Story Tally

Thanks to Chip, Alina, Drew, Cassie, and Carly for the story tally assignments.

Drew's list brings up the concept of "gists". Roger Schank refers to memory as involving the storage and retrieval of "story gists". We reduce an experience or a piece of information into a compressed form, similar to a file-compression program for the computer such as .zip or stuffit. That gist is retrieved and expanded when we make an association. For example, if I mentioned that my dog loved swimming and would jump in the water at the first opportunity, you might begin to associate any number of your gists with various ideas in my statement: dogs, water, pets, passion, etc...

Notice how, in your daily interactions with stories, one story will prompt another. Notice also, how we will discover lost memories in the act of conversation, essentially making active our dormant gists.

The concept of gists and of memory compression and retrieval has implications for performance. Firstly, many storytellers insist that they do not memorize their stories. Instead, they "learn" them. That is to say, they reduce the story to a gist that can be expanded in the act of telling in much the same way you might expand upon a memory in conversation. Secondly, in performance, the use of a literary or cultural allusion relies on the ability to activate the listeners' gists. If I say, "when I walked into the principal's office, I had a David-and-Goliath moment," I am activating your memory of the story of David and conflating it with my story.