The Stories We Tell...
Monday October 9, 2006
Now that we’ve taken out a subscription to New Scientist, I’ve realised that it is going to be pretty hard not to start every other post on this blog with the words “This week, I was reading in New Scientist...” I’m not sure why it is, but even though I am officially a philosopher (is there such a thing as an official philosopher?) I often find science publications more stimulating than works of philosophy. Anyway, the first copy of New Scientist to flop through the letterbox was a fascinating one, and the headline article by Helen Phillips, on confabulation – the tendency of our brains to reel out stories like demented fax machines, with precious disregard for their veracity – was particularly interesting.
The article was pretty much a summary of William Hirstein’s book Brain Fiction (which I’ve yet to read), a study of the human mind’s tendency to fill in the gaps in knowledge with stories, whether true or not. Confabulation is not telling fibs, in that there is no intention to deceive: the mind just serves up a story on a platter, so to speak. The phenomenon is most marked in neurological patients, for example Oliver Sacks’s patient in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat who had Korsakoff’s syndrome, and whose short-term memory barely functioned, but who – every moment – would create fictions that seemed plausible to account for his experience, oblivious to the fact that these fictions were always changing alongside the changes in the world, often leading to blatant contradictions and absurdities.
This is of course interesting in terms of understanding neurological disorders, but the essay claims that research seems to now be showing that even apparently “normal” brains tend to confabulate unstoppably. As Phillips writes:
we may all confabulate routinely as we try to rationalise decisions or justify opinions. Why do you love me? Why did you buy that outfit? Why did you choose that career? At the extreme, some experts argue that we can never be sure about what is actually real and so must confabulate all the time to try to make sense of the world around us.
Of course, this is hardly news to anyone who has sat in meditation for a little while. There you are, watching the breath, and your mind is serving up story after story after story, seemingly of its own accord (I’ve always liked Natalie Goldberg’s contention that the brain, like the spleen, is an involuntary organ!), trying to make sense of what is going on. That these stories seem to be constantly in motion, that they are often in blatant contradiction with each other, does not seem to act as a brake on this confabulating tendency.
I caught myself at it the other day. There I was, chatting to my girlfriend, and I found myself saying something that was just patently untrue. It was a little story about some trivial matter that somehow my mind had cooked up and that had been sent straight to my mouth, so to speak, before I could stop it. It was not a lie, which is to say, it was not said out of an intention to deceive; nor was it something I was saying to make myself look better. It was one of those things that might as well have been true or false and it would have made no difference at all. Only that it was false, but I happened to say it as if it was true. Only when I’d said it did I realise this. I stopped, baffled for a moment, thinking how odd!!!
If we are serial confabulators – and I suspect that we are – then this raises all kinds of problems relating to truth, testimony, the way that law works, and the way that we view ourselves. The New Scientist article ends by raising the kinds of question about rational choice and free will that has already been raised here on thinkBuddha in earlier posts: is “free will” some kind of free intervention in action, or is it rather a post hoc confabulation that makes sense of whatever it is that we have just done (e.g. put the cake in the washing machine rather than the oven, unexpectedly asked somebody out on a date, fled the greyness of Birmingham in Autumn for Barbados without giving any notice or leaving any food out for the cat)? More and more, I think that the latter story, the story about post hoc confabulation, is more convincing than the former one.
What does this mean for the stories we tell ourselves about the world and about ourselves and others, every moment of the day? Following Wim Wenders’s dictum that “Stories are impossible – but it is impossible to live without stories”, I suspect that we may well be stuck with the fact that our human brains confabulate wildly. I don’t think that it is possible to live without stories. The trouble is not so much the stories, but that we seize upon first this story, now that story, with the unshakable conviction that it is true. And why do we believe that it is true? Because, as has been said, our brain has served the story up to us on a platter and given it an overwhelming aura of conviction. Instead of attempting to overcome this tendency to confabulation (and now that I’ve started thinking about it, I seem to find myself confabulating at every possible opportunity), it seems to me to be more a matter of engaging with the stories with a healthy dose of irony and curiosity, so that we might not take them at face value.
#1 · Gareth
9 October 2006
Nice post Will, :)
I’ve noticed myself doing this all the time.
For example, making up explanations about things I have absolutely no way of knowing, but not being satisfied until my explanation golds water – no matter how true or false.
Or even going back over old memories and doing the same thing, trying out different endings, different stories until I find one that fits my current way of thinking. When I find one that does I feel myself relax – even if I know I’ve just fabricated the entire thing.
realising this, and knowing how fallible my own memory is – I’m not sure how I can believe any story…just habit, I suppose.
All the best
P.S – I almost wrote, that I was going to write about this myself, but I have no idea how true that is, or if I’ve filled in the blanks after the event.