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Archive for the ‘narrative’ Category

Strange things happen…..

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, narrative, tagged , on September 1, 2009| 1 Comment »

The other day Ian sent me an email with a link in it (he does this quite a lot!). It was to a book which he thought would interest me. I followed the link and, yes, it sounded really up my street. The book was called “Friends in Low Places”, by James Willis and it seemed to be a plea for a human approach to medicine, instead of a protocol-imprisoned one. I clicked “buy’ from one of the amazon marketplace resellers (I do that quite a lot!). I then picked up a book from my bookshelf as I walked out of my front door. I wanted something to read on the train and I’d just finished reading “Popco” by Scarlett Thomas (VERY enjoyable). The book I picked up was “Pharmakon“, by Dirk Wittenborn, and I’d read a review of it in the BMJ about a month before, thought it sounded like just the kind of novel I’d like to read, and clicked “buy” from one of the amazon marketplace resellers (I told you I do that quite a lot!)

I settled down on the train and started to read it. I got to page 21 and this little piece of dialogue hit me between the eyes

“But how did you get it here?” “Friends in low places.”

The identical phrase. Twice in the same morning. No, twice in the same hour! What are the chances of that? Have you ever even come across that phrase before?

Spooky?

This story isn’t finished yet. Pharmakon is a great novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The following day, before leaving for work I was browsing through my rss feeds in googlereader and came across this astonishing video –

Go on, watch it. It’s amazing. It’s about how the Hubble telescope was pointed by scientists at a part of the sky where they could see nothing. Nothing at all. Just darkness. Watch the video to see what they saw when they looked where there seemed to be nothing……! Then I left for work, got on the train and continued reading Pharmakon. Page 95. Here’s what I read…..

Caspar tried to distract himself by looking out of the window in the direction of galaxy clusters not visible to his human eye

Well, I don’t know about you but it sent shivers down my spine. How does that work?

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Suffering and good lives

Posted in from the consulting room, health, narrative, personal growth, philosophy, science on March 2, 2009| 5 Comments »

My daily working life is that of a doctor. That only tells you a little because Medicine is a very broad subject and doctoring can require extremely different sets of skills. Sometimes I muse about just what is the job of a doctor? Or what makes for a good doctor? I’m pretty sure it involves trying to understand people better. I’m also pretty sure it involves helping people. It involves never thinking you know everything or that you are definitely right! (I know that’s a surprising conclusion but there’s a difference between being decisive and being certain…..read the linked post for more on this). I think it’s also a common experience that a good doctor is one who gives a damn ie one who cares. However, the specifics of the working life of a doctor depend a lot on the context of the doctor’s work. I made myself a “human spectrometer” to clarify this point.

Human spectrometer

Most health care is created around systems. There are whole departments defined on the basis of their focus on a system – Neurology, Urology, Gastroenterology etc. The focus of a doctor in that department is a particular system of the body. He or she becomes expert in the diseases and disorders of that system and acquires the knowledge, tools and experience to intervene, to either resolve, or to manage those disorders. Some doctors specialise more than this. Move left a little from the system on the spectrometer. We have both medical and surgical specialists who focus on one particular organ, or part of a system, like liver specialists, hand surgeons, and so on, and following that path further left we have biochemists and geneticists who concentrate on the functions right down at cellular, or intracellular levels. Jumping to the other end of the scale, there are the epidemiologists and the Public Health doctors who consider disease at a population level. I’m a great admirer of the work of Prof Richard Wilkinson who makes clearer than anyone else I know just what an impact inequality has on population health. The knowledge, skills and experience he needs to do his job are quite different from those of the hand surgeon. Move left again along the spectrum from the right hand side. There are doctors who focus on families, whose everyday lives involves working with whole families, or parts of families. Then there’s me. Right there in the middle. There are lots and lots of doctors like me. Our days are spent largely in consulting rooms with individual patients. Our approach is a generalist one, not a specialist one. We focus on the person. The skills, knowledge and experience needed to do this kind of daily work is holistic, narrative-based and focused on the ability to listen, to communicate and to understand at an individual level.

So each doctor needs the skills and the knowledge appropriate to their practice but there’s something else all doctors share. We are all trying to relieve suffering.

Suffering isn’t a word you’ll find in medical textbooks (just like you won’t find the words “health” or “healing” in textbooks of clinical medicine either!) but it’s our raison d’etre. You can judge me by it. I judge myself by it. When I go to work any day, I want to relieve suffering. If I interact with a patient and don’t feel that I’ve contributed to a relief of their suffering by my involvement and my actions then I don’t feel I’ve done my job. Dr Eric Cassell’s book, “The Nature of Suffering”, deals with this issue beautifully. He says in this book, and in his others, that he changed his clinical practice by deciding to focus on the issue of the patient’s suffering. In fact he explicitly asks his patients to tell him about their suffering as a powerful way of allowing them to set and declare their agenda and for him to focus his care where it matters. In that book he shows how suffering might lie in an individual patient, but it might lie in their relationships, their family, their workplace or community. You could, in fact, ask that question at any point on the “human spectrometer” above. Just where on the spectrum does the suffering lie?

However, human beings have a complex relationship with suffering. It might even be extolled as something good – “No pain. No gain” “I have to suffer for my art” I’ve read more than one book which considers the place of a serious illness in an artist’s life and puts forward the hypothesis that it was their suffering which enabled them to produce their distinctive, great art. I recently read David Lynch’s book, “Catching the Big Fish; Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity” (which I highly recommend actually!) where he powerfully refutes that argument, claiming that Van Gogh might have had the chance to produce even more and even greater art if he hadn’t had all that suffering to cope with in his life. Suffering gets a good press in many religious teachings as well as in a certain kind of New Age thinking. There are many spiritual practices based on inflicting suffering on the body and there’s even a belief in destiny, or Fate, or karma, which states that if you are suffering it’s because that’s what your soul requires. Even the “quest story” of Arthur Franks, as exemplified in Lance Armstrong’s “It’s not about the Bike” shows how suffering can be a path to growth and development.

I’m not denying any truths which lie in those beliefs. Nor am I claiming to know better. But let me be very clear, as far as I know, nobody, given the choice between a path of suffering and one of bliss, chooses suffering. We only choose suffering if we can see no other way to get to where we want to be. If we can find another way that doesn’t involve suffering we’ll choose it. So, yes, maybe my job involves helping people to make the most of their suffering, or to even get something good out of it, but, my first priority, my prime motivation is to do my best to relieve it.

Whether I can help relieve someone’s suffering or not, the inextricably related goal I have is to help that person to have a good life. The point of relieving suffering is to enable a person to experience a good life. But as suffering is an inevitable thread that winds its way through all lives, a doctor’s job is to help people to have a good life, whether they are suffering or not.

Doctors are not the only people to help others to lead good lives of course, but I do think a doctor who loses sight of this goal, loses sight of what it is to be a doctor.

PS Now you’ll be thinking “ah, but what is a GOOD LIFE?” Me too! (I’m working on a post about this but here’s an earlier one to be going on with)

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Myths which improve life

Posted in from the living room, life, narrative, philosophy, writing, tagged on February 3, 2009| 6 Comments »

People often use the word myth as if it is the opposite of the word truth. It’s juxtaposed to reality. You hear that a lot. An explanation about something is dismissed as a myth, meaning that it’s not true, not a fact, that’s it’s unreal. It’s quite strange how we’ve developed this way of using the word myth, because that was never the original meaning of the word. In Karen Armstrong’s “A Short History of Myth” (ISBN 978-1841957036) she says

Human beings have always been mythmakers [because] we are meaning seeking creatures.

Myths then, are a kind of story, a particular kind of story which has the potential to cast light on some aspect of life, some potential to make something clearer, to improve our understanding.

Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives – they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human.

Mythology is about enabling us to live more intensely……it expresses our innate sense that there is more to human beings and to the material world than meets the eye.

I think this a key problem for us now at this stage in human development. How do understand both objective and subjective reality? How do we find meaning and purpose in our lives? The great advances of materialistic naturalism (as Havi Carel) would call it, has advanced through a reductionist approach to reality. It’s based on the belief that everything can best be understood by considering the parts, the components, from which it is made. That’s brought great advances in our ways of being able to understand and interact with the physical world, but when pushed to an extreme it creates a world view which denies the importance, even the reality of anything which cannot be measured, counted, or described objectively. That’s created a sense that the life itself has no meaning, that individual lives have no purpose, and that the priorities of living are about accumulation and consumption of material objects. Now the whole system is in crisis. Prime Minister Gordon Brown says we have never been here before and nobody really knows how to progress.

Karen Armstrong says, “Mythology and Science both extend the scope of human beings.” She’s right. these different ways of grasping reality complement each other.

A myth is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information. If, however, it does not give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life, it has failed. If it works, that is, if it forces us to change our minds and hearts, gives us new hope, and compels us to live more fully it is a valid myth.

Wouldn’t you like to read myths which did that?

She concludes –

We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow beings

We need myths that help us to realise the importance of compassion

We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude to see beyond our immediate requirements

We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again.

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The stories that emerge from little observations

Posted in books, from the living room, life, narrative, writing, tagged on February 1, 2009| 3 Comments »

Let me tell you a story.

Last week, when visiting my parents, my mum said she was looking for her collection of Robert Burns poetry (it was Burns Day), and she came across her aunt Wilhelmina’s “Burns Birthday Record”. Here it is
Burns Birthday Book

I’ve never seen a book like this before. You can see it was owned by my great aunt. Here’s her name and the date she got the book
Burns Birthday Book

25th February 1907. Wilhelmina Rosie was my mum’s father’s sister. Here she is with my gran and grandpa and their first born (my mum). This is taken in Orkney in front of Evie Primary School where Aunt Mina was schoolmistress all her working life.

mum, gran and grandpa and great aunt mina

I started to browse through her Burns Birthday Record
Burns Birthday Book
entries in the Burns Birthday Book

You’ll see that the idea of the book is to enter someone’s name at the date of their birthday, opposite the little quote from Burns. The first thing that struck me was the surnames. There are lots of names here I’ve never come across in all my life. Apparently that’s because many of the names were typically Orcadian but I’m still a little surprised. My grandfather was, for example, Orcadian but moved south to Stirling. Did a lot of these families never move out of Orkney?

entries in the Burns Birthday Book

The next thing I noticed was that they weren’t all written by the same person. Maybe she wrote most of them herself but sometimes her friends would write in their own names? I browsed the entire book, wondering about all these people and their strange names. Several had the same surname so there were clearly a few families represented. Then I came across this entry in December.

entries in the Burns Birthday Book

This entry stands right out.

It’s the only entry in the whole book which gives the person’s full date of birth and the date they died. And it’s the only entry with a quote from the Bible added. Here’s why. George Folsetter was Wilhelmina’s love. They were engaged to be married but he fell from his horse, aged 26, and died. She never married. You’ll see the date of George’s death was 1903, but Aunt Wilhelmina only got her book in 1907.

Look up the quote from Numbers Chapter 18. I had trouble finding it. I assumed that in her day, she’d have a “King James” version of the Bible but in fact the quote comes from the “Revised Standard Version” which was only published for the first time in 1901, six years before she got her Birthday book. I’m not terribly clear why she picked this particular verse, but the chapter as a whole is about tithes and giving the first of the best of all you have to God.

I heard Eddie Reader, in an introduction to Burns’ song, “Ae Fond Kiss”, that the Nancy for whom he wrote the song, lived to her 80s and every year wrote in her diary on December 14th “This day I’ll never forget for this was the last day I saw Robert”

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Stories and genes…..how we are made

Posted in art, from the consulting room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, narrative, science on October 26, 2008| 1 Comment »

Although I get a genuine thrill out of scientific discoveries about how the body works, it’s never quite enough for me. I’m always aware of something else. It’s partly that knowledge that a complex whole human being is so much more than the sum of his or her parts. But it’s also the knowledge that characteristics such as consciousness and highly developed language/communication skills aren’t just other elements which make humans different from all other living creatures. Rather they transform us. Our capacities to remember and to imagine open up whole other ways of being for us.

I’m re-reading one of my favourite trilogies (actually I’m re-reading the first two books in anticipation of the publication of the third and final one…….coming soon in English). It’s Jan Kjaerstad’s The Seducer, The Conqueror and The Discoverer. In the first of these, I came across this dialogue.

I think what I’m trying to say is that every human being could be said to be as much an accumulation of stories as of molecules. I am, in part, all the things I have read over the years. They don’t leave me. They settle inside me like – how can I put it? – like sediment.

So you believe the stories you have heard are every bit as important as the genes with which you have been endowed?

Maybe that’s what life is about. Collecting stories, Axel said, building up an arsenal of good tales, that can be put together in all sorts of complicated ways: like DNA.

If you’re right, then it’s not a matter of manipulating our genes but the stories in our lives, said Jonas.

It’s not the sequence of base-pairs, the genes, we ought to be mapping out, but the sequence of the stories that go to make up a life, and who knows? Arrange them differently and you might get another life altogether.

I certainly find that I gain insights and understanding about life from novels, from painting, from music, from movies and photographs, which I don’t get from a reductionist/materialist science. And I think there’s a lot of truth in this dialogue. Sure, it helps us to understand the mechanisms of molecular function, but if we want to understand living, human beings, then we have to understand how to listen and how to tell stories.

This is a significant part of my work as a doctor…….to understand a person by mapping out their stories and, therapeutically, to help them rearrange those stories in ways which enable them to create a different life.

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I am because you are

Posted in creativity, from the living room, life, music, narrative, personal growth on September 28, 2008| 13 Comments »

One of greatest joys of blogging is how it facilitates the discovery, and creation, of connections. My daughter, Amy, who writes the wonderful lessordinary, has developed a whole online network of friends through her blog. She’s a great networker and deliberately creates her blog to make and develop connections with others. Let me tell you a little story which will illustrate how this is such a core quality of hers. When she left school, she was accepted for an English Literature course at Stirling University. We drove her to the halls of residence in the grounds of the university at the start of the first semester and helped her unpack her small collection of belongings from the boot of the car and pile them in bags and cardboard boxes into her small room. If you’ve ever been to a student hall of residence you’ll have an idea of what they are like. This one was typical in my experience – a series of corridors full of identical box like rooms each with the same furniture (most of it custom built to fit the room exactly and screwed to the floor or the walls). At first sight its a bit bleak and very impersonal. It wasn’t easy to leave her there. I shouldn’t have worried though because the very next day she phoned and said when the door closed behind her and she sat in that bleak room alone she cried. Then she thought, well, everyone else in this corridor is in the same boat as me, I’ll go and say hello. So she set off down the corridor, knocking on all the doors, introducing herself and inviting the “freshers” down to the pub for a drink and a chat. She never looked back.

It strikes me that blogging can be a bit like that. Each of these posts is like a little room, something to be discovered, a door to knock on. I’ve been blogging for about 18 months now and there have been over 55,000 visitors in that time. Almost 2000 comments have been left and every one of those comments is like a little knock on the door.

I hope that some of the posts you read here will be like little discoveries for you, that you’ll hear that knock on the door, and that you’ll find new connections and new possibilities in your life. But let me tell you of a recent experience where it’s happened the other way around for me.

A couple of weeks ago a new commenter, Ian, came along and left comments on a few different posts. At the same time he emailed me and introduced himself. In his introduction he described the trail which led to our connection. Ian said he’d been in Ullapool recently and had picked up a copy of “Why do people get ill?”, completely resonated with it and decided to read some reviews online. One of those reviews was the one I wrote on this blog. He browsed my blog and discovered a like mind. He also recognised my name and remembered a poet friend of his mentioning me to him some time back – Larry Butler. Well, not only has Ian left some really interesting links other sites in his comments, but last week he emailed me and asked if I’d like to go to a traditional music concert at the Tolbooth in Stirling. It was an eye-opener for me. Or maybe, more accurately, and ear-opener. Too much to say about it here in this post but here’s the bit which is most relevant to this story. The three musicians, for some of their tunes, all played mandolins. I can’t say I’ve ever been attracted to the mandolin, but one of the people I’ve met through blogging is the wonderful Dr Tom Bibey. He plays mandolin in a bluegrass band and as I listened to the music I not only heard the mandolin differently from how I’ve heard it ever before but – and here’s my point – I heard it differently BECAUSE of the connection with Tom Bibey – and enjoyed it as never before, but the whole evening, and the people I met there, showed me another possibility – that of playing music. I listen to music all the time. But I haven’t played music since I was a teenager. I think it’s probably time to change that. That thought, the possibility of picking up a musical instrument again, is like a rediscovery of part of me. But several decades on, its a rediscovery of a different me, as I’m obviously much changed by my experiences and my connections of the last thirty years or so.

We are who we are because of the people we connect with. Human beings are highly social creatures. It’s impossible to know what a person is like by putting them into a room all by themselves. We reveal ourselves through our relationships. We create ourselves through our relationships. The patients I meet every day change me because they tell me their own, unique stories. Their stories are told from their own, unique perspectives. They are the heroes of their own stories. And in the telling of their stories they show me different ways of seeing and experiencing the world. The world is different after a story. I am different after a story.

Remember that a story has several components – a teller, a tale, something told about, and a recipient of the tale. Through the sharing of our stories we change each other. We create each other.

One of Ian’s links was to Roman Krznaric who has written a fabulous downloadable booklet called “Empathy and the Art of Living”. Go get it and read it. I highly recommend it. Here’s a key extract –

Most books or courses on the art of living focus on how we can
discover ways of improving our own lives. The emphasis is,
unashamedly, on what can be done to help me. I find this kind
of self-help approach too narrow, individualistic and narcissistic.
In my experience, those people who have lived the most joyful
and fulfilling lives have dedicated much of their time to thinking
about and helping others. It has given them not only personal
satisfaction but also a sense of meaning. They have, in effect,
lived a philosophy of ‘You are, therefore I am’.
Einstein recognised the need to move beyond self-help when
he said: ‘Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us
comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes
seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life,
however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for
the sake of other men.’ We will always feel something missing if
we attempt to live alone, hermetically sealed in an isolation of
our own making, thinking only of our own pleasures and pains.
The mystery of existence is constituted by our relations with
each other.
The twentieth century was an age of introspection, when
psychoanalysis impelled us to search for who we are by looking
inside our own heads. But the art of living involves escaping
from the prison of our own feelings and desires, and embracing
the lives of others. The twenty-first century should be the age of
outrospection, where we discover ourselves by learning about
other people, and finding out how they live, think and look at
the world.
Empathy is at the heart of how to live and what to do, and is
the ultimate art form for the age of outrospection.

Now I don’t know if Roman has invented that word – outrospection. But if he has then it’s hats off to him! This SO hits the spot! I find myself completely agreeing with this viewpoint. There’s way too much in the world of self-help which turns people in on themselves but most of what I’ve read about happiness includes an emphasis on the human need to connect to others, to connect to a sense of whatever is greater and more than ourselves, to be engaged with the world.

Who I am evolves and changes every day as I live in the world. I’m changed by my daily experiences, not least because of the other people I meet and connect with each day. This very fact brings back to my mind one of the books I have most enjoyed in recent months – Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.

Barabasi makes it crystal clear that to understand anything in this world we need to examine the connections, the links – how very Deleuzean!

I am because you are

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Storytelling and the science of the mind

Posted in from the reading room, life, narrative, neuroscience, psychology, tagged on August 11, 2008| 3 Comments »

Because I deal with stories every day, I decided to learn more about the place of narrative in human experience, but coming from a medical perspective I couldn’t find much about narrative, even though there are emerging disciplines of “narrative-based medicine” and “narrative-based research”. Instead, I found the best thinking on storytelling lay in the world of the Humanities. In fact, Richard Kearney’s “On Stories” gave me more insights than any other single work.

It was interesting, therefore, to read this perspective, from Scientific American, which describes how researchers are beginning to study the use of narrative in order to gain insights into the workings of the mind. “Why does our brain seem to be wired to enjoy stories? And how do the emotional and cognitive effects of a narrative influence our beliefs and real-world decisions?”

The first problem scientists face, however, is defining a story! What exactly constitutes a story?

Exposition contrasts with narrative by being a simple, straightforward explanation, such as a list of facts or an encyclopedia entry. Another standard approach defines narrative as a series of causally linked events that unfold over time. A third definition hinges on the typical narrative’s subject matter: the interactions of intentional agents—characters with minds—who possess various motivations.

I loved the conclusion they reached –

However narrative is defined, people know it when they feel it. Whether fiction or nonfiction, a narrative engages its audience through psychological realism—recognizable emotions and believable interactions among characters. “Everyone has a natural detector for psychological realism,” says Raymond A. Mar, assistant professor of psychology at York University in Toronto. “We can tell when something rings false.”

In other words……you just know! How often this applies in life! How do you know when you are well? How do you know when your energy levels are good? Guess it’s the same when it comes to recognising a story. It’s a function of human intuition.

Do you become immersed in stories? Completely absorbed by them? Well, it turns out that if you have prior experience which is similar to that of the characters in the stories then you are more likely to become immersed in those stories. This is kind of obvious. It means that you are more likely to become absorbed by a story if you identify with the characters. One step beyond this conclusion is interesting though…..those who become more easily immersed in a wider range of stories have been shown to be those who have the greatest capacity to empathise. Interestingly, this can work the other way too…….you can increase somebody’s ability to empathise by teaching them literature! The ability to empathise is the ability to imagine what’s going on in someone else’s mind – scientists call this “theory of mind”. Theory of mind develops in children around the age of 5 and is a key part of the human ability to live in communities. So, storytelling also has the possibility of improving our skills in living together.

Other scientists have studied stories to see what they reveal about human motivations and goals –

As many as two thirds of the most respected stories in narrative traditions seem to be variations on three narrative patterns, or prototypes, according to Hogan. The two more common prototypes are romantic and heroic scenarios—the former focuses on the trials and travails of love, whereas the latter deals with power struggles. The third prototype, dubbed “sacrificial” by Hogan, focuses on agrarian plenty versus famine as well as on societal redemption. These themes appear over and over again as humans create narrative records of their most basic needs: food, reproduction and social status.

Are these the basic, common themes we find in stories? Do you agree that stories reveal the common human patterns of motivation and desire?

Let me finish this post with the final point made in this interesting article – the power of stories to influence us. This is well understood by advertisers and PR companies, but this point really struck me –

…..labeling information as “fact” increased critical analysis, whereas labeling information as “fiction” had the opposite effect. Studies such as these suggest people accept ideas more readily when their minds are in story mode as opposed to when they are in an analytical mind-set.

Now isn’t that interesting! Stories are more likely to convince people than “facts”!

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4 verbs which make us human?

Posted in life, narrative, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, psychology, science on May 20, 2008| 3 Comments »

Let’s consider four verbs which highlight essential characteristics of human beings.

SENSING

All living creatures are sensate. All have sensory organs to pick up stimuli from the environment – light, sound, odours, temperature and so on. As human beings we have a particularly elaborate sensory system, possibly THE most elaborate of all creatures, however, being sensate is a characteristic we share with all animate beings.

FEELING

I have a large hardback copy of Gray’s Anatomy on my bookshelf. I bought it when I was studying anatomy at Medical School back in 1973. I still find it fascinating. The section on the nervous system and the brain shows something incredibly striking. All the nerves which carry the signals from the sensory organs travel first of all to what is termed “the old brain”, the “limbic system” more or less. That always amazed me. Why do all the sensory signals go there? This particular area of the brain is the main emotion generating and processing centre. It’s responsible for those feelings you get of fear, of arousal, of anger, and so on. Modern techniques of brain imaging are helping us to understand this better. It seems that we have developed in a way which allows signals from our sensory equipment to first of all create emotional states. This has a survival advantage. For example, we can quickly develop the “fight or flight” response to successfully deal with any threats around us. Obviously emotions are considerably more elaborate than this. Anthony Damasio is really interesting to read about this subject. “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain” is a good starting point. But I can also recommend his “The Feeling of What Happens” and “Looking for Spinoza”. You might also like “Consciousness Explained” by Daniel C Dennett and “Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman. What all of these authors show us is how this particular function of the brain allows us to respond to stimuli from the environment far, far more quickly than we could if we had to become aware of everything consciously first, then figure out what to do about it. That thinking thing comes next! Although it’s not possible to really know the emotional content of another creature’s mind, from observing behaviour patterns it would seem that other animals also have emotions.

THINKING

Those two great parts of the brain known as the cerebral hemispheres are responsible for what we term “cognition”…….thinking. In its entirety, the human brain is THE most complex structure in the known universe. Amazing, huh? And it’s inside your head! There’s way too much involved in thinking for me to explain here but it involves memory, imagination, awareness, concentration and systems of assessment. Once signals have been processed in the old brain (and acted upon!), this “new brain” picks up the trail and processes what’s going on. It’s thinking that let’s us make choices. Some other creatures think too, but, as far as we know, not to nearly the same extent as human beings do. One of the things we’ve done with these capacities is to develop language which gives us the ability to handle and manipulate symbols and to think both abstractly and synthetically. And that leads to the fourth verb – the one which seems to be uniquely human –

MEANING-SEEKING

We don’t just pick up signals, we don’t just generate feelings, we don’t just think about the signals and the feelings to make choices, we do something else. We try to make sense of things. We are always asking the questions “Why?” and “How come?” We are insatiably curious but we are also insatiably trying to understand the world and our experiences. The way we do this is by telling stories. We put everything together and attribute values and meanings to weave narratives which enable us to make sense of the world and of ourselves. We do this in a host of complex ways. Viktor Frankl showed how this is one of our most fundamental drives. See his “Man’s Search for Meaning”. Richard Kearney shows how we use storytelling for this purpose, and Owen Flanagan shows how we inhabit “spaces of meaning” to create our distinct worldviews and narratives.

So, there you have it. Four verbs which make us human – sensing, feeling, thinking and meaning-seeking.  Let me just add one further level of complexity. I’ve presented this is a logical, step-wise way – inspired by those evolutionary biologists – but on a moment to moment basis, these activities of the human being are continuously active and interactive. What sense we make of something influences what we sense and vice versa. Feelings influence thoughts and vice versa. And so on.

What do you think? Do you agree that these four verbs capture what it is to be human? Have you any others you think I should add?

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Not just what you say, but the way you say it

Posted in from the viewing room, movies, narrative, video on March 3, 2008| 5 Comments »

We construct our sense of self, and we experience our own very unique lives through the tool of narrative. Narrative means the story and the way its told. This is something I look for all the time during my consultations. I’m interested to notice not just the words people use but the tone of voice, the speed of speech, the hesitations, the facial expressions and the body language. The way a story is told is actually what gives the content of a story its meaning.

Have a look at this short French film (English subtitles)

It’s brilliant. Starts bland, with words that don’t convey much, but with a small piece of direction the words are said again in an entirely different way and WHAM – if it doesn’t get you, I’ll be surprised! (Well, it got me sniffing anyway!)

Tell me what you think. How aware are you of the way you say things? How aware are you of the way things are said to you?

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The importance of story

Posted in books, creativity, from the reading room, life, narrative, philosophy on January 30, 2008| 39 Comments »

The people who come to see us bring us their stories. They hope they tell them well enough so that we understand the truth of their lives. They hope we know how to interpret their stories correctly. We have to remember that what we hear is their story.

Robert Coles in “The Call of Stories”.

Stories have always fascinated me. I love them. Every day when I sit in my consulting room patients tell me the most amazing, fascinating and unique stories. As a medical student I was taught how to “take a history” – I hate that phrase actually – who’s doing the “taking” and what exactly are they “taking” and from whom? Doesn’t seem right to me at all. Instead I prefer teaching medical students how to listen to patients’ stories. However, the point is that this is the beginning of all diagnosis. To a certain extent listening to the patient’s story is a diminished art. There’s an over-reliance on technology and a lot of doctors just don’t seem to be able to make a diagnosis without a test these days. Diagnosis is a form of understanding. It’s a process of trying to make sense of somebody’s experience.

If stories are so important in clinical practice, then how can I learn to handle them better I wondered? There is a developing area of medicine known as “narrative-based practice”, with associated “narrative-based research” methodologies, but materially-orientated, reductionist scientists look down on narrative. They prefer data. So, when I started to study narrative (which, technically is the story AND the way that story is told), I couldn’t find much work from a scientific perspective. I had to turn to the humanities.

One of the books which I really love in this area of study is “On Stories” by Richard Kearney (ISBN 9-780415-247986). Not only is it a fabulous exploration of the place of story in human life, but it’s written completely beautifully. Richard Kearney is a philosopher but he’s also a magnificent writer. This one book taught me more about the importance of story than any other.

Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.

This sets stories at the heart of human existence – not optional, but essential.

Aristotle says in “Poetics” that storytelling is what gives us a shareable world.

The key word there is “shareable”. It’s through the use of story that we communicate our subjective experience and its through the sharing of subjective experience that we connect, and identify with others.

Without this transition from nature to narrative, from time suffered to time enacted and enunciated, it is debatable whether a merely biological life could ever be considered a truly human one.

Beautifully expressed. Sets narrative at the heart of what it means to be human and stands it against those who would take a materialistic view of life which they claim can be reduced to data sets and DNA.

Every life is in search of a narrative. We all seek, willy-nilly, to introduce some kind of concord into the everyday discord.

This is one of my favourite lines in the whole book. This is exactly the power of story – it enables us to “get a handle on” life, to bring some kind of order out of chaos.

What does Richard Kearney mean by story then? Well, I’ll finish this post with two more quotes from his book which make it very clear and very simple.

When someone asks you who you are, you tell your story. That is, you recount your present condition in the light of past memories and future anticipations.

This shows that story collapses time, bringing the past and the future into the present. Story telling requires memory, imagination and expression.

Every story requires –

a teller, a tale, something told about, and a recipient of the tale.

Nice and simple, but what profundity lies in there. For every story, there is a unique human being doing the telling, there is the story itself and its subject matter, and, very importantly there’s the recipient – the listener or the reader. Story is, as Aristotle said, a way of creating a shareable world. That’s the greatest potential of blogs, I reckon. By sharing our stories we create a shared world. Yes, sure, stories can divide as well as connect, but without stories, there is no potential for connection, no potential for compassion and no potential for the creation of a meaning-full, and better world.

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