A couple of years ago, I wrote about a study that suggested children who have imaginary friends have more advanced narrative skills than those who don’t.

I lamented that I had not had an imaginary friend, while both my sisters had. My son had an “old family” that had been killed in an explosion, and he was often quite emotional about missing them.

In telling the heart-wrenching story in The New Yorker of his infant daughter’s rare form of cancer, novelist Aleksander Hemon weaves in the thread of his elder daughter Ella, age 3, and the imaginary friend, Mingus (actually an imaginary brother), who emerged during this painful time for the family. Hemon writes:

It is not unusual, of course, for children of Ella’s age to have imaginary friends or siblings. The creation of an imaginary character is related, I believe, to the explosion of linguistic abilities that occurs between the ages of two and four, and rapidly creates an excess of language, which the child may not have enough experience to match. She has to construct imaginary narratives in order to try out new words that she suddenly possesses. Ella now knew the word “California,” for instance, but she had no experience that was in any way related to it; nor could she conceptualize it in its abstract aspect — in its California-ness. Thus, her imaginary brother had to be deployed to talk at length as if she knew California. The words demanded the story.

My son was a late talker, really not using words before about age 2. Perhaps new linguistic abilities are especially explosive for a child like him, requiring the narrative of his “old family” to provide experiences for his new words.

In the case of the Hemon family, Mingus also provided a way for Ella to process the terrible thing that was happening to her baby sister and provide her with comfort. Although Hemon ultimately finds story construction of no value in the isolated world of his baby’s illness, he recognizes that Ella’s need to spin stories is similar to what the author does as a fiction writer:

Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories was deeply imbedded in our minds and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination — and therefore fiction — was a basic evolutionary tool for survival. We processed the world by telling stories, produced human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.

Indeed this need to tell stories is deeply embedded. But why do some of us have imaginary friends and others don’t? Why do some of us become fiction writers and others don’t?

There is more than one way to engage with our imagined selves.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

At a symposium on the Future of the Humanities this spring, Steven Knapp gave a talk called “The Enduring Dilemma of the Humanities.”

As I read the text of the talk in the Phi Beta Kappa Key Reporter, I was less interested in Knapp’s main thesis about the humanities than in the way he kicked off this premise by citing a school of psychology called essentialism and a book by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works, that focuses a chapter on essentialism.

It is perhaps unfair to try to describe Bloom’s approach without having read the book. I’m relying on the small preview that appears on Amazon. I also note that the description of psychological essentialism in sources like Wikipedia don’t seem to exactly match what Knapp and Bloom are talking about.

In a nutshell (in essence!), Bloom says that the pleasure we get from everyday objects is relate to our beliefs about their histories. He cites our willingness to pay huge amounts of money for artifacts with historical meaning an significance (for example, the shoes thrown at George W. Bush by an Iraqi journalist). Bloom asserts that everyone he knows “owns at least one object that is special because of its history either through its relation to admired people or its connection to someone of personal significance.” If we were to lose the object, its replacement would not be as meaningful, even if it is physically identical.

Knapp elaborates:

It turns out that the origin of an object makes a profound difference to human beings, and according to Bloom, that difference is built into the way we relate to the objects around us. Bloom regards this human disposition as a kind of innate essentialism in the human psyche: We automatically and involuntarily see objects as connected with their histories in ways that transcend their physical and aesthetic properties. That’s why it matters to us whether an image was created on purpose or by accident, and that’s why we care more about what a picture was intended to represent than we care about what it actually looks like. Hence Bloom reports on “a series of studies that found that even three-year-olds would name their pictures based on what they were intending when they created it.” One investigator found that “even 24-month-olds are sensitive to a drawing’s history when deciding what to call it.”

What these studies point to, it seems to me, is the inseparability of our notion of particularity from our notion of history. What differentiates one object from another, from the point of view of human interest and value, is not what it looks like but where it came from, how it came to be, what it was intended to do or mean. That’s why there is something profoundly unsatisfying about the idea of replacing a lost wedding ring or a lost childhood toy with an exact duplicate — let alone replacing a beloved person with his or her exact clone, a proposition frequently explored in science fiction precisely because it is so disturbing.

Essentialism, Bloom writes, is the “notion that things have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly, and it is this hidden nature that really matters.”

In other words, the story of the object, even though neither Bloom nor Knapp ever use that word. Knapp, of course, uses “histories.” Close enough. While it’s possible I don’t know enough about essentialism to make this statement, the connection between story and essence seems clear. The “hidden nature” of objects to which Bloom refers is their story. The objects that give us pleasure do so because the stories behind them give them meaning.

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Inspired by the New Yorker article I read about neuroscientist David Eagleman (discussed here), I’m now about halfway his new book Incognito: Secret Lives of the Brain, which I find brilliant and fascinating. His style reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s — only even better.

One of his major premises in the book is that our conscious minds comprise the tiniest portion of what goes on in our brains:

Your brain is carved by evolutionary pressures just as your spleen and eyes are. And so is your consciousness. Consciousness developed because it was advantageous, but advantageous only in limited amounts. Our conscious minds are limited representations of the activity in our heads. Consciousness is the lowest man on the totem pole in the power structure of the brain. Most of what we do and think and feel is not under conscious control. … Almost the entirety of what happens in your mental life is not under your conscious control.

Those of us who follow story know that our brains are wired to think in story form, but Eagleman sheds some light on this process that offers some fascinating nuances. Just a few examples:

“We are constantly fabricating and telling stories about the alien [mental] processes running under the hood,” Eagleman writes. He discusses experiments with patients who have had the right and left hemispheres of their brains split from each other. “When one part of the brain makes a choice,” Eagleman writes, “other parts can quickly invent a story to explain why.”

Turns out it’s the left hemisphere that is the seeker of meaning, the sensemaker, the “interpreter,” the weaver of stories. The split-brain experimenters, Eagleman says, concluded that the “left hemisphere acts as an ‘interpreter,’ watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events.”

Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications. This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially by inferring them from observations of our own behavior.

“The brain’s storytelling power kicks into gear only when things are conflicting or difficult to understand,” Eagleman asserts. In other words, your brain doesn’t need to come up with a story about how to ride a bicycle once you already know how to do it. Dreams, however, are another matter. “Dreams illustrate our skills at spinning a single narrative from a collection of random threads,” Eagleman writes. “Your brain is remarkably good at maintaining the glue of the union, even in the face of inconsistent data.” Think about it. The typical dream is full of wacky bits, but when we relate them to others, we do so in story form.

Unfolding brain research continues to shed important light on how story works at the core of our beings, even at unconscious levels to which we will never have access or control.

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Dave Snowden (pictured) responded to yesterday’s post in which I mentioned a post he wrote several years ago. He tried to post the following — twice — as a comment, but some technical snafu has prevented the comment from coming through to me. I’ve responded briefly below Dave’s comment; I may write more at some point.

Get out of the wrong side of the bed this morning did we Kathy? Not sure why you needed to include a half-remembered and incorrect quote in what would otherwise be an interesting post. Nor why you use the pejorative term “excoriated” when I am pretty sure that all I did was have the temerity to disagree with you.

The phrase I normally use when dealing with social constructivism is “reality exists, live with it”. I’m not wild about critical realism either and if I remember the debate on ActKM (I think that is what you are referencing) opened with that. I think both are absurd positions but they are held by some intelligent people. If you want to take that position they you need to demonstrate (i) that you can lead your life by it (for example when reality intrudes through the theft of your property) and (ii) that you can avoid the Reductio ad Absurdum that leads to solipsism if the position is maintained without compromise.

Otherwise you are confusing perception with reality, or you are taking the position that reality is what is perceived by a human actor. If you want to do that fine, I can’t see why you think I should want to sue you. If you are taking that position then I will send you my deepest sympathies rather than a summons.

You are also drawing conclusions from Eagleman that lack any logic. If we receive a tape delayed broadcast then it is a tape delayed broadcast of something — namely reality. How about if we film the accident then get lots of people to study it and validate their results? Are they dealing with a common socially constructed illusion?

I think I have said this to you before in the ActKM forum; you really need to be comfortable to engage in a debate without taking criticism of your position personally, or making your response personal. Mind you if the world is socially constructed then you are creating reality from your perceptions, not sure I want to live in that world.

(reposted with some changes as apparently original comment lost)

— Dave Snowden, Founder & Chief Scientific Officer, Cognitive Edge Pte Ltd

My response:

It is true that I should not take criticism personally. Since I do not believe Dave’s post criticizing my thoughts on objective reality still exists, neither of us has any way of proving whether the quote I attributed to him (“The world exists, stupid.”) is indeed “half-remembered and incorrect.”

I am, however, nearly 100 percent sure the quote included the word “stupid,” and that one word has blinded me to any kind of rational response in the ensuing years. Yes, “excoriate” is strong, but so is “stupid.” I felt excoriated by Dave’s post. It also felt personal to me. Obviously, it has stuck in my craw for all these years; I have always been sensitive to critiques of my intelligence.

I have never participated in the ActKM forum and am not aware of the debate therein about objective reality.

I have great respect for the work of Dave Snowden; some of my friends in the story world have worked with and revered him.

It is true that I should be comfortable engaging in debate about the positions I take. But honestly, I’m not that interested in philosophy. My real interest is how the human brain uses story for sensemaking. I think that’s an interest Dave and I share.

Thank you, Dave, for responding. Perhaps our dialog will enable me to finally get the “stupid” label out of my system.

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A few years ago, Dave Snowden excoriated me for making the statement that there’s no objective reality. I believe his words were something to the effect that “the world is real, stupid.”

I don’t think his post is still around, which is a good thing because if if were, I’d be stewing and seething about it even more than I already am all these years later. I will admit that I made the statement in a rather clumsy and cringe-worthy fashion.

But I think Snowden kind of overlooked the word “objective.” Do any two people perceive “reality” the same way? Can everyone agree on what reality is? A school of philosophy espouses that no objective reality exists and that reality is socially constructed, that we construct reality through things like language. So, sue me, Dave Snowden, but that perspective makes a lot of sense to me.

If I didn’t support this view philosophically, I might be convinced by neuroscience. (In fact, a neuroscientific study was what inspired the reviled post.) I renewed my interest in the connection between objective reality and the brain when I read Burkhard Bilger’s New Yorker piece, The Possibilian, on neuroscience professor David Eagleman.

Eagleman has studied and done all sorts of things, but the main focus of the article is on how the brain perceives time. Bilger writes: “‘brain time,’ as Eagleman calls it, is intrinsically subjective.” Eagleman’s work inspires Bilger to wonder about …

the fundamental issue of consciousness: how much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds? Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments: millennia to microseconds, aeons to quartz oscillations. Yet the data rarely matches our reality.

Eagleman says our sense of time comes from multiple areas of the brain, but not any we can necessarily isolate. He calls our sense of time, Bilger reports, “a distributed property. It’s metasensory; it rides on top of all the others.”

The brain does not process all sensory information at the same rate. Bilger writes:

Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. … The brain is describing the present — processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous now. How does it manage it?

Here’s Eagleman’s picture of what the sensory time differences look like:

“Imagine that there’s an accident on the highway up ahead,” he began. “One of these cars runs into that bridge.” If the crash were to occur a hundred yards away, we’d see the car hit the bridge in silence. The sound, like a peal of thunder, would take a moment to reach us. The closer the impact, the shorter the delay, but only up to a point: at a hundred and ten feet, sight and sound would suddenly lock together. Under that threshold, Eagleman explained, the signals reach the brain within a hundred milliseconds of one another, and any differences in processing are erased. … Reality is a tape-delayed broadcast, carefully censored before it reaches us.

Maybe now you’re beginning to guess how story fits in…

“… the brain needs time to get its story straight … Living in the past may seem like a disadvantage, but it’s a cost that the brain is willing to pay,” Eagleman said. “It’s trying to put together the best possible story about what’s going on in the world, and that takes time.”

It seems to me that if no human brain can truly perceive reality in real time, objective reality cannot exist. That story is what the brain uses for sensemaking is at the core of why story is so incredibly important in our lives.

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Thaler Pekar and her neurophysicist and brain-mapper brother Jim (pictured) will explore The Story of the Science of Story on Wednesday, December 8 in a free teleconference.

They’ll be addressing these questions:

• Is the effectiveness of story explained by “brain science”, and especially by brain-mapping?
• How does brain mapping work, and what does it tell us about the organization of the brain?
• What are the limitations of brain mapping?
• What is “reverse inference” and what is “neuroessentialism”?
• What can brain mapping say about story?

The free teleconference is generously hosted by Worldwide Story Work, a community of story practitioners focused on the application of story-based techniques in organizational settings.

The Dec. 8 event takes place 4 - 5 PM Eastern. Dial 1-218-936-4700 then enter Access Code 710691.

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I really enjoy yoga and have also considered meditation to address various issues.

But I have a very hard time with the instructions typical of these pursuits: “Empty your mind. Strive for complete stillness. Quiet your mind. Connect with your breath. Just be.”

I recently read an article about meditation that helped me understand why these guidelines are so difficult for me. The author, Catherine Price, uses the example of an exercise in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) form of meditation, in which the meditator imagines he or she is a mountain:

A mountain reminds you of skiing, which reminds you of a family vacation, which reminds you of the weekend, which reminds you that a friend invited you to dinner on Saturday, which reminds you that you never got back to her and that maybe you should be writing her an e-mail instead of sitting on the floor pretending you’re a mountain — which reminds you that you’re supposed to be sitting on the floor pretending you’re a mountain, which makes you mad at yourself for letting your mind wander. And then — bam. Not only are you no longer cultivating intimacy with the present moment, you’re committing one of mindfulness’s biggest faux pas: beating yourself up for getting distracted.

That’s me to a T. My mind is always buzzing like that when I’m supposed to be living in the present moment, doing yoga or whatever. I gave up on Eckhardt Tolle pretty quickly because I could not achieve the stillness he espouses. Nor did I really want to. I like to think. I dislike not thinking. Isn’t thinking what our minds are for?

Price goes on to talk about how meditation can change the way we use our brains, first citing the mental state from which we might want to change:

… we (by which I mean your average nonmeditating American) respond to new stimuli and experiences automatically, based on how we think they’ll affect us. A traffic jam isn’t just cars; it’s a problem that will make us late for dinner — so when we see a red wall of taillights in front of us, we become stressed-out. … In other words, we don’t just experience, we evaluate — and then respond without thinking (clogged highway = extra minutes stuck in the car = misery).

Price is describing narrative processing, which happens in the “medial prefrontal cortex of your forehead that coordinates complex behaviors and thoughts. (It’s also the part of the brain that’s being used when your mind starts to wander.)” Meditation, Price writes, can help activate a different part of the brain, the insula, which “informs you of what’s happening in the present moment without connecting the experience to a specific emotion. When you’re thinking this way, a traffic jam doesn’t seem like a problem; it’s simply a bunch of cars on the road.”

It’s difficult for most people to empty their minds and stay present, and even meditation may not get completely get a person to that point.

All that makes me feel better about my yoga and meditation deficiencies. But I really enjoy my narrative processing. Maybe people who are really into storytelling particularly like narrative processing and have a harder time than others shutting off that processing.

What say, storytellers and fans of storytelling? Is it hard for you to meditate?

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

This week NPR presented a two-part piece on “Our Storied Lives.” The text of the story (part 1 and part 2), written by Jon Hamilton, engagingly juxtaposes a preview of an upcoming book by Antonio Damasio with the story of a storyteller trying to make it in Los Angeles after many delays in reaching for his dreams.

The Damasio book, Self Comes to Mind, Hamilton writes, is about “how our sense of story influences our lives.” Hamilton characterizes the views of Damasio, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California: “… although we may not be aware of it, each of us thinks of our life as if it were a story in the making. … [W]e use stories to gain a perspective on our own lives.”

The way Hamilton structured the piece inspired me to juxtapose my life/story with Damasio’s research about story. Not because I think my story is fascinating but because I think this kind of analysis is useful for anyone, especially anyone interested in how story influences our lives. Here are some of Damasio’s findings (in italics) and my responses.

… we frequently model our own life stories on a story we’ve seen on stage or at the movies.

I don’t think so in my case. My favorite movies are achingly romantic, and I definitely wanted romance in my life, but I don’t believe I modeled my life after any one fictional story. Possibly the biggest pop-culture influence of my youth was comic strips. Perhaps I did model my story a bit after the life of Brenda Starr, the beautiful reporter whose story was filled with romance, intrigue, and adventure. But she was a working gal, and more specifically, a writer. That’s what I wanted to be.

My parents’ stories, however, influenced me more than those of pop culture. I decided early on to be a writer, in large part because my father was a writer. But I had a parallel ambition: I was rather obsessed with being a mother. Also the idea of being pregnant. As a child, I voraciously and precociously read reams of material about pregnancy and parenting, writing the story in my head of what a wonderful mother I would be. In 1964 (I think), the Ladies Home Journal ran a story about the Fischer quintuplets of Aberdeen, SD. This was back before fertility drugs, so quints were very rare; in fact, the Fischers were the first American quints to survive. I cannot tell you how many times I read that article.

My mothering fantasies were fed by my perception that my mother was a perfect mom completely dedicated to mothering. It wasn’t until I had children of my own that I learned my mother was not living the story she wanted; one day, she loudly and emphatically exclaimed that she had never wanted children. She had played the role of devoted mother to the hilt because she considered it her job, and she always gave 100 percent to her jobs. But the story she really wanted probably involved horses and being outdoors in nature. The saddest part is that I turned out much the same way. I believed my story would be one of fulfilling and nurturing motherhood but was shocked to discover — as much as I adore my children and do not in any way regret having them — that I was much more fulfilled by the Brenda Starr side of my life than by the Fischer quints side.

Setbacks aren’t unique to humans, but … our response to them probably is. We see them as changing the plot line of the life story we thought we were writing, and we cope by coming up with a new narrative.

The biggest setback in my life, the one that shaped my story for many years, was discovering — at the last possible moment — that my father had used my college money to start a PR firm specializing in petroleum companies — during the energy crisis of the 1970s. Needless to say, that venture was doomed to failure. I had been accepted at three great colleges, including Boston University, my dream school. But my dad told me there was no money to send me. I had grown up never having one shred of doubt that I would go to college. I had earned good grades so I would be accepted at a good school. My parents’ expectation for me was that I would go to college. If I had known they wouldn’t be able to finance my education, I would have approached going to college differently. And that’s what I ended up doing. I rewrote the narrative so that I alone was responsible for my education. I worked for a year after high school to save money, apply to cheaper state schools, and line up loans, grants, and scholarships. But my college self-sufficiency plan derailed after just over a year at a state university. I dropped out for reasons I didn’t understand then, but that I now recognize as depression. I’m sure my money struggles played a role, but they were not the entire cause. And I had to rewrite my story again. During the next 18 years, I worked my way up through a series of retail and clerical jobs, always looking for a chance to go back to school. I made a couple of false starts but managed to sabotage myself. I finally finished my undergrad degree at age 39. My setback story is not unlike that of Shaun Parker, the protagonist of Hamilton’s story on NPR. He, too, postponed his goal for nearly 20 years. Both of our stories turned out the way we hoped. But I know I can’t help wondering whether my story would have contained more success and prosperity if I had finished college at a more traditional age.

Humans never stop looking ahead to something better. … Because we know our own life is a story, we are able to look ahead to the part we haven’t lived yet and start writing those chapters.

Today, my next-chapter story is influenced by my mother, but in the opposite way from the way it shaped the story of my younger years. Hers is the story I don’t want. I love my mother dearly, but I do not want to be the lonely, bitter, pessimistic bigot she is. She has given to everyone else at the expense of living her own story. As selfish as I sometimes feel, I can’t be like that.

I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time. Life is very, very good. But, yes, I still have chapters to write, including literal ones. I have at least a couple more books in me, including a novel. I would love my story to include teaching again. I want to pursue creative avenues like crafts projects. And perhaps play a small role in guiding my children to fulfilling stories for their lives.

Humans have a unique awareness that our lives are stories that begin when we’re born and end when we die. And because we know we’re going to die, … we are not satisfied with merely surviving day to day. We want our personal story to mean something.

I want to be remembered. Many aspects of my story have pointed to the meaning I have sought, this desire to be a memory. It’s why I’ve written books, though none (yet) timeless enough to be propel my memory for very long after my death. I have left many artifacts — writing and more — all over the Internet in the hope of leaving a bit of a legacy. I was a teacher. Some of my students from 15 years ago remember me, and I hope some will after I’m gone.

How has your life been influenced by awareness that you are living your story?

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

So, I was listening to the audiobook of Wikinomics today. My best friend raved about it more than a year ago, but I hadn’t listened to it before now because I generally save audiobooks for road trips, and even then, only road trips when I’m driving and obviously can’t read.

I had kind of a mini-epiphany as I listened to the book: It’s really hard to listen to nonfiction. In fact, I’ve listened to other nonfiction books, and I could not tell you a thing about most of them.

But one part of the early chapters was riveting — a story about Canadian gold-mining company Goldcorp and how the company was struggling mightily until it opened up all the company files to the world in a contest to find additional veins (is that the right word?) of gold on the company’s property. The contest was a huge success that turned the company around. You can read about it here.

But I found it very hard to focus on the parts of the book — most of it — that were not told in story form. Now, this revelation should not have surprised me as a student of storytelling, but it did drive home the power of stories in a big way. The human brain is just not wired for ordinary exposition. Somehow, we can cope with expository writing (at least I can) a little better when we read it rather than listen to it. But the human brain is wired for story, which is why I was utterly absorbed in the Goldcorp story but not soaking in much of the exposition.

This phenomenon, I believe, is why Malcolm Gladwell’s books are so popular. He writes nonfiction, and yes, of course it contains exposition. But a huge part of it is in story form.

So here I am in the middle of this epiphany when I hear the audiobook narrator — as surrogate for the Wikinomics authors — say that the rest of the book will contain “stories for the casual reader.” I took this statement as rather pejorative both about stories and casual readers. I was so incensed that I don’t even remember how he characterized the other material or the apparently superior beings that the non-story material was directed at.

So, if I’m drawn to the stories in the book, I’m not really serious? I’m not a real reader, just a casual one? Maybe I’m reading too much in. But I think Malcolm Gladwell understands that serious readers read his books — and get a great deal out of them — because they are so rich with stories.

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Just read a fascinating and resonant (to me anyway) article by Frank A. Mills in the online Urban Paradoxes magazine (reprinted from the blog Flaneur). (Beware that some of the links in the article are a bit funky).

In the article, “Quantum Storytelling: The New Way of Thinking,” Mills asserts that “old linear, left-brained thinking” (which “reduces new products, new technology, and new solutions, to just another version of the same old thing”) needs to yield to “a new model of right-brained thinking — Creative and conceptual.” (much like Dan Pink’s proclamation that we are in the Conceptual Age).

For me, the most striking line in Mills’ article is this one:

Whatever you call it, the “new economy” is at its core, a storytelling economy.

That statement is a preface to this:

This is not storytelling in the same linear fashion we use today … The new storytelling model is web-weaving, histological storytelling. In truth, there is nothing new about it; it is a return to a form of storytelling lost to the Enlightenment and its subsequent 1 + 1=2 objective logic. Over the years we have come to believe that the only way to think logically is the linear way. If Quantum Theory has taught anything, it is that there are logic constructs other than linear.

As you can guess from the article’s title and the foregoing, Mills then compares storytelling with Quantum Theory. Here’s a snippet of that comparison:

Each and every story contains, contains other stories, each opening up, if we but see and hear, potential and possibilities for even more stories, stories hereto unknown. In classic Newtonian logic, the observer is always a neutral and objective external agent. In quantum logic, the observer is always involved in the process of observing, and will in spite of efforts to the contrary always influence the eventual outcome. I just stated this linearly, but what we must grasp is that the eventual outcome is not fixed, not even singular, but rather has the potential to be one or more of many possibilities, perhaps even hereto unobserved. Every story has a backstory, middle, and end. In quantum storytelling, it is the middle, not the backstory nor the end that is important.

(I’m not sure Mills really explains why the middle is most important). He goes on to discuss how our brains think in “wholes,” not parts; thus, “The natural result of the mind processing the ‘whole story,’ i.e., the quantum story.” Mills ends with this powerful call to action:

Let us tell the stories that need to be told, and in the telling and the conversations, discover brand new, hereto unrealized solutions. Quantum storytelling is our last hope for a better future.

[Image credit: From The Daily Galaxy, http://www.dailygalaxy.com/myweblog/parallelworldsmultiversequantum_physics/, depicting quantum theory]

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