accent) made the following discovery. If you inhibit the left hemisphere of
a right-handed person (more technically, by directing low-frequency magnetic
pulses into the left frontotemporal lobes), you lower his rate of error
in reading the above caption. Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts
blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept. However,
if you zap people's left hemispheres, they become more realistic—they
can draw better and with more verisimilitude. Their minds become better
at seeing the objects themselves, cleared of theories, narratives, and
prejudice.
Why is it hard to avoid interpretation? It is key that, as we saw with
the vignette of the Italian scholar, brain functions often operate outside
our awareness. You interpret pretty much as you perform other activities
deemed automatic and outside your control, like breathing.
THE NARRATIVE FALLACY 67
What makes nontheorizing cost you so much more energy than theorizing?
First, there is the impenetrability of the activity. I said that much of
it takes place outside of our awareness: if you don't know that you are
making the inference, how can you stop yourself unless you stay in a continuous
state of alert? And if you need to be continuously on the watch,
doesn't that cause fatigue? Try it for an afternoon and see.
A Little More Dopamine
In addition to the story of the left-brain interpreter, we have more physiological
evidence of our ingrained pattern seeking,* thanks to our growing
knowledge of the role of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that are assumed
to transport signals between different parts of the brain. It appears
that pattern perception increases along with the concentration in the brain
of the chemical dopamine. Dopamine also regulates moods and supplies
an internal reward system in the brain (not surprisingly, it is found in
slightly higher concentrations in the left side of the brains of right-handed
persons than on the right side). A higher concentration of dopamine appears
to lower skepticism and result in greater vulnerability to pattern detection;
an injection of L-dopa, a substance used to treat patients with
Parkinson's disease, seems to increase such activity and lowers one's suspension
of belief. The person becomes vulnerable to all manner of fads,
such as astrology, superstitions, economics, and tarot-card reading.
Actually, as I am writing this, there is news of a pending lawsuit by a
patient going after his doctor for more than $200,000—an amount he allegedly
lost while gambling. The patient claims that the treatment of his
Parkinson's disease caused him to go on wild betting sprees in casinos. It
turns out that one of the side effects of L-dopa is that a small but significant
minority of patients become compulsive gamblers. Since such gambling
is associated with their seeing what they believe to be clear patterns
in random numbers, this illustrates the relation between knowledge and
randomness. It also shows that some aspects of what we call "knowledge"
(and what I call narrative) are an ailment.
Once again, I warn the reader that I am not focusing on dopamine as
the reason for our overinterpreting; rather, my point is that there is a physical
and neural correlate to such operation and that our minds are largely
victims of our physical embodiment. Our minds are like inmates, captive
to our biology, unless we manage a cunning escape. It is the lack of our
control of such inferences that I am stressing. Tomorrow, someone may
6 8 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I U B R A RY
discover another chemical or organic basis for our perception of patterns,
or counter what I said about the left-brain interpreter by showing the role
of a more complex structure; but it would not negate the idea that perception
of causation has a biological foundation.
Andrey Nikolayevich's Rule
There is another, even deeper reason for our inclination to narrate, and it
is not psychological. It has to do with the effect of order on information
storage and retrieval in any system, and it's worth explaining here because
of what I consider the central problems of probability and information
theory.
The first problem is that information is costly to obtain.
The second problem is that information is also costly to store—like
real estate in New York. The more orderly, less random, patterned, and
narratized a series of words or symbols, the easier it is to store that series
in one's mind or jot it down in a book so your grandchildren can read it
someday.
Finally, information is costly to manipulate and retrieve.
With so many brain cells—one hundred billion (and counting)—the
attic is quite large, so the difficulties probably do not arise from storagecapacity
limitations, but may be just indexing problems. Your conscious,
or working, memory, the one you are using to read these lines and make
sense of their meaning, is considerably smaller than the attic. Consider
that your working memory has difficulty holding a mere phone number
longer than seven digits. Change metaphors slightly and imagine that your
consciousness is a desk in the Library of Congress: no matter how many
books the library holds, and makes available for retrieval, the size of your
desk sets some processing limitations. Compression is vital to the performance
of conscious work.
Consider a collection of words glued together to constitute a 500-page
book. If the words are purely random, picked up from the dictionary in a
totally unpredictable way, you will not be able to summarize, transfer, or
reduce the dimensions of that book without losing something significant
from it. You need 100,000 words to carry the exact message of a random
100,000 words with you on your next trip to Siberia. Now consider the
opposite: a book filled with the repetition of the following sentence: "The
chairman of [insert here your company name] is a lucky fellow who happened
to be in the right place at the right time and claims credit for the
THE NARRATIVE FALLACY 6 9
company's success, without making a single allowance for luck," running
ten times per page for 500 pages. The entire book can be accurately compressed,
as I have just done, into 34 words (out of 100,000); you could reproduce
it with total fidelity out of such a kernel. By finding the pattern,
the logic of the series, you no longer need to memorize it all. You just store
the pattern. And, as we can see here, a pattern is obviously more compact
than raw information. You looked into the book and found a rule. It
is along these lines that the great probabilist Andrey Nikolayevich Kolmogorov
defined the degree of randomness; it is called "Kolmogorov complexity."
We, members of the human variety of primates, have a hunger for rules
because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into
our heads. Or, rather, sadly, so we can squeeze them into our heads. The
more random information is, the greater the dimensionality, and thus the
more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize, the more order
you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes
us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it
actually is.
And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.
Both the artistic and scientific enterprises are the product of our need
to reduce dimensions and inflict some order on things. Think of the world
around you, laden with trillions of details. Try to describe it and you will
find yourself tempted to weave a thread into what you are saying. A novel,
a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from
the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Myths impart
order to the disorder of human perception and the perceived "chaos
of human experience." *
Indeed, many severe psychological disorders accompany the feeling of
loss of control of—being able to "make sense" of—one's environment.
Platonicity affects us here once again. The very same desire for order,
interestingly, applies to scientific pursuits—it is just that, unlike art, the
(stated) purpose of science is to get to the truth, not to give you a feeling of
organization or make you feel better. We tend to use knowledge as therapy.
* The Parisian novelist Georges Perec tried to break away from narrative and attempted
to write a book as large as the world. He had to settle for an exhaustive
account of what happened on the Place Saint-Sulpice between October 18 and October
20,1974. Even so, his account was not so exhaustive, and he ended up with
a narrative.
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A Better Way to Die
To view the potency of narrative, consider the following statement: "The
king died and the queen died." Compare it to "The king died, and then the
queen died of grief." This exercise, presented by the novelist E. M. Forster,
shows the distinction between mere succession of information and a plot.
But notice the hitch here: although we added information to the second
statement, we effectively reduced the dimension of the total. The second
sentence is, in a way, much lighter to carry and easier to remember; we
now have one single piece of information in place of two. As we can remember
it with less effort, we can also sell it to others, that is, market it
better as a packaged idea. This, in a nutshell, is the definition and function
of a narrative.
To see how the narrative can lead to a mistake in the assessment of the
odds, do the following experiment. Give someone a well-written detective
story—say, an Agatha Christie novel with a handful of characters who can
all be plausibly deemed guilty. Now question your subject about the probabilities
of each character's being the murderer. Unless she writes down the
percentages to keep an exact tally of them, they should add up to well over
100 percent (even well over 200 percent for a good novel). The better the
detective writer, the higher that number.
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS NOT QUITE PAST
Our tendency to perceive—to impose—narrativity and causality are symptoms
of the same disease—dimension reduction. Moreover, like causality,
narrativity has a chronological dimension and leads to the perception of
the flow of time. Causality makes time flow in a single direction, and so
does narrativity.
But memory and the arrow of time can get mixed up. Narrativity can
viciously affect the remembrance of past events as follows: we will tend to
more easily remember those facts from our past that fit a narrative, while
we tend to neglect others that do not appear to play a causal role in that
narrative. Consider that we recall events in our memory all the while
knowing the answer of what happened subsequently. It is literally impossible
to ignore posterior information when solving a problem. This simple
inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed
one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than
it actually was—or is.
THE NARRATIVE FALLACY 71
Conventional wisdom holds that memory is like a serial recording device
like a computer diskette. In reality, memory is dynamic—not static—
like a paper on which new texts (or new versions of the same text) will be
continuously recorded, thanks to the power of posterior information. (In
a remarkable insight, the nineteenth-century Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire
compared our memory to a palimpsest, a type of parchment on
which old texts can be erased and new ones written over them.) Memory
is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last
time you remembered the event and, without realizing it, change the story
at every subsequent remembrance.
So we pull memories along causative lines, revising them involuntarily
and unconsciously. We continuously renarrate past events in the light of
what appears to make what we think of as logical sense after these events
occur.
By a process called reverberation, a memory corresponds to the
strengthening of connections from an increase of brain activity in a given
sector of the brain—the more activity, the stronger the memory. While we
believe that the memory is fixed, constant, and connected, all this is very
far from truth. What makes sense according to information obtained
subsequently will be remembered more vividly. We invent some of our
memories—a sore point in courts of law since it has been shown that
plenty of people have invented child-abuse stories by dint of listening to
theories.
The Madman's Narrative
We have far too many possible ways to interpret past events for our own
good.
Consider the behavior of paranoid people. I have had the privilege to
work with colleagues who have hidden paranoid disorders that come to
the surface on occasion. When the person is highly intelligent, he can
astonish you with the most far-fetched, yet completely plausible interpretations
of the most innocuous remark. If I say to them, "I am afraid
that. . . ," in reference to an undesirable state of the world, they may interpret
it literally, that I am experiencing actual fright, and it triggers an
episode of fear on the part of the paranoid person. Someone hit with such
a disorder can muster the most insignificant of details and construct an
elaborate and coherent theory of why there is a conspiracy against him.
And if you gather, say, ten paranoid people, all in the same state of
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episodic delusion, the ten of them will provide ten distinct, yet coherent,
interpretations of events.
When I was about seven, my schoolteacher showed us a painting of an
assembly of impecunious Frenchmen in the Middle Ages at a banquet held
by one of their benefactors, some benevolent king, as I recall. They were
holding the soup bowls to their lips. The schoolteacher asked me why they
had their noses in the bowls and I answered, "Because they were not
taught manners." She replied, "Wrong. The reason is that they are hungry."
I felt stupid at not having thought of this, but I could not understand
