Overview

There must exist a point at which the molecular and electro-chemical processes that comprise brain function are transformed into rich, orderly conscious experience which seamlessly blends the present moment, what led up to it, and what will follow it. This is the stuff of our everyday lives, and it raises questions about its organization and how that organization facilitates engagement with the world at large. In short, what is the structure of conscious experience and what is gained by it being structured that way?This book argues that the structure is what is familiarly known as narrative form and that the gain is the ability to communicate about one's experience with oneself and others, as well as to make informed predictions about what will happen in the fundamentally unknowable and potentially dangerous future. In the latter case, because the essence of narrative form is time and causality, structuring events from memory (the past) and from perception (the present) in narrative form causally implies future events (expectations). The potential threat (the bad or the absence of good) of these expected future events can be assessed, and, if required, action can be taken to prevent their occurrence or to diminish their impact. The implications about thinking and action, and about who we are as individuals, are also discussed here.

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9781527537569

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Lee Roy Beach is McClelland Professor Emeritus and former Vice Dean at the Eller College of Business of the University of Arizona, where he also served as a Professor of Public Administration and of Psychology. He received his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Colorado, before serving in the US Navy. This was followed by two years of post-doctoral work in decision research at the University of Michigan. Before he retired, he was a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society, and a member of the Society for Organizational Behavior and the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. He served on the editorial boards several academic journals, and has published over 120 scholarly articles and 11 books on psychology, decision making, and organizational behavior. This is his third book on narrative in cognition.

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