I recently read an article "The Confabulations of Oliver Sacks" by neurologist and Boston University School of Medicine assistant professor Pria Anand in which she explores the tension between reality and the mental stories we create to model reality. Her discussion uses her own medical clinical reality and the fairy tales or confabulations that famed neurologist Oliver Sacks used to characterize his patients.
Anand defines confabulations as a neurological repair where the brain fills memory gaps with stories that the teller believes to be true. She says: "A confabulation is not a conscious lie, but rather an unconscious repair … Confabulators experience their own stories as the truth." She references a recent New Yorker article by Rachel Aviv that claims Sacks often "injected parts of his own experiences into the stories of his patients" to create a more compelling narrative and that in his journals Sacks wrote that he gave patients in his books "some of my own powers, some of my own fantasies too." In a letter to his brother about his famous book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks said, "These odd Narratives – half-report, half-imagined, half-science, half-fable … are what I do, basically, to keep MY demons of boredom and loneliness and despair away." For Sacks, then, confabulation was a strategy for self-survival, and Anand notes this tendency in the stories of many clinical physicians, including herself, who "are just as prone to false truths as the reports of an amnesia patient, subconsciously shaped by our priors, our communities, our own narratives." Anand concludes that confabulation is a universal human condition, a fundamental way all humans process a chaotic world, and not merely a clinical symptom found in brain-injured patients.
I can draw two tidy insights about narratives from Anand's musings: First, narrative is a human survival tool. We are biologically programmed to seek order, and when faced with gaps in our understanding, or "abysses of meaninglessness," we create stories to bridge those gaps. Given that we humans understand very little about our worlds, then much of our understanding is based on our stories. We need only a handful of stars to create the most fantastic stories.
Second, storytelling begins subconsciously. Storytelling is so powerful because it mostly happens below the level of conscious thought where we do not realize that we are shaping and revising reality. We simply believe the tidy stories that we construct. Anand says, "All of us narrate our way through gaps, often mistaking the satisfaction of a tidy story for the truth."
As I have come to believe, then, narrative for Anand is a fundamental biological and psychological imperative rather than a mere literary tool or strategy. Storytelling is the mind's primary mechanism for survival and internal coherence. I can draw several inferences relevant to rhizonarratology from Anand's insight.
Narrative as "Unconscious Repair": Anand does not treat confabulation as a flaw, or worse, as a manipulation or a lie; rather, she sees it as the mind's attempt to repair its understanding. When confronted with a gap in knowledge, all brains instinctively generate a story, or a hypothesis, to fill it, hating a vacuum. When I remove from the oven a fallen cake that I've baked perfectly well dozens of times, then I will immediately posit a story, or several stories, about what went wrong. The story may help me find some data to clarify what went wrong, but if not, I'll work with my tidy little story to explain it to my disappointed guests. We all do something like this, incessantly. Stories act as links, or in networking terms, edges that connect unrelated nodes. For the cognitively impaired, this can manifest as hallucinations and invented memories. For the rest of us with mostly healthy minds, it is the constant, subtle process of smoothing over the rough chaos and uncertainties of daily life. As Anand says, "A confabulation is not a conscious lie, but rather an unconscious repair … Confabulators experience their own stories as the truth."
Narrative as Survival Mechanism: Drawing a parallel to the legend of Scheherazade in The Arabian Nights, Anand suggests that the human drive to tell stories is literally a life-preserving act. Narratives provide us with the order necessary to navigate a world "deluged with sights, sounds, and sensations," a confusing swirl that without story to organize it will leave us humans in a state of meaninglessness and psychological despair.
Narrative as Vessel for the Sublimated Self: Arnand claims that narratives enable the mind to process aspects of identity that cannot or will not be expressed directly. She notes that Oliver Sacks injected his own repressed desires and insecurities into the stories of his patients, and she suggests that we all similarly express ourselves through the stories that we receive and tell to ourselves and to others. Narratives, then, serve as symbolic versions of ourselves, allowing our minds to "keep [the] demons of boredom and loneliness and despair away" by projecting internal struggles onto external structures. As Sacks so succinctly says: "I write out symbolic versions of myself."
The Gravity of Narrative over Truth: Perhaps Anand's most striking and sobering claim is that the human mind is biased toward its tidy stories over objective reality. She says that the "gravitational pull" of narrative is so strong that even highly trained professionals, like doctors, fall victim to it. Certainly scientists feel the pull despite their rigorous training in the scientific method developed primarily to keep them focused on the facts. Even the most casual observer of human behavior will readily intuit our tendency to believe our stories about our lovers, our families, our countries over the facts that drop like bombs on our heads. Neurological studies have demonstrated clearly that our brain prioritizes the satisfaction of a coherent plot over the messiness of actual facts. We always prefer the single footprint in the sand to the jumble of infinite sand that constitutes a beach.
If Anand is correct, and I think that she is, then narrative is the biological software that converts raw, chaotic data into a liveable reality. It's an instinctive search for order that slips beneath consciousness to insure that we always have a coherent sense of ourselves and our worlds – even if that coherence is partially or even mostly imagined. It is no wonder, then, that we cling so tenaciously to our stories. Changing our stories, changes ourselves. Losing our stories, loses ourselves. Most of us will fight to the death to keep our stories intact, and unfortunately, too many of us will fight to force our stories on others.
