ABSTRACT
Human language is powerful because it forces human beings to think in stories. Story is the mind’s—and the brain’s—information management system, compressing events and states into ‘gists.’ Our very perceptions are already biased toward the schemata and scripts that fit the anticipated gist of the story, biasing what we perceive towards predicted outcomes (‘apperception’). When we later expand and elaborate stories into narratives to share with others, we do not recall so much as re-create. Thus, our stories change to accommodate narrative frames as well as our audience’s preferences and feedback. Story is the vehicle by which information propagates across minds. This chapter explains ‘collective intentionality’ as the result of distributed cognition made possible by language.
