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The Neurology of Narrative
Kay Young, PhD
Department of English, UC Santa Barbara
Jeffrey Saver, MD
Department of Neurology, UC Los Angeles
Narrative is the inescapable frame of human experience. While
we can be trained to think in geometrical shapes, patterns of sounds, poetry,
movement, syllogisms, what predominates or fundamentally constitutes our
consciousness is the understanding of self and world in story. Not
only our texts, but also our lives, gain meaning only through narrative-motivated
words, words that acts as a story with a coherent sense of wholeness bound
to a beginning, middle and end, as a series of events situated diachronically
and with referential specificity, wrapped together by a governing sense
of consequence or logic, enacted by agents, and structured by a discourse
that defines a point of view. But while thinkers as diverse as Aristotle,
Barthes, and Bruner have all recognized the centrality of narrative in
human cognition, all have scanted its neurobiologic underpinning.
Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience suggest that the creation of
narrative in the human central nervous system is mediated by a regionally
distributed neural network. Fundamental components of this network include
1) the amygdalo-hippocampal system, responsible for initial encoding of
episodic and autobiographic memories, 2) the left peri-Sylvian region where
language is formulate, and 3) the frontal cortices and their subcortical
connections, where individuals and entities are organized into real and
fictional temporal narrative frames. To illustrate this emerging schema
of how the brain narratively organizes experience, we describe four types
of dysnarrativia, states of narrative impairment experienced by individuals
with discrete focal damage in different regions of the neural network subserving
human self-narrative. Patients with these syndromes illustrate the inseparable
connection between narrativity and personhood. Brain injured individuals
may lose their linguistic or visuospatial competencies and still be recognizably
the same persons. Individuals who have lost the ability to construct
narrative, however, have lost their selves.
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