A Bit on the Importance of Narrative

Quoting from "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell, pg. 118:

The original Sesame Street was anti-narrative: it was, by design, an unconnected collection of sketches. “It wasn’t just the ads that influenced the early Sesame Street,” Anderson* says. “There was also a theoretical perspective at the time, based in part on [the influential child psychologist] Piaget, that a preschool child couldn’t follow an extended narrative.” Since the late 1960’s, however, this idea has been turned on its head. At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them. “It’s the only way they have of organizing the world, of organizing experience,” Jerome Bruner, a psychologist at New York University, says. “They are not able to bring theories that organize things in terms of cause and effect and relationships, so they turn things into stories, and when they try to make sense of their life they use the storied version of their experience as the basis for further reflection. If they don’t catch something in a narrative structure, it doesn’t get remembered very well, and it doesn’t seem to be accessible for further kinds of mulling over.”
(*Daniel Anderson: television researcher at UMass)

When I read this passage, I realized that this is why I am so obsessed with mythology as a way to help reconcile my experiences, my emotions, and place me in my world. In this psychological context, it makes perfect sense that even as an adult the narrative format could still serve so well as a tool for personal integration and understanding.

Very cool. :)