But the basic story - you should pardon the pun - told by the guys who do it is that the ability to call forth long-term memories at will and attach them to other long-term memories and/or new experience is dependent on them being part of a coherent story that evokes an emotional response.
There's this guy called John Teske who argues that emotional response is vital in imprinting the contents of our short-term working memory onto the long-term memory. Putting the experience into a coherent story allows, he claims, the mind to retrieve it from the long-term memory at will, rather than having it surface semi-randomly in response to sensory input.
At the talk I attended, he argued that one reason that trauma manifested as post-traumatic stress disorders was that it had never been put into a coherent story that allowed the mind to "file" it properly and only retrieve it when needed. So it would surface as a pre-cognitive response to various sensory triggers. Think the shell-shocked veteran who dives for cover when he hears a firecracker go off - in some cases, the veteran can even be aware that it's a firecracker, not an artillery shell, and it'll still trigger an involuntary recall of a traumatic memory.
Teske's explanation is that the experience hasn't been adequately "retold" as a story, so it remains merely a connection between certain sensory input (a loud, sharp noise) and certain emotional and mechanical responses (fear, diving for cover). He claims that a reason that re-telling their experience can work for PTSD sufferers is that it puts the experience into a coherent narrative framework that can then be related to future sensory input in a more constructive way (say, to distinguish between loud, sharp noises made by firecrackers and loud, sharp noises made by shelling - imputing causal connection between two events, Teske claims, is inherently an act of narrative construction).
Now, I'd be very surprised if Teske's story is the be-all-end-all final word in how the human memory works. But I think it has a reasonable chance of explaining one of the mechanisms behind memory and how we construct experience from sensory input.
Where am I going with all this? I'm not precisely sure, except to say that there is indeed science at work here that, if not exactly paradigm-shatteringly outside-the-box stuff, then at least attempts to push the edge of the envelope a little farther out.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Implying, those that have greater connections between the two hemispheres and better connections between the frontal Temporal and posterior Frontal lobes have better grasp of Reality -- whatever that is -- then those without such pathways.
Since women, in general, have more neural pathways than men the implication can be made women have a better grasp of Reality -- whatever that is -- than men.
Therefore, the average woman is more likely to have a better grasp on Reality -- whatever that is -- than the average man.
Therefore, under Indeterminate Epistemological situations one is better off to accept the average woman's grasp of the situation than the average man's.
Conclusion: If you are a guy, Shut Up and listen to what {Fran, In Wales, metavision, Barbara, Sam, ElaineinNM...} tells you.
QED.
:-)
Since women, in general, have more neural pathways than men the implication can be made women have a better grasp of Reality -- whatever that is -- than men. Therefore, the average woman is more likely to have a better grasp on Reality -- whatever that is -- than the average man.
That makes the rather large assumption that the neural pathways are accurately observing and modeling reality. If they're not then having more could mean that they actually are further away from reality. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
The affect and effects of hormones on brain development, and how they impact stimulus processing is very much an area of on-going research. Gross-level testing implies a 'Female' (gender please note!) brain has finer grain response to certain stimuli than a 'Male' brain and a Woman's (extensive difference in levels of certain hormones -- and differences in the level of other neuro-transmitters) brains have responses to stimuli that, in some cases, do not overlap a Man's response to the same stimuli but is more responsive.
For other stimuli the reverse is true.
What he says sounds a lot like NLP which has used the creation of new narratives for quite a while - it's called 'change history' or in what goes in the same direction 'Reframing'.
