In this video, Jon and Gillian introduce Olin Story Slam
Thank you, Gillian. So, we decided Gillian would tell the story, and then I would do the interpretation, so good luck to me, so I am gonna talk a little bit about why we tell stories and I think, actually, your story illustrates it really nicely which is that we all have two roles to play in our lives. Most of the time, we’re just the main character in our lives, right? We just go about doing the stuff of our lives, but every once in a while, like, starting a new job, we step out of being the main character, and we tell the story of it. We make sense. We become the narrator, and that’s not something to be taken lightly actually, right? We’re born without words – let alone stories – and we spend most of our childhoods as characters and stories told by someone else, usually our parents or other caregivers, but in adolescence and early adulthood, we get this skill to become the narrator of our own lives, and in that skill is the seed of human agency. So, there’s this famous philosopher Daniel Dennett who says that, “stories are what humans do. Spiders spin webs, and beavers build dams, and humans tell stories. They are our evolutionary adaptation for navigating our social niche, and if you think about our social niche compared to that of a spider or a beaver, they are infinitely more complex, and stories are this incredibly efficient effective way of navigating all the demands on us, right? If you think about the complexity of our lives, no memory system could possibly hold on to all of the details, and indeed we know from research on memory that we’re not very good at holding on to the details of our lives. If you want to know what really happened, don’t ask someone to tell you a story about it, but what stories do tell you is what those things meant to the person stories are the medium of meaning, so and if you think about why do we have memory in the first place it’s not so we can sort of nostalgically hold on to all of the details of the past we have a memory so that we can navigate the present and make decisions about the future and the future and the present are never exact replicas of the past so if we could only hold on to the past exactly as it happened our memories wouldn’t be all about useful to us, so this narrative reconstructive feature of memory is not a bug in the system; it’s a feature. So most of us don’t spend that much time deeply consciously working on our stories but our nine storytellers here have put in a lot of time and effort, and we are so happy to see so many of you here to see the fruits of their labor, so without further ado, let me introduce our first story the story is called “Disembodied” by Hwei-Shin Harriman.
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