Roles of Fiction in Cognitive Development





The document's author, Dr. Sylwester, is a well-known authority on how better understanding of the brain can shed light on education practices that directly impact the classroom.Here is some more information about Sylwester:


 * Robert Sylwester is an Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Oregon who focuses on the educational implications of new developments in science and technology. He has written 20 books and curricular programs and 200+ journal articles. His most recent books are The Adolescent Brain: Reaching for Autonomy (2007, Corwin Press) and How to Explain a Brain: An Educator’s Handbook of Brain Terms and Cognitive Processes (2005, Corwin Press). Corwin Press will publish his A Child's Brain: The Need for Nurture in the spring of 2010. The Education Press Association of America has given him two Distinguished Achievement Awards for his syntheses of cognitive science research, published in Educational Leadership. He has made 1600+ conference and inservice presentations on educationally significant developments in brain/stress theory and research. He served as major professor or co-major professor for 66 doctoral students in the College of Education, University of Oregon.

People interested in this article may also enjoy reading the following articles:


 * 20/20 Vision for 2020 Challenges.
 * Brain Science.
 * Mirror Neurons.
 * Fading Memories, Emerging Understanding.
 * A large collection of articles by Bob Sylwester.

Introduction
Many body systems, such as our eyes, ears, limbs, kidneys, and brain hemispheres are biologically doubled. It’s useful to have a back-up system if one part becomes dysfunctional. The combination of two systems also allows for behaviors that a single system can’t carry out, such as to walk, or to play a violin.

Further, our right hemisphere leads in processing novel challenges and creative solutions, and our left hemisphere leads in processing familiar challenges and established responses. Their combined capabilities have obvious cognitive advantages in solving the wide variety of challenges we confront.

We also continually confront such psychological dualities as true-false, right-wrong, fair-unfair, moral-immoral, ethical-unethical, friendly-unfriendly. We tend to consider one of the two terms to be positive and the other negative, but perhaps it isn’t that simple. Let’s explore the issue with fact-fiction.

Fact and Fiction
One of the major curiosities about humans is the great amount of time and energy we spend in creating, relaying, and attending to stories that both the storyteller and audience know are false. It makes survival sense to share true information, but fictional narrative seems intellectually and culturally pointless.

And yet, fiction has been a dominant force in all cultures – from short jokes and parables to extended novels and various dramatic forms. We often add illustrations, gestures, music, and dance to enhance a story’s emotional impact and narrative flow. We even try to bolster arguments with fabricated anecdotes. Does a day ever go by in which fictional narrative is absent from our life?

And as if daytime fiction isn’t enough, our two hours of nighttime dreaming often include strange and disjointed narratives that are untrammeled by space and time realities – dream stories that our brain creates to tell to itself, and that then typically disappear from conscious memory upon wakening.

More curious, even though children have much factual information to master, their enculturation is replete with made-up stories – from fables to fairy tales, from Santa Claus to the Easter Bunny. Children can learn much about the world from true narratives, but what can they possibly learn from fiction?

The emerging answer is that fictional narrative plays a central role in the juvenile development and adult maintenance of important cognitive processes. Brian Boyd’s thought provoking On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (2009) is an excellent example of imaginative explorations that seek to explain such longstanding enigmas of human thought and behavior.

Boyd considers fiction to be an important art form, and the arts to be a major playful venue for developing and maintaining human cognition, cooperation, and creativity. Fictional narrative incorporates all three of these key elements – we have a brain that can process ambiguity; we’re a social species; and we continually confront novel challenges.

Space and Time Limitations
Our advanced form of consciousness allows us to intelligently contemplate and then explore the here and there of space. Our finite sensorimotor system limits the extent of such explorations, but our curiosity is boundless. We thus added technology to speculation, and so populated the earth, explored the heavens, and peered inside our cellular and molecular bases.

Time creates a similar exploratory challenge with then, now, and later. We have a memory of the past; we can observe the present; but we can only speculate about the future – and then we have to wait to see how it turns out.

Intelligence is an elusive concept, but it seems to incorporate general/verbal (crystallized) knowledge and problem solving (fluid) abilities. Jeff Hawkins (2004) defines intelligence as the ability to rapidly and correctly predict what will occur on the basis of how currently perceived events relate to prior experience. Intelligent prediction is thus dependent on our ability to successfully function beyond the here and now by identifying related recurring space/time patterns.

Novel Challenges
But what if we didn’t have prior experiences that are similar to the current challenge? This was certainly the situation with early humans who lacked the knowledge, personal experience, and technological support that could get their cognitive systems beyond here and now. And it’s certainly the case with children, who have a very limited experiential background.

Our brain’s solution was to simply use its superior pattern-recognition ability to search for any reasonable connections between current and previous spatial and temporal problems.

It could do that because we recognize and store information conceptually (which is perhaps another way of saying within identified but variable patterns). For example, although chairs occur in a wide variety of shapes, we can identify an object we’ve never seen before as a chair, or perhaps use it as a chair even if it isn’t.

We can similarly identify a couple dozen leaves as maple leaves, even though no two are alike – and if an oak leaf is included in the set, even children can quickly identify it as a leaf, but not a maple leaf.

Analogy and metaphor emerged out of this comparison capability. As our brain’s highly interconnected conceptual networks seek matches between what’s currently perceived and what it has experienced, it often activates concepts and specific objects/events that aren’t a perfect match, but are close enough to be useful. Such metaphoric matches form the base of much of prediction, discourse, fiction, and the arts in general.

Early humans could only speculate about the cause of such significant natural events as storms, seasons, and illness. Deities emerged as a convenient anthropomorphic explanation for many such mysteries (eg, the gods are angry). Expanded narratives made the explanations understandable and acceptable until a better explanation emerged.

An explanation thus doesn’t have to be true to be cognitively and culturally useful. Storytellers emerged as important cultural resources because of their ability to imagine plausible explanations.

A good story can emotionally arouse our brain and focus its attention at almost the same level as a real life challenge. We thus don’t have to physically experience something to understand it. We can mentally experience it with the author, imagine an appropriate metaphoric resolution, and insert that into our memory for later use if needed.

This capability is especially helpful with potentially dangerous challenges, or with challenges that involve complex personal relationships. Most fictional narratives thus focus on difficult challenges rather than on simple problems that are relatively easy to understand and resolve. We tend to seek out fictional narratives that provide credible resolutions of personally significant issues and relationships.

Dramatic narrative forms (such as film, TV, and theater) are especially powerful in that we observe real humans act out the imagined problem in a naturalistic setting that enhances the credibility of the story.

Although fiction creates imaginary events, it often includes a lot of obscure factual information that’s inserted to bolster the credibility of the speculations. The reader thinks: ‘An author who knows that much about the setting of the story is probably also correct about the speculative elements.’

Dan Brown’s widely read and discussed The Da Vinci Code (2003) and his latest book, The Lost Symbol (2009) are good examples of this phenomenon. The books are full of obscure facts that probably wouldn’t interest most people out of the context of the book. For example, The Lost Symbol provides a rich factual base of Masonic lore, Washington DC government buildings, famous art objects, and new developments in surveillance technology. The facts help move the story, but they don’t in themselves turn a fictional speculation about a conspiracy into fact.

Further, like all good storytellers, Brown knows that attention, a key cognitive system, is tuned to the unexpected, so his novels are full of plot twists and turns to help maintain the reader’s attention over 500+ pages.

Prophetic literary devices such as science fiction have always had a strong appeal, because they shift our focus from what is to what could be – and into an environment that we can currently only imagine. They thus have led to various creative cultural developments and to inventions that resolved problems that didn’t have a current useful solution.

Fictional absurdity similarly creates a complex situation that has no connection to current reality. Our pattern seeking brain will however automatically seek to locate a coherent pattern. This added effort in a complex challenge can prime our brain to function more efficiently in the identification of patterns in other more relevant settings (Proulx, 2009).

We’ve become a global village, and this has forced us to try to understand and resolve problems that are spatially and/or temporally distant from our actual experience. Primitive humans wondered what caused the hail that fell in their village, and we wonder about global warming. Wars were formerly fought over geopolitical issues, but cultural issues are prominent in the current Middle East conflict. Terrorist strategies have replaced supposedly civil Rules of Engagement.

When things change and established understandings and conventions can’t resolve the new challenges, storytellers imagine explanations and resolutions. If the story makes sense, we remember it, and use it when fiction becomes reality.

The stories we learned during childhood may thus provide the base for many of our adult beliefs and decisions. They may even become so deeply engrained that we reject credible new discoveries that differ from the powerful beliefs that emerged earlier via fictional narrative.

Fictional narrative is thus a useful technique that our brain uses as it moves from curiosity to discovery.

Author
This article was written by Robert Sylwester. It is protected against changes by readers. Comments can be made on the accompanying Discussion page (see menu at top of this page).