How Do We Understand?
Picture it this way. An understander has a list of
beliefs, indexed by subject area. When a new story appears, he attempts to find a
belief of his that relates to it. When he does, he finds a story attached to that
belief and compares the story in memory to the one he is processing. His
understanding of the new story becomes, at that point, a function of the old
story. Once we find a belief and connected story, we need no further processing;
that is, the search for other beliefs is co-opted.
To the extent that
people do understand anything at all, we can identify three different features of
understanding:
1. Matching indices for story retrieval
2. Adding aspects of a new story to empty slots in an old one
3. Seeking further evidence for stories that were only tentat... (查看原文)
Stories, as we have noted, are the basis of our understanding. Understanding means
retrieving stories, and applying them to new experiences. The consequence of this
is profound for models of memory. If active memory is really a beehive of activity
involving story retrieval and story application, then what it means to remember
needs to be reinterpreted.
First, memories for events are indexed by our understanding of the events
themselves.
Second, and most important, we must consider how such indexes might have been
constructed in the first place.
Telling is remembering.
Everything else, what we fail to tell, gets forgotten, although it can often be
reconstructed. The effect of all this is very interesting. Not only do our
memories become a function of what we talk about, but if these sto... (查看原文)
Humans cannot easily digest the complexity of the world they live in and the
actions that they and others take in that world. We look for explanations of our
own behavior and of the behavior of others that seem to make sense. But what does
it mean to make sense of a behavior? When we tell about a series of events that
have occurred over a five or ten year period, as in a divorce story, we look for
overall patterns rather than attempting to relate every event that ever happened.
We look for generalizations to make. But what kinds of generalizations can we
make? First and foremost, we look for generalizations that we have seen before and
that we believe others have seen before. We speak in generalizations that our
listener can understand.
(查看原文)
The process of distilling a coherent story from a range of particular experiences
causes a memory entity, the index, to be constructed. After a index is
constructed, it, in effect, becomes the memory of the original set of events that
comprised the story. The events themselves become lost as an easily retrievable
entity, while the index is available for use.
(查看原文)
