Stories and the Brain by Paul B. Armstrong

Author:Paul B. Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2020-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Interactions of Action in Narrative and Narration

Narratives are constituted by the intertwining of different modalities of action, most basically by the interaction between discourse and story—that is, the relation between the act of telling and the actions and events emplotted in the told that is fundamental to our capacity to exchange and understand stories. The ability of narratives to bring into relation different kinds of action is grounded in (and can consequently have a powerful effect on) the role of action in coordinating different cognitive processes in our embodied engagements with our worlds. As Berthoz and Petit observe in their authoritative study of The Physiology and Phenomenology of Action (2008, 42–43), the synthesis of “multiple systems . . . of sense data” in the brain is accomplished through action: “The unity of the perceived world depends upon the extraordinary capacity of the brain which, in the first instance, breaks up the world into multiple components. The world of our lived experience is then the result of a synthesis of the activity of all these stations. . . . The act is an indispensable feature of this unity.” For example, as Merleau-Ponty (2012 [1945], 151) points out, “What unites the ‘tactile sensations’ of the hand and links them to the visual perceptions of the same hand and to perceptions of other segments of the body is a certain style of hand gestures, which implies a certain style of finger movements and moreover contributes to a particular fashion in which my body moves.” Because the felt unity of embodied experience is generated by the underlying “style” of these interactions, Merleau-Ponty famously declares that “the body cannot be compared to the physical object, but rather to the work of art” (152). Narratives are powerful cognitive and existential instruments because of their ability to organize and reorganize action of many different kinds, on different levels, across many perceptual and experiential modalities.

A particular style characterizes different modes of cognition because they are what Alva Noë (2015, 10) calls “organized activities.” As he explains, “Our lives are one big complex nesting of organized activities at different levels and scales.” These styles of organization are patterns integrating the differences registered by our perceptual equipment, the epistemological habits that develop over our lifetimes of embodied cognitive experience through Hebbian wiring and firing. The style that organizes these perceptual and cognitive modalities characterizes in turn our style of being-in-the-world, the characteristic intentionality (the directedness toward people, states of affairs, and the future) that comes to define our sense of self. Cognitive narrative theorist Guillemette Bolens’s (2012, 22, 28) definition of gesture as “kinesic style” encapsulates these linkages: “Kinesic styles interconnect all degrees of expressivity. . . . A person’s kinesic style is perceptible in her idiosyncratic movements and the singular way she negotiates social codes and physical constraints, while the kinesic style of a literary work is conveyed through its narrative dynamics.” A person’s distinctive kinesic style has to do with how her different ways of acting in the

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