What is a story? Events set into a pattern.
Patterns–narratives–are how we understand the world.
Look away from the screen. What do you see? A collection of lines and colors? Or objects?
You can make sense of the light entering your eyes because your brain organizes them into patterns. You recognize that a colon and a parentheses are a face🙂 You recognize that orange and black stripes mean a tiger is nearby. Sounds coalesce into words and marks scratched in wet clay into epics.
If you spot a tiger every time you go to the watering hole, you notice a pattern–and if you’re lucky, find a new watering hole. If you can’t recognize patterns, chances are good you’ll be eaten by a tiger.
Brains love patterns so much, you can trigger a state of bliss just by repeating patterns to yourself. Former schizophrenics have related to me just how nice schizophrenia can feel, which I admit seems kind of counter-intuitive, but then, I found a pattern in some data today and was so happy as a result, that I can see how that might be so.
Suppose I read you numbers at random from some dataset–say, daily rainfall in Helsinki for the past 2000 years. Each number would tell you something about that particular day, but the dataset as a whole would tell you nothing. Random data is just noise. Even if I read the numbers in order, you’d probably hear little more than noise, though if you paid attention, you might start to hear a pattern after a year or two of rainfalls.
But if I made a graph, Helskinki’s rainy October and Novembers–and dry Aprils–would suddenly stand out. We could make graphs of rainfall over years, months, or centuries. We could look for all kinds of patterns–and interesting outliers.
Once we see patterns, we find meaning.
History is the study of change. An accounting of history without patterns soon devolves into random noise. Names, dates. Names, dates. The narratives give it meaning.
I first really discovered this while trying to research the French Revolution via Wikipedia. Wikipedia tries its darndest not to impart any particular bias to its historical articles, resulting in a lot of names and dates and places, without much that ties it all together. This actually makes them hard to read; after a while my eyes glaze over and my brain starts refusing to process anymore. By contrast, pick up any book on the French Revolution, and you’ll probably discover the author’s central thesis “The peasants made them do it!” or “Crop failures drove them to revolt!” or “System breakdown!” The author takes care to marshal evidence in favor of his thesis, drawing out the patterns for you.
It took only one small book on the French Revolution for it to suddenly make sense. The was a stark difference between my brain’s willingness to follow this author’s train of thought (“The peasants made them do it!”) and my brain’s willingness to follow the Wikipedia’s N-POV articles, even though I did not necessarily agree with the author’s thesis.
To be clear, the Wikipedia is not bad for avoiding POV; many, many theses are completely wrong. You could not even begin to write an article on the French Revolution if you wanted to make an accurate presentation of all the theses people have had on the subject, or even just the major ones. The best thing for the Wikipedia is to try to present factual information, and leave it up to the readers to find their own patterns.
(The “badly written” Wikipedia articles have bias and POV-issues and actually make sense, even if I often disagree with the author’s thesis.)
Much of what I do here on this blog is look for patterns in the data. “Here’s something interesting,” I say. “Can I find any patterns? Anything that might fit this data?” It is all very speculative. I know it is speculative. I hope that you know that I know that I am speculating, and not proclaiming to know the One True Truth.
Take the post, “Why do Native Americans have so much Neanderthal DNA?” Native Americans appear to have more Neanderthal DNA than other people is the starting datum; from there I try to marshal up some patterns that might explain things. Same with, say, “Adulterations in the Feed.”
Ultimately, I wager that a lot of my theories will turn out to be wrong. The real world does not care about patterns nearly so much as our little brains do, and we are prone to seeking out patterns in data even when there really aren’t any. Sometimes shit just happens and it doesn’t really mean anything bigger than the shit that is happening right now. Maybe there is no master plan. But we can’t live without meaning. We must have our patterns to make sense of the world, so our patterns we will have.
Remember, you are a braid in spacetime:
