The Studio 360 Story

Professor Patrick Henry Winston ’65, SM ’67, PhD ’70

I hear my Studio 360 inteview turned out ok.  I attribute that to a sort of aural cosmetology. Jonathan Mitchell came into my office about a month ago, chatted me up for an hour or so, and somehow he and the other geniuses at Public Radio International and WNYC found a few coherent sentences on the tape about my group's research on story understanding.

Here is the story: As a species, we became symbolic and different from other primates a little more than 50,000 years ago; becoming symbolic meant that we could describe events. Once we strung events together into sequences, we could tell stories. Mastering story telling meant we could teach through case studies, ranging from fairy tales to blogs. Finally, by learning to blend stories together to make new stories, we developed one highly useful kind of creativity. So, if we are to understand intellligence, we need to put a lot of effort into understanding story understanding.