This is a video that was taken last November in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, that quickly went viral. While you watch, think about how you would describe what you're seeing. This was described in an article by the CBC News in Canada. And they didn't just say, here's a video of a polar bear interacting with a sled dog. That wouldn't get many clicks.
They say, gentle giant polar bear cuddles up with dog. Group catches arctic predator in tender moment with rare sled dog breed. So it's being referred to as cuddling.
It's described as a tender moment where adding thoughts into the minds of the polar bear and the dog. In the article, the guy that took the video and also the guy that runs the animal sanctuary where this took place described it this way. The guy who shot the video said, I've known bears to have somewhat friendly behavior with dogs but for a bear to pet like a human would pet a dog is just mind-blowing. It was a beautiful sight to see and I just can't believe an animal that big would show that kind of heart toward another animal. And then the owner of the dog sanctuary said, it's like a little Garden of Eden.
It's a safe place, they feel like they're happy there, they survive, they love it, and so hey, why should I not help them? In both cases, The person shooting the video and the owner of the place aren't just saying what they saw but they're interpreting it in terms of the sentiments, the feelings, the thoughts of the animals there. But you may have noticed that the dog was chained up and when it got up it maybe it was distressed, maybe it wasn't exactly licking the bear the way a friendly dog might greet its owner or someone it was familiar with.
There's actually more to the story. We found out a few weeks later that on that same animal sanctuary a dog was killed and eaten by a polar bear Churchill the name of the town a Churchill dog was killed by polar bear on the only night the owner didn't put food out okay, well there's more to the story the owner's been putting food out the owner's been chaining up the animals and When the owner didn't put food out the the bear or a bear may not have been the same bear in the video may not Have been the same dog, but a polar bear ate one of those dogs And because of that, conservation officers had to immobilize a bear in the area last week, move it to a holding facility because it killed one of the dogs. Ladun, who runs the Mile 5 Sanctuary, told CBC News that one day last week there were nine bears on the land where he keeps his dogs chained up.
One of the bears ate one of his dogs. That was the only night we didn't feed the bears, the only night we didn't put anything out. So there's new information that changes the way we see.
what we saw in that video. A Quartz blog article describes it this way. People are wildly misinterpreting a quote, heartwarming end quote video of a polar bear playing with a dog. There's just one problem with this heartwarming narrative, that polar bear isn't expressing love for the dog, it's playing with its prey. Same information, very different interpretation.
Now, either one of these stories may be more accurate than the other. They're both possible interpretations of the video given what we've seen in the video. The visual information alone, it first provokes us to give one explanation, to generate one story about what's happening. But with a little bit more information we can expand that story or we may have yet more information that shows, oh wait, another polar bear killed another dog, but hey this polar bear loves this dog.
We don't have enough To know for sure, but we have plenty to make up a story and we don't notice that we're making up the story Computer scientist Roger Schenck, who's one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, teamed up with political scientist Robert Abelson to do several studies and several books that were widely read back in the later part of the 20th century because they both wanted to understand how people think and Abelson, I'm sorry, Schenck was wanting to figure this out in order to figure out how to apply that to artificial intelligence. Why can't you just sort of program a computer brain to work like a human brain? And he discovered it's because people don't just use facts. We don't just use logic. We use stories to figure out what's going on in the world.
So they write this. What we know that seems factual is actually derived from personal stories. Explanations of totally new events or really just rewrites of existing stories in memory adapted to fit new circumstances. Understanding the world means explaining what happened in it. in a way that seems consonant with what you already believe.
Thus, the task of an understander who has a memory that is filled with stories is to determine which of those stories is most relevant to the situation at hand. He then uses the old story as a means for interpreting the new story. Doing things in this way makes a seemingly unmanageable task simpler.
Understanding the world is phenomenally complex. Finding a story that is like the one you are now seeing is much easier."End quote. These stories they're referring to, they later use the term script to describe this. I'm later going to use the phrase cognitive script to distinguish it from scripts like in a play. But they say a script is a set of expectations about what will happen next in a well-understood situation. In a sense, many situations in life have the people who participate in them seemingly reading their roles in a kind of play. Thinking in most contexts means finding the right script to use. rather than generating new ideas and questions. So essentially we find it easier to apply scripts than to reason out every new situation from scratch. And the example, end quote, the example they use is when you go to a restaurant. Now when you go to a restaurant, you don't have to learn from scratch how things take place in a restaurant. You don't wander around until someone puts food in your mouth. You know, I either need to go through a line and get my food at a counter, or I go sit down and a waiter will come up. and bring me a menu and ask me what I want to eat. Sometimes there are variations on that script, but we know it's going to be something relatively similar to that. So having that script makes it much easier to get your food at a restaurant. So I put the word script in red because it's something I want you to know later. I'm about to throw a lot more slides at you with long quotations from neuroscientists. You don't have to memorize these, just get the basic idea. When it comes to a term that you will need to know, like on a quiz, I'll put it in red like this. So we use stories that we've learned in the past to figure out what is happening in the present and to predict the future. But we also use stories to understand the past. Memories aren't memories of raw data, they're memories of data arranged in a narrative form. We don't remember with one part of the brain and think about the present or future with other parts. Memory and imagination use the same tools. Neuroscientist Daniel Schachter specializes in memory research. And he says, a rapidly growing number of recent studies show that imagining the future depends on much of the same neural machinery that is needed for remembering the past. These findings have led to the concept of the prospective brain, an idea that a crucial function of the brain is to use stored information to imagine, simulate, and predict possible future events. Both past and future event conception tasks require the retrieval of information from memory, and hence both engage common memory networks. However, only the future task requires that event details gleaned from the various past events be flexibly recombined into a novel relationship. future event. Thus, additional regions that support these processes might be recruited by the future event task. The simulation of future episodes is thought to require a system that can flexibly recombine details from past events. This idea was put forward in an attempt to understand why memory involves constructive process of piecing together bits of pieces of information rather than a literal replay of the past. The suggested answer is that a crucial function of the memory is to make information available for the simulation of future events. Alright so let's take an example and see how this might work. This is a dragon. You probably didn't need me to tell you that. You recognize it. But you've never seen a dragon so if you've never seen a dragon how can you recognize what a dragon is? You might say well I've seen it in movies, I've seen pictures. and that sort of thing. But the idea of a dragon or something like a dragon has been around a lot longer than film and even longer than books. There are examples from the Aztecs in Native South America, there are examples from Mesopotamia, from Northern Europe, from Eastern Asia. So how is it that they all coalesce around this similar image if we've not actually seen something in reality? Some people might say, well, maybe it's a memory of dinosaurs. The thing is, at the time that the giant lizards, the dinosaurs were around, our ancestors were more like rodents, and it's very unlikely that they carry a memory for something specific that far. Also, if you look at dinosaur skeletons, none of them look exactly like our idea of a dragon. And of course, animals don't look exactly like our idea of a dragon either, but If we look not at an entire animal but individual parts of animals, we start to see things that are that end up in the composite image of a dragon. We see the the canine teeth of wolves and lions and that sort of thing. Dragons usually have that sort of the sharp the four sharp teeth at least. They sort of have the posture similar to a lion or a tiger. They either have talons like an eagle or they have the gripping claws of a big cat. They have scales like an alligator or a serpent. Frequently they have serpentine bodies that moves in strange ways. They have, if they can fly, they have leathery wings like a bat. Rarely like a bird, sometimes like a bird, but mostly sort of bat wings. And sometimes they have horns. They're all sorts of shapes. But they're never a shape of a horn that you don't see in nature. And most importantly, they can breathe fire. Now if you take a look at all of these things, with the possible exception of bats, you see a lot of the things that we evolved to actually be afraid of. Not, you know, dinosaurs or something like that that we lived millions of years ago, but things that were around when our homo sapien ancestors were evolving. Things like wolves, lions, tigers, alligators, Serpents, even the horns are things you have to be wary of because if you're trying to kill an animal, even though it's not an animal trying to kill you, if you're trying to hunt an animal that has horns, it's probably gonna use those horns to defend itself. And of course, fire. Fire, the thing that contributed to the development of humanity, also regularly threatens our existence and threatens our lives. So if we take a look at those elements, and instead of looking at the entire animal, looking at entire memories or images of with everything in them, we just take bits and pieces of all those things, put them together, we kind of have this ultimate predator. That at least is the theory behind this book, An Instinct for Dragons by David E. Jones. If that kind of thing interests you, I highly recommend that book. But that composite is something that we don't see in nature. Instead, we... take individual elements of nature, recombine them, abstract them, recombine them in ways that make a new whole that we wouldn't normally see in nature. So we may have never seen a dragon, but we can imagine a simulation of what one would look like, what would it be like, by combining the parts of other animals. The psychologist Raymond Marr and Keith Oatley agree that narratives create a simulation of how things might be from recombining elements of what is. They also point out that in order to do so narratives must abstract that information to make it generalizable from one situation to the next. They simplify the information, omitting many of the details, and they compress the information, such as when we imagine things happening close together, when in actuality they may have happened at very different times. We do this in order to make our memories resemble the types of stories we hear or see depicted in movies and television. In other words, We have to abstract reality, simplify it and compress it in order to make it fit our expectations of what a good story is. Sociologist Michael Shudson has studied the way individual memories become reshaped to resemble types of narratives shared by that individual's culture. He calls this the narrativization of memory. He says, quote, to pass on a version of the past, the past must be encapsulated into some sort of cultural form. And generally this is a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, with an original state of equilibrium, a disruption, a resolution, with a protagonist and obstacles in his or her way and efforts to overcome them. Reports of the past observe certain rules and conventions of narrative. An account of the past must choose a point to begin. This is not always the case. It's always easy or obvious. Indeed, it is always to some degree arbitrary. The narrative formula he's describing, where there's a beginning, and in the beginning everything is at peace, but then some conflict emerges, and that conflict must be overcome, and once it's overcome, that's where everything ends. That formula is very familiar to writers, and should be familiar to anyone who reads or watches a lot of fiction. But reality never works that way. Whatever that event was that seemed to bring the conflict, From someone else's perspective, there's probably an event before that event that was the real beginning. And someone else will say there was a beginning before that beginning and so on. We see this when children get in trouble for fighting. Each one will say that the other started it. And each one will be telling the truth from their point of view as long as you start the story at a certain point and leave out whatever happened before that point. As with the dueling narratives about who started it, Narratives about the past typically have villains that cause conflict and heroes who overcome it. We expect this in a good story. Schutzen goes on to say that successful narratives often foreground individual protagonists and antagonists rather than structures, trends, and social forces. A particular works of art or efforts at storytelling may live on in memory in ways that overwhelm the less dramatic, less lucid, less epitomized, less narrativized ways of telling the past. Narrative at Narrativization is an effort not only to report the past, but to make it interesting. Narratives simplify. For example, if you ask me how thunder and lightning work, I can explain it this way. When a warm front and a cold front collide, the combination of temperatures creates a rapid upward air movement in a cloud that produces a mixture of super cool cloud droplets, small ice crystals, and soft hail or gropple. The updraft carries positively charged ice crystals upward toward the top of the storm cloud, where it collides with the larger and denser grapple as it descends. The discharge that results from these opposite charges within the cloud, or between the cloud and the ground, produces the lightning that we see and the thunder that we hear. Got it? Or, I could describe the same phenomenon as a battle between the Norse god Thor and the Frost Giants. Every spring, Thor rides through the air, throwing his thunder hammer, Mjolnir, and slaying the Frost Giants. Once that storm battle is over, the Frost Giants'cold air retreats, the warm air is able to return, and spring begins. One of these explanations is more entertaining than the other. It's more memorable than the other. Unfortunately, that explanation is not the most accurate of the two. This isn't just a way of talking about the weather. Narrativization creeps into all of our explanations, even when we're talking about data sciences. That's why economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb agrees about, agrees with Schutzen about how easy it is to think in stories. He says abstract statistical information does not sway us as much as anecdote, which is a story, no matter how much, no matter how sophisticated the person. We want to be told stories, and there's nothing wrong with that except that we should check more thoroughly whether the story provides consequential distortions of reality. And this will always be a problem. When we think and communicate through narrative, we add inferences about unseen factors, like causes and intentions. We have to choose a beginning to the story. And like the case of the polar bear, we can sometimes use the wrong narrative to explain the facts. This is why Taleb warns us to be careful of what he calls the narrative fallacy. This is the inability to look at sequences of fact without weaving an explanation into them. Notice you're not explaining what's there, you're adding something to that through the explanation. He says explanations bind facts together, they make them all the more easily remembered, they help them make more sense, but where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding. Our impression of understanding by implication not being actual understanding of what's happening. So if we have a good story, we feel like we have an answer even if we don't. And as Schenck and Abelson point out, we typically use stories to avoid thinking critically. They say, people attempt to construe new stories they hear as old stories they've heard before. It is actually quite difficult to absorb new information. New ideas ramify through our memories. causing us to have to revise our beliefs, make new generalizations, perform other effortful cognitive operations, and we prefer to avoid all this work. One way to do this is simply assume that we are seeing or hearing is just the same old stuff. But that doesn't mean that stories can't also be used to provoke us out of these kinds of lazy mental habits. Taleb doesn't see stories as a complete hindrance on our understanding. He says, quote,"'There may be a good way to use narrative,"'but for a good purpose."'Only a diamond can cut a diamond."'We can use our ability to convince"'with a story that conveys the right message.'" what storytellers seem to do. I prefer to use stories and vignettes to illustrate our gullibility about stories and our preference for the dangerous compression of narratives. You need a story to displace a story."End quote. But, uh, Taleb wasn't the first to have this idea.
209 years before Taleb had the idea to use stories to get people to think more rather than think less, the English Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a similar idea. They co-authored a book of poetry called Lyrical Ballads. Here's why they said they did it.
William Wordsworth said, quote,"'The principal object then proposed in these poems"'was to choose incidents and situations from common life"'and to relate or describe them throughout,"'as far as was possible, in a selection of language"'really used by men, and at the same time"'to throw over them a certain coloring of the imagination,"'whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind"'in an unusual aspect.'" And then a few years later Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his co-author, looks back and describes it this way, In this idea originated the plan of the lyrical ballads to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite feelings analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us. An inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes yet see not ears that hear not and hearts that neither feel nor understand end quote in other words they recognize that people start to go through life the same way thinking the same things looking at things the same way and when you look at some some new thing as if it was just an old thing you miss a lot this is what coleridge called the film of familiarity not a film like you watch a film but a film is in something in front of you that gets between you and the thing you're looking at. In the beginning of the 20th century, Russian literary critic and art critic, Victor Shklovsky said,"'If we start to examine the general laws of perception,"'we see that as perception becomes habitual,"'it becomes automatic."'We see an object as though it were enveloped in a sack."'We know what it is by its configuration,"'but we only see a silhouette.'" After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us, and we know about it, but we do not see it. Hence, we cannot say anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception, end quote. In other words, he goes on to say, art defamiliarizes the familiar world.
Now, that word defamiliarizes is kind of clunky. It comes from the Russian, ostraninity, and I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that. But it's to make the familiar into something strange, or to make it appear strange. Not to add something to it, but to actually point out things that we might overlook in it. To take something familiar and make someone look at it as if it was new and unfamiliar.
To make someone re-examine what they thought they already knew. This has become a key principle of literature. both writing and creating new literature, but also examining old literature. So in his guide to literary terms, M.H.
Abrams defines defamiliarization by saying, by disrupting the modes of ordinary linguistic discourse, literature makes strange the world of everyday perception and renews the reader's lost capacity for fresh sensation. The article by psychologists David Kidd and Emmanuel Castano that I mentioned in the last video, So far we've been using the word story and narratively interchangeably, but at this point it becomes very important to distinguish between the two in the way literary scholars do. The problem with the narrative fallacy is that we assume we already know the story when we actually don't. So the problem isn't the story but the way we construct the story. That process of constructing the story is the narrative process.
We frequently say, quote, there's more to the story or that a movie is based on a true story. And that implies that we are using the word story to refer to events that happened or events that didn't happen, but the events are something different from the description of those events. So we'll use the word story to refer to the events and the word narrative to denote the way those events are described. So literary scholar Porter Abbott puts it this way, narrative is the representation of an event or series events.
In other words, not the event itself, but it's a representation of the events. He says, quote, We never see a story directly, but instead always pick it up through the narrative discourse, end quote. Depending on how the story is told, we may quickly and thoughtlessly attach a new story to our old scripts. But the storyteller, the writer, the narrator, may deliberately block our tendency to project the old onto the new.
The narrator may force us to do those effortful cognitive operations that Shank and Abelson say that we usually try to avoid. This brings us back to our polar bear dog story. We don't actually know the real story. All we know are the various narrative versions of it, and that includes the narrative that your mind instantly generated when you watched that video for the first time. By contrasting the different narratives to each other and by examining a widening array of story elements, such as the chain holding the dog in place, or the fact that the owner was charging tourists to come and see the bears, or of course the fact that a bear had eaten one of the dogs at the same site, By dealing with all these narrative choices, we defamiliarize the scene and recognize just how little we know about what's going on.
Realizing how little we know may not sound like an improvement, but by the time we make that realization, we know much more than we did back when we thought we knew the whole story. Okay, let's review. A cognitive script is a set of expectations about how things usually happen.
It is easier to use these familiar patterns to interpret new information. than it is to think critically about that new information. Memory involves a constructive process of piecing together bits and pieces of information to fit familiar scripts, rather than a literal replay of the past.
We narrativize real events when we turn them into stories, with a beginning, middle, and end, with an original state of equilibrium, a disruption, a resolution, with protagonists and obstacles. A narrative is the representation of a story, not the whole story itself. Narratives abstract, simplify, and compress information to make them fit conventional forms. The narrative fallacy is the inability to look at sequences events without weaving an explanation into them. And literary fiction attempts to defamiliarize something that we might normally explain by one of our familiar scripts.
So for your first assignment, let's test our ability to understand a new and unfamiliar story. The example comes from a memory experiment performed by psychologist Frederick Bartlik in Britain. in the early 20th century. British college students heard a story from the Chinook people, Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest, and they were later asked to write down as much of the stories they could remember. And this is what I'm asking you to do.
First, listen to the story I'm about to read, pay attention, and try to remember as much as you can. Then, go to the assignments page on Blackboard. On the assignments page, click the link titled War of the Ghosts, and follow the instructions.
Remember as much as you can, but don't worry. You won't be graded on your accuracy in this exercise. It's an exercise, not a test.
One night, two young men from Agulak went down to the river to hunt seals. And while they were there, it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war cries, and they thought, maybe this is a war party. They escaped to the shore and hid behind a log.
Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles, and saw one canoe coming up to them. There were five men in the canoe and they said, what do you think? We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war on the people. One of the young men said, I have no arrows.
Another said, arrows are in the canoe. Then the young man on the bank said, I will not go along. I might be killed.
My relatives do not know where I have gone. But you, he said, turning to the other one, you may go with them. So one of the young men went, but the other returned home.
And the warriors went up the river to a town on the other side of the Kalama. The people came down to the water and they began to fight, and many were killed. But presently the young man heard one of the warriors say, Quick, let us go home. That Indian has been hit.
Now he thought, Oh, these are ghosts. He did not feel sick, but they said he had been shot. So the canoes went back to Agulat, and the young man went ashore to his house and made a fire.
And he told everybody and said, Behold, I accompanied the ghosts, and we went to fight. Many of our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked us were killed. They said I was hit, and I did not feel sick. He told it all, and then he became quiet.
When the sun rose, he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and cried. And he was dead.
So that's the end of the story. Be sure to complete the assignment on Blackboard and we'll come back to this and I'll explain why I had you remember as much as you could later in unit 2.