What is narrative?

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-01-stories-deepest-values-region-brain.html

"Stories help us to organize information in a unique way," he said.

To find relevant stories, the researchers sorted through 20 million blog posts using software developed at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.

"We wanted to know how people tell stories in their daily lives. It was kind of like finding stories in their natural habitat," said Kaplan, assistant research professor of psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

That 20 million was pared down to 40 stories that each contained an example of a crisis involving a potentially protected value: cheating on a spouse, having an abortion, crossing a picket line, or getting in a fight.

Those stories were translated into Mandarin Chinese and Farsi, and then read by American, Chinese and Iranian participants in their native language while their brains were scanned by fMRI. They also answered general questions about the stories while being scanned. (link above for the article)

Comment: Motivation. In a sort of deep way, the development of how we think, of where we place ourselves in differing contexts, the direction of our understanding or representing relevant aspects of the world. Our individual grooves, so to speak. 

   Narrative is not the organizational way we organize experience and memory of human happenings. It is instead, I think, a dominant way of describing memories and experience extrinsically - which includes others, including self. Narrative also doesn't have to be character-based but usually is, as a couple studies seem to point to, because cultural influence can trump other stuff, ie like what is a character. And emerges because of the diffusion of imitation, likely influenced by a network of mirror neuron 'turbo-chargers'. Hence as a species we are able both to abstract ourselves from ourselves and place ourselves into something - most importantly someone - else, or a representation of the same. Hence we build representations on varying strata. Symbolic thinking was a necessary precursor.

   Time, or better 't', is likely quanta - but separate from meaning, even physiologically. It is a sort of emergent abstraction. Kind of like a field. Narrative needs to use that approach in order to convey, per force, by speaking to our corresponding abstractions and in turn to other representations top-down. And the unfortunate thing about real time, block time, and abstracted self or representations involving manipulations - they cannot afford contradiction. Only one possibility at a time. So: the necessary removal of information. Inhibition, which is a distinguishing aspect of our species, both the percent of and absolute amount of inhibition in our brains. Leading to a sort of narrative uniqueness - which may be representatively true only in narrative, but not beyond the particularity of the narrative.

   It's hard to keep the flavor, I realize, but principles of emergence and plurality (in systems of information) might run more deeply. Ironically more than purely hermeneutical, a story is successful more when it allows the emergence of time-less, non-hermeneutical aspects that come from (here it comes) BEYOND (nudge-nudge, wink-wink, without italics) the narrative, both of the conveyor and the conveyed to, more than 'constituted' or functions by the same. That is, it acts a bridge into larger integrative systems.

   We often mix story and narrative as concepts, using contextual domain conceptually to distinguish the two. That's perhaps not a great idea even if a bit inevitable. Stories are always created (constructed or inferred,) by the receiving. An author never tells a story - they present elements of narrative that might induce the creation of story by others. You know, from 'in the beginning there was the verb,' to 'it was a dark and stormy night'. Or call me Ishmael. Or even... 'deep down Louisiana close to New Orleans, there lived a country boy....' Anyway.