Telling Stories

The challenge one faces when appearing on Jeopardy is that in the course of our lives we accumulate so many facts and associations, but our brain is only able to recover certain memories at certain times, while at other critical moments, we draw a complete blank.

The ability of humans to represent thoughts, objects, and actions with various symbols has, from our earliest beginnings, separated our species from others. Our ability to improve and cultivate these representations provides a key to the evolution of our cultures.

The urge to communicate with consistency over time and space must be as old as the urge to speak, to pronounce words. We all want others to know what we know, to see what we see, to experience what we have experienced. We want to influence people, to bend them to our way of thinking. We want to do this quickly , and we want to do it widely, to as many people as possible, and we want our messages to last.

The development of language itself was the first major step, a leap of consciousness that allowed a person to step out of the ever present now, and refer to an object with a sound. “Naming” has magical powers which still reverberate through our society. When the Gospel of John is read each Christmas, we continue to marvel at the music of “the Word”.

Out of the development of language, we have History, the ability to reconstruct the past, as well as the ability to make predictions about the future, and Literature, the imaginative ability to associate and compare and record. We have standardization. By naming objects, we begin to quantify them. Commerce flows from the ability to compare and trade disparate objects.

When that early man made the first crude drawings in the dirt, he took an incredible leap into the world of representation and symbols. Scratches on a shell or a slab of clay mysteriously resemble an experience or an object and somehow have the power to convey that experience or object to another person.

Since then, our advances in communicating have been refinements of these leaps from experience to consciousness to symbolic representation, as we have learned to refine and standardize and mange and store and transport and distribute these symbols, When we have mastered one set of symbols, we have developed secondary and tertiary layers of symbols (shorthand) to speed our interactions, and we have refined the vehicles that we use to transmit these symbols.

The constraints have been labor and materials, time, portability, bulk, cost, permanence, accessibility, control, accuracy, authority, standardization, reproduction.