What follows is a quote from Edward Wilson, a famous naturalist. It comes from 'Life is a narrative', the introduction to 'The Best American Science and Nature Writing' (2001). In a later post I'll explain why this is important to me.


"Everyone can understand the process of science, and once familiar with a modest amount of factual information and the elementary terminology of particular disciplines, he or she can grasp the intuitive essence of at least some scientific knowledge. But the scientific method is not natural to the human mind. The phenomena it explicates are by and large unfamilar to the ordinary experience. New scientific facts and workable theories, the silver and gold of the scientific enterprise, come slow and hard, less like nuggets lying on a streambed than ore dug from mines. To enjoy them while maintaing an effective critical attitude requires mental discipline.

"The reason is the innate constraints of the human brain. Gossip and music flow easily through the human mind, because the brain is genetically predisposed to perceive them. Theirs is a Paleolithic cogency. Calculus and reagent chemistry, in contrast, come hard, like ballet on pointe. They have become relevant only in modern postevolutionary times. Of the hundreds of fellow scientists I have known for more than fifty years, from graduate students to Nobelists, all generally prefer at random moments of their lives to listen to gossip and music rather than to scientific lectures

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"By narrative we take the best stock we can of the world and our predicament in it. What we see and recreate is seldom the blinding literal truth. Instead we perceive and respond to our surrondings in narrow ways that most benefit our organismic selves. The narrative genius of Homo Sapiens is an accommodation to the inherent inability of the three pounds of our sensory system and brain to process more than a minute fraction of the information the environment pours into them. In order to keep the organism alive, that fraction must be intensely and accurately selective. The stories we tell ourselves and others are our survival manuals.

"With new tools and models, neuroscientists are drawing close to an understanding of the conscious mind as narrative generator. They view it as an adaptive flood of scenarios created continously by the working brain. Whether set in the past, present or future, whether fictive or reality based, the free-running constructions are our only simulacrum of the world outside the brain. They are everything we will possess as individuals. And, minute by minute, they determine whether we live or die.

"The present in particular is constructed from sensations very far in excess of what can be put in the simulacrum. Working at frantic pace, the brain summons memories --past scenarios-- to help screen and organize the incoming chaos. It simultaneously creates imaginary scenarios to create fields competing options, the process we call decision making. Only a tiny fraction of the narrative fractions --the focus-- is selected for higher-order processing in the prefrontal cortex. That segment constitutes the theater of running symbolic imagery we call the conscious mind.

"During the story-building process, the past is reworked and returned to memory storage. Through repeated cycles of recall and supplementation the brain holds on to shrinking segments of the former conscious states. Across the generations the most important among these fragments are communicated widely and converted into history, literature, and oral tradition. If altered enough, they become legend and myth. The rest disappear."

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The first two paragraphs of this quote actually appear later in the article than the last four, but as an excerpt I think they work better this way. The thread in this entry is continued here.