my mind on books

Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory by Roger C. Schank

Most of the public writing I’ve done up to now has been fairly academic – from college papers to abstracts of journal articles. This book by Roger Schank (who is forever associated in my mind with the “restaurant script”) has started to change the way I think about writing. Instead of thinking of the information I want to impart and how to organize it, Schank prompts me to think more in terms of “what story can I tell about this?”

Schank discusses the relationship between storytelling and intelligence, conversation as a process of responsive storytelling, and how stories are stored in memory:

Stories are a way of preserving the connectivity of events that would otherwise be disassociated over time. (p.124)

Near the end of the book (p. 221-237) Schank suggests that greater intelligence involves extending normal human abilities along seven dimensions. The dimensions are

• data finding (“the more that interests you the better memory you are likely to have,” p. 224)
• data manipulation (“the more successfully you adapt old stories, the more creative you are,” p. 226)
• comprehension (“intelligence means being interested in explaining as much as possible rather than explaining away as much as possible,” p. 229)
• explanation (“Failure is valuable because it encourages explanation,” p. 231)
• planning (“the more intelligent you are, the more you can create new plans,” p. 233)
• communication (“the more ideas are discussed, the more insights one will come to,” p. 235)
• integration (“the smartest of us becomes curious about certain aspects of what we encounter, and it is precisely those aspects that are worth focusing on,” p. 241)

Schank is also the author of The Connoisseur’s Guide to the Mind: How We Think, How We Learn, and What It Means to Be Intelligent and The Creative Attitude: Learning to Ask and Answer the Right Questions (among others).