Health Reform is Bad Except that it’s Good. Why and how we are Prisoners of Narrative

We love a good story. There are lots of reasons this is true. For example . . .

• We’re raised listening to stories, some read, some told.
• Most of the media we consume is narrative based.
• Culture is communicated, instilled, and passed along through stories.
• We use narrative as a mechanism for processing stimulus and memories into something we can use.

We non-scientists know this later point to be true simply by observing our own internal dialogs. For example, when we feel wronged by someone, what do we do? We replay the story of the wronging over and over again in our heads. And then what happens? We change the dialog and the outcome of these stories as we imagine all the devastatingly clever things we should have said.

In the same way, when we think about the future we construct stories that encapsulate our hopes and fears. Depending on the content of the stories we imagine, and the intensity with which we imagine them, we might call this activity daydreaming, visualizing, or obsessing.

This internal process of story telling doesn’t stop with a single drama. We tell the story over and over, changing bits and pieces as we go. And then we go further. We assemble the stories into a broader meta-story that becomes the narrative of our lives. If a particular person has wronged us, we might resurrect other tales of being wronged in a similar way by other people. Or we might string together stories about other times that person did something to us we didn’t like. By doing this, we wrap stimulus, response, and specific memories together to create a narrative.

This act of linking stories together, either looking backwards or forwards, is a function of our wiring to use meaning and pattern making as a way of making sense of what goes on around us. We order our memories and what we perceive to be facts into a pattern that makes sense, a narrative that has meaning.

Again, we know this to be true when we examine our internal dialogs. When we tell ourselves things like, “My brother was always smarter than me?” or “I make bad decisions under stress” or “I have always had great instincts about people” we are organizing a life of memories, stimulus and response into a narrative, backed by stories that support the meaning we choose. We could just as easily find memories to support an alternative narrative.

Here’s a small and silly example. I can remember standing next to a building some years ago and realizing that a bird had just dumped a load on my shoulder from somewhere above me. And what story did I tell myself? “Birds are always crapping on me.” I supported that conclusion by recalling several other instances I could recall when a bird had either crapped on my, my car, the furniture on my deck, even on other people. So now I have a narrative, created out of stories I told myself, that supports a meaning and pattern I went looking for.

Does that last point sound harsh? Then ask yourself this? How many birds have flown over you in just in the last year, yet along the last ten, or in my case, 53 years? You can’t count that high.

No, birds don’t always crap on you, me, or anyone. But you can see how easy it is to think such a thing when you realize that we are wired to think in narratives, stories linked to stories that support patterns and meaning on which we have already anchored. That’s right. We come to our story telling with the patterns and meaning already in place and interpret the stimulus and memories to fit. It takes an act of will to change the relationship and observe our situation separate from our wiring to narrate.

We see examples of the power and danger of narratives all around us, most vividly when it comes to lightning rod issues like health care reform. If you could go back in time a year ago and ask people about health care, you would most likely have heard personal narratives . . . points of view based on personally experienced stimulus and responses.

Twelve months later, there are “sides to the debate.” Health reform haters and supporters are now swept up in powerful narratives that are generally not rooted in personal experience. They come from someplace else. Almost nobody has read the actual legislation, so we know that the meaning people find here is not rooted in analysis or something that passes for fact. The meaning has begotten the narrative. People project their hopes and fears onto the narrative and thus become part of it.

There are good reasons for why this happens. We have amazing cognitive abilities, gated by a relatively small capacity working memory. In a hugely over-stimulated existence, we survive by focusing on a few immediately important pieces of information, and rely on the wealth of pre-stored behavioral scripts, mental models, memories, pre-loaded patterns and meanings, and “proven” narratives to make sense of the rest. We do this because most of the time the cost of doing so is low and the results we seem to experience are pleasing, or at least tolerable.

Over thousands of generations, we have evolved all manner of thinking tricks that have kept us out ahead of our competitors and circumstances. Narrative thinking is a useful term for describing how we create, store, and retrieve memories in a complex world . . . a world by the way made complex by our stunning and ever evolving thinking skills.

You can use these wonderful story-telling skills to your advantage. Two ideas come to mind.

If you decide you want to make a change, the first place to start is to construct new narratives. Resurrect old stories into new combinations to support the new meaning you want to find and make. In other words, when you change your “values” (a fancy word for what you want), actively change the stories you tell yourself about your past and about your future. Change the meaning first, the narrative second, and the rest will follow.

If you find yourself caught up in the passions of the hour, particularly the kind that seem to excite the imagination of lots of people, remind yourself that narratives are not the stories and the stories aren’t the “facts.” You and I can look at exactly the same set of facts or stimulus and find very different meanings. Things are as they are. They aren’t supposed to be one way or another. We are the ones who assign meaning and pattern. We make that choice. We can make a different choice.