The Binding Problem And Storytelling

The binding problem is a problem in Neuroscience regarding how we bind together the disparate senses and mental processes that we have into the conscious experience we all live our lives through.

It comes across in the stories we tell in the difference between how we live a story, and how our telling of that story comes across. Language is an approximation, and our memories are a distilling and reconstruction of what we experience.

The consequences of this come into play as Hollywood remakes films, and makes formula pictures for the benefit of perceived audiences. Heck, this comes into play when you got bad movies and movies that almost made it. We're subjective creatures, and what's more, our brains throw away from our conscious notice much of the information we use to flesh out the feel and understand we have of the world.

This is particularly troublesome for those portraying real life events, as the sense of events changes with the adaptation from real life to one media or another. With any "true" story on film, even in documentary form, there is always something left out.

Human beings dwell in a rich sea of information, interpreting and experiencing it in real time as billions of neurons work in parallel. As we interpret it, we too throw away information. As a result, though there is much potentially discoverable in front of us, our minds take a certain course through life, and ignore the rest of the riches.

Effective storytellers, to create the desired effects, must do two things: discover those riches and make them accessible and desirable to those who haven't thought to seek or wanted to seek these things out, and translate them effectively from the author's experience and understanding to that of the audience. It's a dance, a high-wire act. It's no easy task.

It's this, not any lack of cultural high-mindedness or business savvy that makes storytelling so difficult a business to get right. This is the real challenge of show business, and the reason that financial success is not deterministically predictable from the basis of a high culture, big business, or even the putative quality of the work. The landscape of mind and heart in this country is constantly shifting, so the fitness of a story in the scheme of things (to borrow evolutionary terminology) is not a stable or predictable thing.

However, as long as we're not looking for deterministic predictability (That is, I do A, therefore B will happen), then the more successful stories, in whatever medium you might chose, are those that relay a great deal of unexpected meaning in the given period of time. Does that mean packing things to the gills with details? Not necessarily. In the case of a TV show, it might be to the storyteller advantage not to force the audience to remember too much from the last show, or if so, make the recall easier by inserting the proper cues in the episode as needed. Even that can be problematic, as anybody who's had to watch the "on the last episode of ______" montage can attest. Information always takes time to move between author and audience, and the less spent telling parts of the story you've already covered, the better.

No, what we're looking for is content organized in such a way that it expands people's sense of the world as they can know it and as they can imagine it. We're looking to give people an intense experience makes enough sense, whether it's that of the real world or that of a fictional one, that people lose focus on the prepared, artificial nature of the medium, and lose themselves in the story. To do that, we must understand better how the subjectivity that defines our existence and our conscious experience can shape our world, and how we interpret sensory cues, and assign meaning to different objects.

We don't have learn this explicitly, but we must have some intuition, some process of working out practical storytelling beats that do their job in such a way that it's not merely trial and error. Otherwise, we will tend to stick to what's already been done, and will continue down a path of formula and replication of earlier works. To get new life into new stories, we must be willing to confront what it is that gives life to our ordinary normal experiences.