Our brains have a finite storage capacity, and as such, it is necessary for human beings to have selective memory. We must, in other words, only remember the things that promise to be relevant to us in our future. So our conscious minds are continually evaluating which of our past experiences are most important for us to remember in the aggregate. Choosing what parts of our past to include in our own personal history and what parts to leave out, then, is one of our brain’s most important functions. It is for this reason that Wilhelm Dilthey, in the early days of the 20th century, wrote that human beings are possessed of a “historical consciousness.” And in the same way that historians determine the syntax of history, narrative storytellers determine the syntax of the art that they create, by deciding what elements to include in the discourse and the way they want to present them.

What do histories and narrative art have in common? And how do our artists, in crafting their work, stand in for our conscious faculty of attention? Listen to find out.

The Syntactics of Narrative

Narrative Evolution