Telling to Understand by Andrea Smorti

Author:Andrea Smorti
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030431617
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Conclusion

After having observed in the previous chapter how important the binomial “constancy–variability” was in cognitive development and in particular in play, in this chapter we have found ourselves facing it once again by exploring the world of art, where the divine proportion, the concinnitas on the one hand, and the disproportion and exaggeration on the other, have re-proposed the relationship between norm and deviation. We have seen how these concepts are fundamental to the measures of statistical science and how Ramachandran and Hirstein have used them in the formulation of the principle of peak displacement.

The analysis carried out in this chapter has thus made it possible to highlight four key concepts on which the narrative understanding is based: norm, standard deviation from the norm, normal deviation, and anomaly. These concepts can be approximated to what was previously written about the concept of habituation, interest in variability, pleasure in repeating interesting shows, and bitonic ritualization. From a cognitive point of view, they are connected both to the search for variability and to the search for the norm. Schank argued that the cognitive system is usually placed in a condition where events are expected to happen normally, but is at the same time ready to grasp what is unexpected. An anomalous phenomenon does not always deserve further analysis, but it is nevertheless the subject of a first level of attention. We have seen in the previous chapter that some authors (Goldberg and Costa 1981; Martin et al. 1997) have identified in the left and right hemispheres processes specifically intended to work with what is already known or what is still unknown. This discovery further supports the conviction of a dynamic relationship between constancy and variability: what at first appears variable and unpredictable can become a regulated and predictable phenomenon at a later stage, after it has been elaborated.

This proceeding toward the unexpected and this continuous work to reduce it to canonical is precisely what the processes of narrative understanding do. Narrative comprehension, precisely because of the resources brought by memory and play, by respect for reality and its invention, is driven to face the unexpected in order to domesticate it and make it a cognitive heritage thanks to that previous knowledge made up of rules and the “normal” exceptions to them. Through storytelling, narrative understanding has the right equipment to deal with the unexpected in a world laboriously built up through rules. It is interested in looking for the reasons behind the daily puzzles and in finding appropriate antecedents, external conditions, triggering events, and mental states.

Using narrative genres, narrative understanding also has the cultural resources necessary to understand oneself and others. Literary, legal, autobiographical, and scientific genres address and elaborate constancy and variability. Through autobiographical narratives, narrative understanding is not only interested in understanding how and why events actually went away. It goes beyond that to wonder how they could have gone. The playful component inserts into the narration the way of possibility. The development of symbolic playful thinking, perennially going toward

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