“The best laid plans o’ mice and men gang aft aglee” . So wrote the Scottish poet Robert Burns about 250 years ago. My plans certainly went haywire this last week. Everything came at once: the cracked reticulation pipe , the bull ant bite (whipper-snippering stirred them up!), the chipped tooth, and a couple of other things that I won’t bother to recount. So as daily life and work have to continue, it was doing the BFP that suffered, so I am behind schedule.
The story telling exercise.
To cap it all I had my first experience of the narrative exercise. Firstly the intro was indecipherable, but cleared at the start of the exercise. When I found the story was concerned with the inadequacies of a woman driver, my resentments came to the fore! In the story it had been suggested to an elderly woman driver that she had to consider getting off the road…permanently (in the nicest possible way of course!). Of all available narratives they had to choose that one. I suspect that the story is pretty old: ten years at least. The main tenets of the story could be accused of reflecting ageist and sexist attitudes. Even the young lad in the story was stereotyped, his eyebrow ring, his baggy clothes, and jiggling knee being associated with drugs. There is a time gap and possibly a cultural gap involved here I suspect. The display of the generation gap was also unfortunate.
I had no choice of story, so continued, and although the story got better, it was inevitable that Rita would ‘ding’ her car, despite her good intentions and however hard she tried. Needless to say I didn’t do too well on remembering the details as instructed by the exercise.
Interpretation and memory
The memories that I did recall were not included in the multiple-choices available….My memories related to my interpretation of the story. The attitude the woman had towards the youngster, the issue of aging women drivers, or “seniors” driving in general. There was a suggestion recently in WA that seniors cars could be identified on the road. A bit like “Granny on board”? (Mind you I have seen aged, hunched female drivers barely able to see over the dashboard of the car.. )
How we interpret a situation influences memory in everyday life. That’s partly why we often remember things differently. In the narrative exercise the eyebrow ring, and the colour of the car etc., were irrelevant to my interests: memory tests that instruct one to remember for the sake of it, are unlikely to transfer to the way memory functions in everyday life.
Michael Gazzaniga (of split brain fame) is in Australia at the moment. He identifies the left hemisphere of the brain as the interpreter. This is where behaviour, moods, explanations of what is going on are tied together to make a coherent whole, a story, an ongoing narrative. And this interpretation capacity, getting the ‘gist’ of what is going on, means that we don’t have to think everything through each time. What an amazing brain…
However as I want to move up the narrative sequence of the BFP I will attempt to provide the correct answers.(LEAVE A COMMENT)“
