If you’re not disturbed by the fact that America’s Defence Department has a scientifically studied how stories work on your brain, then you’re probably one of their victims. The American war machine relies heavily on propaganda to get you disinterested in their wars so that you don’t stop them from killing innocent people around the world. Kendal Haven, a storyteller not scientist, worked on such a project for DARPA and tells us as much as he can about what the propagandist know about our fickle brains.
Kendall Haven lectured Your Brain on Story @ Stanford’s mediaX Seminar. In it, he tells of a theory about how our brains remembers life events in a story format. That means we translate everything into a beginning, middle and end, with a theme of our choosing. The reason for this “translation” is mainly because prehistoric humans couldn’t write anything down so they reorganized everything into a kind of story that could be told intergenerationally, for thousands of years. This process then became hardwired into our brains so that 21st century Earthlings, like us, became story-processing humans rather than information-processing ones.
First, the folks at DARPA learned that the lower left part of the brain, called the “Neural Story Net”, was responsible for taking life experience and translating into a story format. That’s right. This process is a physical, neurological process in our heads, not some habit we picked up thousands of years ago. Furthermore, this process is unconscious, meaning that we do spin life into a kind of story without even knowing it. That’s pretty huge discovery in human brain function and the implications are endless. That means understanding life as a story is as natural as digesting a Subway sandwich at lunchtime. We see life with a kind of basic storytelling formula whether we like it or not.
Second, they found that we deliberately filter information out so that it fits our storyline. They call it the “Make Sense Protocol”. That’s when we alter our memory so that we can retell what happened in a way that’s makes sense to us because if it doesn’t we just omit it without even knowing. We’ve got a kind of built-in confirmation bias as human beings. We make sense of the world not with objectivity but with subjectivity in the form of storytelling. Anything that’s confusing gets left out. Not a very effective truth-finding machine we are, but a very effective truth-making one instead. I hope journalists fairs better. They don’t
Third, the U.S. military has been in the know for a long time. The top brass is aware that we tell ourselves stories that are believable to us. That means propaganda has to be the same. You can’t just kill another world leader somewhere, you have to call him Hitler. Do that, and everyone is on board with that story. The question will always be: How can the narrative be told in a language that we can understand and want to understand so that we feel sure about what we’re doing? Hence, we need to receive the message in a way that caters to pre-existing information, our history, so that it can be distorted into a new plot. Think about that the next time the government hands down your marching orders. Just zap a story into your brain and voila, we’re off to war in Iraq or on drugs or, better yet, UFOs.
That’s the brain on stories and the rest of the world too. The universe is made of stories. Not atoms. A quote from Muriel Rukeyser. As human beings, we’re wired to think like our prehistoric ancestors, which essentially means reinterpreting everything into a story as if we’re going to be telling it at the campfire tonight. It also means we leave info out so that it’s a better telling. Our only hope is to learn self-story analysis so that we can re-evaluate our narratives to make better sense in the long-run so that we can survive this planet better. One last note: If the military knows, then so does the Entertainment Industrial Complex and other forms of Big Business. Perhaps they knew long before DARPA discovered it. (Roswell?) That’s how they sell jewellery and cellphones to everyone too.