Brain Chemistry Chronicles: Creating Narratives

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Creating Narratives

This morning, I went back and read all my posts for the past year and a half. I like my ideas about brain chemistry but I wish I could share them with more people. This is the shoal on which my ship of good intentions founders: the hard reality of the difficulty of getting people to listen and understand and agree that my perspective is valuable.

It seems that everyone loves to disagree these days. All our media is filled with conflict, much of it, it seems to me, manufactured for the purpose of selling more goods and services. Ah yes, commerce. The bedrock upon which our nation was founded. Nothing wrong with that, but I wonder if our method of promoting sales is good for us.

We seem to have entered a period in which every communication between people must be a narrative. There's nothing wrong with that on the face of things, but unfortunately, a good narrative, one that succeeds at getting people's attention and entertaining them, must contain conflict, and that conflict must be sufficiently compelling to get the viewer/reader to stay with it to the end. "Only trouble is interesting," say the fiction-writing teachers. So in an effort to get people to pay attention to their messages about goods and services that are for sale, advertisers (and the shows they sponsor) copy fiction's structure and try to create narratives with as much "trouble" as possible.

And so we have shows like the long-running Survivor and its many imitators, to the point where every reality show must have some kind of conflict to be seen as viable. Even shows that are not contest shows (that is, already set up for conflict) must, it seems, contain conflict in order to be thought interesting. For instance, American Chopper, a reality show centered on what would normally be considered a peaceful activity (crafting a motorcycle), becomes instead a soap opera about the crafters' intra-familial fights. That soap operas are traditionally fictional is my point: what we call "reality" shows these days are more fictional than the shows they are trying to emulate. Because of the success of American Chopper and other conflict filled shows, we now have a number of shows that are, like soap operas, based entirely on dysfunctional relationships (Keeping Up With the Kardashians is one of the many).

But what does this have to do with brain chemistry? Well, the process of creating narratives in the media is similar to the process individuals with bad brain chemistry engage in to rationalize why they feel bad. The bad feeling that comes from the brain is out of context, so the sufferer creates a context that makes sense. She writes a narrative that contains a conflict to which she must then respond. And owing to the requirement that in order to be sufficiently compelling a narrative must have serious conflict with dire consequences, the person who feels bad must create a conflict that requires an immediate and serious response. Life or death, fight or flight.

Unfortunately, the drama unfolding is only happening in the sufferer's mind. It's a private screening. Like listening to one half of a cell phone conversation, watching a brain chemistry compelled drama makes the viewer feel as if she is missing something. Why are you so upset? is a question that the unfortunate witness asks herself, and she can only answer that there is no rational reason and therefore the person who is upset is irrational and therefore, at best, is to be avoided and at worst, to be feared.

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About this blog . . .

I created this blog as a place to write about my day to day struggles with what I call bad brain chemistry. In discussing those struggles, I also share my theories about bad brain chemistry and how its effects can be mitigated.

I started this project about 20 years ago, when depression and other bad moods were making my life miserable. A man I met during that time (now my husband) convinced me that I had to change; a therapist who offered medication scared me into finding a way to change. The result was my theory of brain chemistry, which goes beyond merely labeling mood disorders as physical phenomena and finding medication to fix them. I seek to explain bad brain chemistry in a way that shows the disorder to be rational and naturally human, and dealing with it something that a human can do through rational thought.

As I go along with this blog, I'll talk more about this theory and how I think people who have this condition tend to deal with it.

You're welcome to join me!

My Theory of Bad Brain Chemistry, Part I

My theories are based on how my mind works, but I think that I'm not alone, that other people share this problem with brain chemistry that doesn't work well in the modern world. My idea is that the way my brain works was advantageous at some point in the history of humanity. People like me, hyperalert people, were useful to human society because they were extremely aware of their environment.

In a situation where people are in constant danger of being devoured by predators, or attacked by human enemies, those who are hyperalert make good scouts, good watchers, good guards. Also useful to people who must hunt for food every day in order to eat are those who are good at seeing animal prey, noticing and remembering their patterns, their behavior, their defenses, their smell. And those who know how to find edible plants or other important items such as reeds or flints or underground sources of water will also be valued by their group.

Unfortunately, in modern society (especially middle class Western society), there's less need for hyperalert people because there's less danger from predators. And there's very little need to hunt down food or water or tools in one's surroundings--we can simply go to a store to get all those things, or even better, have them brought to us.

In this situation, being hyperalert is not only no longer an advantage; it seems instead a disadvantage. In fact, it's often thought of as a disability instead of a highly valued ability. I have only to cite the disruptive effect of hyperalertness on the modern elementary classroom to make my point. What has been termed ADD--attention deficit disorder--is to me hyperalertness, a condition of the brain that is not so much an inability to pay attention, as it is an inability to stop paying attention.

And it is this condition of hyperalertness, I believe, that can lead to depression, anger and other moods that make life quite difficult for many people, including me. What was once good brain chemistry is now deemed bad and in need of fixing.