipherable. We are also limited in how many words we can read per minute because of the speed of our 'saccades the rate at which our eyes move. What most of us perceive as one smooth movement across the page is actually a series of jolts. Interestingly, when words are quickly flashed before us on a computer screen, we can read them much faster than we could from a book. Thus, our minds, which seem so geared toward something that they were not evolved for, have adapted well to it, though they still lack things that would make it easier. In fact, our eyes, Dehaene says, will not reveal a ‘divine watchmaker’. They are far too imperfect.
Dehaene, to summarize further, writes:
Our eyes impose a lot of constraints on the act of reading. The structure of our visual sensors forces us to scan the page by jerking our eyes around every two or three tenths of a second. Reading is nothing but the word-by-word mental restitution of a text through a series of snapshots. While some small grammatical words like ‘the,’ ‘it,’ or ‘is’ can sometimes be skipped, almost all content words such as nouns and verbs have to be fixated at least once (17)I mentioned earlier that words must be quickly taken apart in our head as we read—this requires a complex lexicon of symbols. We may not realize it, but upper and lower case figures generally do not have much connection with each other. On top of this variability, there is an endless catalog of fonts which we encounter. The brain has learned not only to memorize 26 characters but the variability which those characters come in. CaN yOu ReAd ThIs? HoW eAsIly? It goes to prove that your mind has learned the LeTtErs so well that it makes little distinction between a 'R' and 'r' or an 'E' and an 'e'. Dehaene gives another rather startling example: the words ‘sight’ and ‘eight’ seem to be a world apart but, in fact, are only one tiny line away. I commented earlier on how I believed that each individual word was a picture we stored in our mind representing an absolute idea or thought--well, according to the author, the process has a tad more to it, but is generally the same. What we do is separate the word into ‘graphemes’—that is the 'dead' in 'undead' or 'myth' in 'mythology'. For example, Dehaene says “our visual system automatically regroups letters into higher-level graphemes, thus making it harder for us to see that groups of letters such as ‘'ea'’ actually contain the letter ‘'a'’”" (24). Garage – Medal – Monkey – Love – Flag – Please – Meat – in the last two, the 'a' is harder to notice because of this.
But what about narrative itself? Research has shown that having stories in our lives is highly important. In fact, many of us, if not all of us, have an ongoing internal novel documenting our past, experiencing the present as a scene in a personal memoir, and anticipating the future, the conclusion of the story. People also do this on a national level, perhaps even a religious one. Classical Monotheists place a high emphasis on an eventual Apocalypse where the unbelievers will perish in a fiery doomsday. These religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) are famous for being based around words in a book. Their God is abstract, separate from mans’ vulgar spheres because He is above. Literate tradition puts emphasis on an authoritative canon (opposed to the spirits I mentioned in the Part II), on lists, separations, and seclusion. Written words, like people’s new identities, were cut off from the wholeness of nature. They had a distinct beginning and ending and represented an ideal image like a person’s name. Groups of words formed sentences, which formed paragraphs, chapters, books, and then canon. Literate humanity’s consciousness shifted towards the left brain, which harbored the ego—the pin-pointer, the hunter, the writer, and mathematician. The past is made of images which are separated, usually unconnected events. It is the left brain, the narrator, which collects them to form a story.
In fact, Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli-American psychologist, says the importance modern man places on different memories are related to where they all fall into his overall narrative. In an example he gives during a TedTalks conference, Kahneman describes a man listening to a symphony. The music being played was sublime, life-changing, that is until the end when a large shrieking sound occurred and "ruined the whole experience." Emotionally, it destroyed what was being built, changing the frame which the man was going to remember it. Kahneman relates, "He had had the experience, he had had 20 minutes of glorious music. They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory, the memory was ruined, and the memory was all he had gotten to keep." In another example, Kahneman gives a graph of two patients undergoing surgery. More waves represented increasing pain, and it was clear that Patient B had had a more miserable experience. However, during the procedure for Patient A, the doctor jiggled the instrument at the end, causing a sudden jump in pain and making A remember the whole thing as being terrible while B's pain was slowly reduced. Our memories are thus influenced by the narratives we construct, and if something bad happens at the end, it can change the whole story.
"Now, the remembering self is a storyteller and that really starts with the basic response of our memory, it starts immediately. We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory tells us stories, that is what we get to keep from our experiences is a story," Kahneman says. In the surgery example, the remembering Patient A would be better off with more pain in the beginning than at the end, but experiencing Patient A would be worse off. Thus, change is important in the construction of story—during a vacation, the remembering self would care little if a great holiday lasted one or two weeks. "We actually don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. And even when we think about the future, we don't think of the future normally as experiences, we think of the future as anticipated memories." By simply changing their internal story, a person can make themselves better off. All the terrible things they perceived to be done in the past can be rearranged into the story of a necessary growth into the person they are today. A lot of people do this, as I will further explain below. Kahneman finally mentions Californians’ perception of themselves—a person’s experiencing self will not be better off in the Golden State, but their remembering self has the potential to be because they will start comparing their memories to the ones they would have made elsewhere (such as Montana). We fix our memories to a story, and that our lives are building to something. These stories, however, can also destroy.
Tales of soldiers coming home from war suffering from Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are repeated across news agencies, mainstream and alternative. There is a certain terror we feel in a vet gone wrong. Has killing become second nature to him? PubMed Health gives a solid definition of what's going on in PTSD victims:
PTSD is a potentially debilitating anxiety disorder triggered by exposure to a traumatic experience such as an interpersonal event like physical or sexual assault, exposure to disaster or accidents, combat or witnessing a traumatic event. There are three main clusters of symptoms: firstly, those related to re-experiencing the event; secondly, those related to avoidance and arousal; and thirdly, the distress and impairment caused by the first two symptom clusters.A few years ago, I watched an American remake dealing with this disorder titled"Brothers". If anyone doubts Tobey Maguire’s acting skills, just watch this; it is a truly nerve-wracking spectacle. Stories of improper diagnosis and lack of aid to sufferers are telling of America’s modern way of life. However, in Wired's "The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever" by Jonah Lehrer, a relatively new way of helping victims is described. Jeffrey Mitchell, a volunteer fire fighter who also suffered from a version of PTSD, invented the CISD method (critical incident stress debriefing) in 2001. It focuses on bringing the emotions involved with the experience out early before the person tries to suppress them and the anxiety gets worse. Essentially, it is like ripping a Band-Aid off quickly. According to the article, this method of handling PTSD has increased in use and popularity, with more than “30,000 people” being “train[ed] in the technique” each year. The only problem? It doesn't work.
Follow-up studies have shown that the process of CISD makes the future anxiety in victims greater. The writer of the article, Jonah Lehrer, doesn’t blame Mitchell, relating:
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have imagined memories to be a stable form of information that persists reliably. The metaphors for this persistence have changed over time—Plato compared our recollections to impressions in a wax tablet, and the idea of a biological hard drive is popular today—but the basic model has not. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.Like I related above and will get into deeper below, the memories which we choose to keep are images which we put into an overall narrative—how we construct the story of our life is in fact more important than what the actual individual recollections are. A great event may not have been so great if it had not ended with your first kiss. A terrible even may not have been so terrible had it not ended in spraining your ankle and limping the rest of the way home. Memories are fluid; they change because, in the end, they are part of our present. Everything, even you remembering the past, is in the eternal now. Lehrer says our faith in our own memories is misguided. They are not unbending to the rules of the present ego; they are not “packets of data” which “remain constant. Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all.” He says that remembering actually changes the memory itself. Thus, CISD fails because “pushing to remember a traumatic event so soon after it occurs doesn’t unburden us; it reinforces the fear and stress that are part of the recollection.”
"Neuroscientists," according to Jonah Lehrer, "actually have a molecular explanation of how and why memories change. In fact, their definition of memory has broadened to encompass not only the cliché cinematic scenes from childhood but also the persisting mental loops of illnesses like PTSD and addiction—and even pain disorders like neuropathy.” Science can now tell us the individual chemicals which go into the process of creating a memory, and as a result, Lehrer dramatically proclaims, “in the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice.” Our brains contain a vast network of linkages—the more we use certain linkages, the easier the associations between different images become. "If one cell fires," Lehrer says, “the rest of the circuit lights up as well. Scientists refer to this process as long-term potentiation, and it involves an intricate cascade of gene activations and protein synthesis that make it easier for these neurons to pass along their electrical excitement.” As a memory becomes engrained into the architecture of the mind, neurons will grow more and more linkages. In other words, the canals are dug deeper, and our most observed memories become literally written into the fabric of our consciousness. Proteins are required in the growth of these channels, however, and if certain amino acids are blocked during the process, the memory itself can be erased. This idea is an interesting one and also tells us something else: “memories are not formed and then pristinely maintained, as neuroscientists thought; they are formed and then rebuilt every time they’re accessed.” The memory is thus more like a play than a movie, changing each time we experience it.
A study done after September 11th found that people’s recollections of the events which happened that day are slowly changing as history progresses. “At one year out, 37 percent of the details had changed” Lehrer says, and “by 2004 that number was approaching 50 percent.” During my interview with Logan Garcia, he informed me that under hypnosis a person can be made to forget a certain memory or even remember one which did not exist before. It is easy to change someone’s recollection because the memory is influenced by narrative, and it turns out that this momentum is necessary for a healthy person to have. It gives a reason to wake up in the morning, to leave the house, and makes every day an adventure—its own little story. In fact, the Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, discovered this inside one of the Nazi’s internments camps when he noticed that the survivors tended to be those who gave themselves a reason to live. Those who didn’t, who simply bumped through the horrors in a daze, were less likely to survive. An article posted in Natural Bias says of Frankl’s ideas:
The process of striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal is what keeps us hungry for life and is what provides us with fulfillment once the goal is accomplished. This fulfillment creates precious memories of the past that can never be revoked or stolen, and in turn, these memories, eliminate regret and foster the courage to not have an excessive and unhealthy fear of death (Natural Bias)A horrible event (even as something as devastating as the Holocaust) can be understood to be a jumping stone for the logical progression of a story. Once a person finds the meaning in unavoidable suffering it will allow them to continue on with their life.
An article in The Atlantic "“Why Storytellers Lie” discussed Jonathan Gotschall's new book, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Maura Kelly, the writer of the piece, says that the author “argues that we’re all storytellers—and all liars too, even if most of us don’t realize it, even if most of us are lying primarily to ourselves.” Gotschall continues inside the pages of his book, saying that not only do yarns give the author a perceived intelligence for mating purposes (Aeneus in Virgil's "Aeneid) and instructions for tasks, they also provide more than that: “They help us to believe our lives are meaningful.” Gotschall says everyone constructs stories. In public, we gossip to bring someone emotionally closer to us and when we return home in the evening we relive the day’s events with our family. However, in private we are also writing a personal memoir, one which will most likely never be published or written down. Kelly continues, “Every day of our lives—sometimes with help working things out via tweets or Facebook status updates—we fine-tune the grand narratives of our lives; the stories of who we are, and how we came to be.” Our identity is molded and shaped constantly by the ego, and the stories we create are often downright lies. Each time a memory passes through our consciousness, we are reworking it, placing it in a new box to fit more closely in with our story. Information technology is also changing the way we concoct our witch’s brew. Our online face is a mask, presenting to the outside world the way we want to be perceived. I will cover this more deeply in Part V.
As we retell a story over again, it changes subtly, and these changes amalgamate overtime:
As Gotschall puts it, 'We spend our lives crafting stories that make us the noble—if flawed—protagonists of first-person dramas. ... A life story is not, however, an objective account. A life story is a carefully shaped narrative ... replete with strategic forgetting and skillfully spun meanings.' For this reason, he asserts, all memoirs, no matter how much their authors believe them to be true, should come with a disclaimer: 'Based on a true story.' (Kelly)" Psychotherapists have begun using a treatment which has the patient constantly repeat their own story, causing them to "mismember". Hypnotists know that implanting a false memory is easily done when a person is in a trance-like state. Would it not be easy to reshape somebody’s life for the better? To completely erase bad memories that were causing the person distress? As Maury reports,
As studies have shown, depressives tend to have more realistic—and less inflated—perceptions of their importance, abilities, and power in the world than others. So those of us who benefit from therapy may like it in large part because it helps us to do what others can do more naturally: to see ourselves as heroes; to write (and re-write) the stories of our lives in ways that cast us in the best possible light; to believe that we have grown from helpless orphans or outcasts to warriors in control of our fate.The danger in these fictional histories is that they portray the teller as the hero. And what does a hero need? Villains. It begins us on the path of dehumanizing others, of justifying bad deeds, as well as allowing for the creation of abstract ideas in the justification of what society perceives itself to be. The ego resides in the left brain! It reshapes the ‘mist’ as need be.
Because memory is in flux, always rewriting the narrative each time we pass through it, eye witness reports are not taken seriously in the court of law. This fact should not be surprising—memory is an imagional structure, influenced by the perceptions of the past, present, and future. Jonah Lehrer says that when a memory is recorded, it is done in two ways: one is the visual (which is kept all over the brain because of the different senses involved) and the other is emotional (in the amygdala). By opening a memory up early, CISD patients can become more traumatized than if they had waited because it was while they were still in a phase of high emotional duress, affecting the eventual recollection which would be recorded. On the other hand, when PTSD sufferers were given ecstasy when they discussed the distressing events, they were calm, altering their potential memories for the better. Lehrer says “83 percent of the [ecstasy] patients showed a dramatic decrease in symptoms within two months. That makes ecstasy one of the most effective PTSD treatments devised.” Other drugs being studied include propranolol, which inhibits norepinephrine. A study showed that sufferers of PTSD fared better under the drug because it prevented strong emotions from being created in the amygdala. It is the protein PKMzeta which may be the key to eliminating specific memories however. Its “crucial trick is that it increases the density of a particular type of sensor called an AMPA receptor on the outside of a neuron. It’s an ion channel, a gateway to the interior of a cell that, when opened, makes it easier for adjacent cells to excite one another.” Interestingly, by genetically modifying a rat to have more PKMzeta, it causes them to become “mnemonic freaks, able to convert even the most mundane events into long-term memory.”
Existential crises, it seems, are what happen when a person’s narrative gets crushed and they have to fix it to a new goal. We often see this in people reaching middle age and realizing they have not done the things they wanted to with their life, or in people whose significant other broke up with them un-expectantly. Concepts of love, hate, good, evil, black, white, binaries, it seems, are the result of the left brain’s exclusive boxing. It allows our brains to create the concept of ‘I’, the ego; while the right brain gives us a holistic intuitiveness, a sense of not being you verse the world, but being part of it. The masculine brain accelerated war because it made it more personal—good (us) versus evil (them). It is relevant that the concept of good and evil also appeared to arrive with the creation of the alphabet. When we are the ultimate hero in our story, there must also be enemies. The book, the drama, have influenced our collective consciousness. When we see ourselves as separated from everything else, as written language can allow us to do so easily, it dehumanizes others. In my mind, I am seeing a perfectly white 2D box floating forward, pushing away black boxes, or being helped along by other white ones. Our literate culture deals so often with binaries that we forget that the opposite is what defines us. It appears it was literate culture which created racism, slavery, misogyny, and stereotypes, because it is easier to exclude than include. This form of thinking is derived from logos or linear thought. This happened because this happened because this happened. The enemy is evil because he killed one of our brothers because his god is evil because his skin is dark because he worships demons... on and on.
What is known is that an abstract, ideal world would make life so much easier. It is a constant fantasy of many to be told what to do, to know who the enemy is, and to know their goal with all their heart. Soldiers often look back on war fondly because of this. It gave clarity and purpose without the ambiguity of normal life. This is the realm of the abstract ideal—Plato’s realm of perfect spheres without ego, the lost paradise of Eve. Everything simply makes sense because living in a world of relativity is hard—it would be easier to follow orders like in the Milgram experiments. It would rid a person of constantly questioning if their actions were right. I have often made this comparison: just as religious people can give their lives over to God to rid themselves of doubt, so can statists give their identity over to the absolute utopian state. In other words, a personal narrative can be hijacked by the group’s and possibly influenced into doing actions the individual would regret. The only truth, it turns out, is the god in ourselves. Hindus treat guests so well because they recognize that everyone is a visiting deity. Like God, our nation, our group, we are the perfect good, and propaganda is used to create the perfect evil. It dehumanizes them and allows us to kill without guilt. Written word divides the world into pieces, into little absolute images of the perfect ideal of things, making nouns do verbs, not verbs do nouns. Namely, the creation of an abstract God let us be self-righteous. We can call ourselves ‘good’. We can form groups which are ‘good’. And we can justify committing genocide as the Hebrews did on the Philistines. This can only happen when we sequester ourselves or our group from the rest of the world by creating narratives from our memories.
But there is an alternative.
Leonard Shlain in The Alphabet versus The Goddess comments that “women have more rods in their retinas than men, and as a result, have better peripheral vision” (Shlain 26). This difference seems to come from man’s original focus on the hunt. This act required pinpointing a target and using a sudden burst of energy. Women, on the other hand, were focused on raising children and gathering—these were not tasks that required tunnel vision but instead a wider one. They had to keep track of what the kids were doing as well as focusing on finding food for the community. It is a stereotype that women are better at multitasking, but this difference may actually be built into our brains. “Men” according to Shlain, “have more cones than women, allowing them to see one segment of the visual field in greater detail and with better depth perception than women” (26). Is it no surprise that it was men who greatly benefited from the invention of the alphabet? The task is dominated by advantages built into the masculine cranium. The narrow cone-vision of reading, the increasing importance of grammar and splitting the text into sentences, paragraphs, chapters, beginnings and endings. The literate, male mind has flourished because of this. It also deals better with abstract concepts like "freedom, economics, and destiny". "The ability," opines Shlain, "to conceptualize that the abstract words crime, virtue, punishment, and justice are all related is supremely human. To be able to leap from the particular and concrete to the general and abstract has allowed us to create art, logic, science, and philosophy" (Shlain 22). (His indentations, not mine.) However, he also claims that this led to slicing up the Mother's wholeness. Literacy provided a catalyst for the males' usurpation of the female.
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