Schank - Tell Me A Story

CH 1- Knowledge is Stories
Scripts: set of expectations about what will happen next in a situation.
-Life experience means knowing how to act and how others will act in a given stereotypical situation - this knowledge is script.The more scripts you know, the more situations will exist in which you will feel comfortable and capable of playing your role. Also, more scripts, failure and confusion.  
Memory: contain specific experiences-memories and labels-memory traces
stories comes with indices: locations, attitudes, quandaries, decisions, conclusions
More indices-> more comparisons with prior experience -> greater learning
-Knowledge is experiences and stories, intelligence is the apt use of experience and the creation and telling of stories.
-Major processes of memory: creation, storage and retrieval of stories .
-Understanding means constructing labels and using them to retrieve similar situations.

CH 2- Where Stories Come from and Why We Tell Them
Five types of stories:
1.Official
2.Invented(Adapted)
3.Firsthand experiential
4.Secondhand
5.Culturally common
1.Official Stories: learned form school or business
carefully constructed
by a group that wants to sell a message
Facts are made simple  e.g. "AIDS - It's a Hop in the Sack"
Simple, no details
intent ro make complex issues clear
2.Invented Stories
like official stories, real and firsthand
created to make a point - but adaptations of previous stories
less details first, then elaboration to make it richer
massaging the reality - how much reality is massaged depends on the goal of the teller
3.Firsthand Stories
can be highly inventive - art of storytelling: finding good ways to express one's experience appropriate for the listener
have to make your story more interesting
no intended point
4.Secondhand Stories
stories of others
facts cannot be recalled perfectly so can be made up as needed
like telephone game is about recall and relate properly what they have just heard
indices less rich more specific
5.Culturally Common Stories
from our environment
Why we tell stories:
1- Me-goals: intentions that storytellers have with respect to themselves
-to achieve catharsis; to get attention; to win approval; to seek advice; to describe themselves
-self-descriptive narrative,
-a personal myth derived from one's experience, from parents, teachers, friends or enemies: starts with you-goal intention but retelling makes it me-goal intention
2- You-goals: intentions that storytellers have with respect to others
-to illustrate a point; to make the listener feel some way or another; to tell a story that transports the listener (to make others experience certain sensations, feelings), to transfer some piece of information in our head into the head of the listener; to summarize significant events
3- Conversational goals: intentions that storytellers have with respect to the conversation itself
- for topic opening, topic changing and continue conversation
The educational point: we must teach cases and the adaptation of cases by telling stories, not teach rules and the use of rules by citing rules - it is not easy to find the situation to apply the rule exactly - applying the stories help more.

CH 4 - Indexing Stories
Memory uses structures as indices to find stories it had already understood
-as in the schema theory, indices = schemas, we code the stories into our memory with indices, which then will help us retrieve.
Thematic Organized Packages (TOPs): indices that are organized around themes in Dynamic Memory

• Indexing is different for everyone, 
• the way to compute indices is common
• different indices for each of us depending on what we know of the world - our perspective of things

Advisory stories: have lessons, derived from real experiences and meant as advise for a person with a problem.

Observation stories: meant to illustrate some in the world, and the truth offered not as an advice but as observation.
Proverbs: is a piece of advice - also observation.
     -elements that make up proverbs are the same elements that make up mental indices

Indexing stories - storytelling is relevant to one's intelligence
-no intelligent system can function properly if it cannot find what it needs to know when it needs to know it
-being able to tell stories at the right time
-intelligence depend upon clever indexing
-but indexing cannot be taught, we make our own way of seeing the world
-intelligence implies the creation and use of indices


 CH 6 - Story Skeletons 

Skeleton stories = Standard stories. Some stories are constructed around these skeletons.  

Sometimes a word of  culture cannot be translated into another language because there is a story unique or well known to that culture and can only be explained in another language by a story.

A word can be recalled by a story -> children learn complex words by being described in a situation

Words have different meanings or stories for different people -> My version of some word can be different than your version.  A meaning of a word can change according to different points of views because of the related skeleton stories they have first being told. People have non-identical skeleton stories.

Skeletons and Memory

Since we understand the world with stories, we remember the facts of an event with the story we have been told. We choose the story that is correct for us.

You need to believe your own story in order to tell it effectively. ->Decision making depends on story construction.

People wouldn't use a skeleton that you listener is unfamiliar with. Even though you can instruct your listener about the meaning of the skeleton, you want something more familiar to get a support from your listeners. So people choose a well known and culturally approved skeletons while telling their stories.

We speak in generalizations that our listener will understand.

Storytellers = story-fitters, people fit events/facts to the standard story they choose  

We adopt a point of view by telling a story. We are the stories we tell. We shape our memory by the stories we tell.

Gist of a story: what is held in memory

                            -the language, the way the story is told, the points we have in mind  

:Structured sets of events that function as a single unit in memory that can be transformed by a variety of processes into actual stories
-each time a story is told, gist is accessed.
-a dynamic entity that can change or be replaced over time by adding or deleting details. Gist: is an evolving kind of entity
Transformation of the gist - stories are different because intentions are different

Gist stored in memory and then transformed  by the processes:

1- Distillation: two-part process,
  Memory process: reduces events of a story to a set of simple propositions = Gist Construction

 -searching through the events and finding the most important ones, - that your listener would be interested into
 -construction of a memory representation of the story.

  Translation: puts those propositions into English  - from their representation in memory to English

2-Combination: Combining two stories deciding which is the master and which is the coloration of the master. Events are interwoven to make one coherent story.

  Suppression: examines gist of each story

  Conjunction: must weave two stories into one by deciding which is the dominant one

3-Elaboration: finding additional things to say. e.g to create an emotional impact

  Detail addition: details are added to the gist, by searching memory to add details.
Story gets more interesting and attention-getting

  Commentary: adding our own view of the situation, adding comments according to audience and our view   at the time

  Role-playing: involve story combination
4-Creation:
combines elements of a real story with a standard story author wishes to tell
5-Captioning: reducing a large amount of information to a very small amount.
6-Adaptation: taking one story and making another one out of it.