Abstract
Narrative, the creation of imaginative projects and experiences displayed in expressions of movement and voice, is how human cooperative understanding grows. Human understanding places the character and qualities of objects and events of interest within stories that portray intentions, feelings, and ambitions, and how one cares about them. Understanding the development of narrative is therefore essential for understanding the development of human intelligence, but its early origins are obscure. We identify the origins of narrative in the innate sensorimotor intelligence of a hypermobile human body and trace the ontogenesis of narrative form from its earliest expression in movement. Intelligent planning, with self-awareness, is evident in the gestures and motor expressions of the mid-gestation fetus. After birth, single intentions become serially organized into projects with increasingly ambitious distal goals and social meaning. The infant imitates others’ actions in shared tasks, learns conventional cultural practices, and adapts his own inventions, then names topics of interest. Through every stage, in simple intentions of fetal movement, in social imitations of the neonate, in early proto-conversations and collaborative play of infants and talk of children and adults, the narrative form of creative agency with it four-part structure of ‘introduction,’ ‘development,’ ‘climax,’ and ‘resolution’ is present. We conclude that shared rituals of culture and practical techniques develop from a fundamental psycho-motor structure with its basic, vital impulses for action and generative process of thought-in-action that express an integrated, imaginative, and sociable Self. This basic structure is evident before birth and invariant in form throughout life. Serial organization of single, non-verbal actions into complex projects of expressive and explorative sense-making become conventional meanings and explanations with propositional narrative power. Understanding the root of narrative in embodied meaning-making in this way is important for practical work in therapy and education, and for advancing philosophy and neuroscience.
Highlights
IntroductionThe Primary Motives for Stories of Common Sense “It were easy to show, that the fine arts of the musician, the painter, the actor, and the orator, so far as they are expressive... are nothing else but the language of nature, which we brought into the world with us, but have unlearned by disuse and so find the greatest difficulty in recovering it. . . . That without a natural knowledge of the connection between these (natural) signs and the things signified by them, language could never have been invented and established among men; and, that the fine arts are all founded upon this connection, which we may call the natural language of mankind. . . . It is by natural signs that we give force and energy to language; and the less language has of them, it is the less expressive and persuasive.”
We identify the origins of narrative in the innate sensorimotor intelligence of a hypermobile human body and trace the ontogenesis of narrative form from its earliest expression in movement
The Human Impulse for Meaning, and its Early Cultivation Young children, in their families, before school, show how our stories of life begin in artful invention (Bullowa, 1979; Trevarthen and Delafield-Butt, 2015)
Summary
The Primary Motives for Stories of Common Sense “It were easy to show, that the fine arts of the musician, the painter, the actor, and the orator, so far as they are expressive... are nothing else but the language of nature, which we brought into the world with us, but have unlearned by disuse and so find the greatest difficulty in recovering it. . . . That without a natural knowledge of the connection between these (natural) signs and the things signified by them, language could never have been invented and established among men; and, that the fine arts are all founded upon this connection, which we may call the natural language of mankind. . . . It is by natural signs that we give force and energy to language; and the less language has of them, it is the less expressive and persuasive.”. The impulses of even the most sophisticated narrative derive from the common ‘vitality dynamics’ of play in infancy (Stern, 2010), with characteristic phases of arousal and moments of focussed intensity (Amighi et al, 1999; Damasio, 1999; Trevarthen et al, 2011; Trevarthen and Delafield-Butt, 2013a), giving feeling to perceptions of outer things by projection of symptoms of inner autonomic activity – heart rate changes, breathing, flight-or-fight response, all displayed and shared in specially adapted expressive movements to convey felt meaning in ‘natural language’ (Porges, 1997; Porges and Furman, 2011) Within these dynamic emotional events, relations between objects and participants, their properties, motivation and character, can become placed and named in ‘artificial,’ learned and conventional language. These are: ‘introduction,’ ‘development,’ ‘climax,’ and ‘resolution.’ To explain this we must turn attention to the processes that generate and regulate animal movements with prospective sensory control
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