The Thinking System

From the start, I have referred to thinking as a process. One problem with this position is that it conceals the complexity of "the process". We may think in terms of a series of simple steps that could be summarised quite neatly. That is what we tend to do with processes: reduce them to a series of steps, or sub-processes.

If thinking is a process, the nature of the process as experienced in human beings, might usefully be described as "filthy". That is, it resists analysis because the interesting sub-processes interact in a non-sequential and self-referential fashion.

So, when I refer to the storyteller and the rationalising process, it is deeply metaphorical. The story is composed from plot ideas, influenced by prejudice and perception, altered by visualisations and linguistic choices, filtered through coherency and plausibility tests, adjusted in the light of imagined and dimly apprehended audience reaction...

We can begin to make sense of this confusion by considering thinking as a complex system. We may consider thinking in human beings as being activity in the brain, occurring at two fundamentally different levels. At the base "hardware" level, we have neurons "firing". There is a whole host of physiological activity surrounding this reasonably elementary process, which is how drugs affect our way of thinking. At the more conceptual level, which is at least conceivable as a system that might have an alternative implementation, are the processes I would refer to as thinking.

In the context of storytelling, a key sub-process is the tendency to create sequential associations. If you are presented with a number of different pictures, for example, such as you might find in a comic strip, but not in a particular order, you will (if you are "normal") generate one or more plausible sequences for the images. This is (probably) not because you are used to receiving jumbled sets of images and being asked to sequence them. It is because that is what your brain naturally does, all the time, in many different ways. In short, the brain tends to impose sequence. And it does so, I presume, because its environment, the world, appears to operate in this fashion. "Effect(s)" follow(s) "cause(s)". Of course, the belief in a causal relationship is a mildly special case of the sequential association, logically. But the default position, I venture to suggest, is that associations are both sequential and causal.

At the heart of the storytelling process, then, is a tendency to associate sequentially, and a default belief in a causal relationship. We can occasionally glimpse this process at work in waking dreams. These are dreams we "recall" on being awoken by some external stimulus. Often, such dreams seem to have their culmination woven into the very fabric of the dream's plot, as if no other outcome would make sense. The simplest explanation for this phenomenon is that the stimulus occurs first and the sequential narrative of the dream is instantaneously assembled from the pre-existing concepts in the brain being associated with the causally unrelated stimulus. And one reason why such dreams seem particularly vivid may be that the "recall" is, in fact, a glimpse of the actual process of generating a sequential narrative from the unrelated concepts, rather than an act of remembering.

The storyteller and the dreamer are one and the same.