Aging with the Story Engram by Renee Fuller

Aging With The Story Engram: The Greatest Gift

by Renée Fuller

When I was a graduate student in psychology we were taught that being in our early twenties meant having reached the pinnacle of intellectual prowess. So much for the good news. The bad news -- from now on the course would be downhill. By age fifty, our analytical abilities, memory systems, rapidity of response would be in definite and often severe decline. Numerous graphs highlighted this humiliating destiny.

Yet how could this be? The data didn't make sense - despite the impressive graphs. A population drag of increasingly stupider, older people would have seen to it that humans died off at the latest in their early forties. "That's the age when people used to die," explained one of my professors.
But Abraham didn't, nor Moses. And neither did Michelangelo nor Homer, and a host of other great contributors to human history. Most of them produced their best work long after their fortieth birthday. Beethoven's Ninth, and last, symphony was his most magnificent. Businesses, countries, churches, have almost always been run by elders, as were - and are - so many other human endeavors and societies. Surely these seniors weren't, and aren't, in positions of power out of politeness. Already as a young graduate student I knew that the statistics showing early deterioration of human intellect must be flawed data. There had to be a major evolutionary advantage, some special gift, that develops as we age. Why else would humans be the only species which lives decades after having created the next generation. The test scores couldn't be telling the real story. But what is the real story?
After finishing graduate school my research included data from IQ and aptitude tests - the same or similar tests that continue to demonstrate deterioration of human intellect with increasing age. Like many researchers I found the tests reliable and valid instruments. They did seem to measure intellectual prowess. But then, after using IQ and aptitude tests for more than a decade something went wrong.
I watched incredulously as four-year olds, neurologically damaged students and even the severely retarded performed intellectual reading and thinking feats that should have been impossible on the basis of their mental age or IQ. After publishing numerous papers in which IQ tests were an important component, their sudden loss of validity was disconcerting. It required that I backtrack and question some basic assumptions about intelligence. Additionally disconcerting was that these questions had been raised by a reading system I myself had devised.
While the validity of IQ tests of students taught with my reading system was crumbling, I couldn't help but notice how I myself was becoming less skilled at the very tasks required by the tests. I was getting older. It was just as the textbook graphs had shown: only in my middle thirties and I was already going downhill intellectually - except I was doing the best work I had done so far. How could that be, unless those downhill graphs were as incorrect in their predictions for an aging population as the IQ scores had been for our students.
What really happens to intellectual prowess as we age? Our older students gave us the answer. After being taught to read with the system, these older students communicated ideas of much greater depth and meaning than their younger counterparts. Fred in his fifties, with an IQ younger than his age, demonstrated what can be achieved intellectually as we age. With his newfound language skill Fred's ability to think and communicate bore no relation to his IQ. Having acquired the cognitive tool, he described his experiences at the institutions where he had spent most of his life, and even more important he told us about the conclusions he had drawn from these experiences. He explained his philosophy - why and how we had to make this a better world, giving us case histories to illustrate what he meant. Amusingly, when I reached my mid-fifties, Fred's age at the time, my ideas about the human condition took a similar philosophic bent, as did my case histories.
What was the cognitive tool Fred had mastered that made it possible for him to organize his life's experiences into a philosophy? No, it wasn't learning to read. Rather it was developmental linguistics, which had been incorporated into the system in order to facilitate story reading. The system recapitulates the language acquisition of the child (developmental linguistics) fortuitously demonstrating how words combine to build ideas. The stories of the beginning books, composed primarily with nouns and verbs (the noun-verb unit), require that only a few words be read for the student to become involved in the narrative. As the stories progress, the more complicated parts of speech, the adjectives, adverbs, articles, the connectives, and last the prepositions embellish the story.
The power of developmental linguistics as a cognitive tool became obvious when all of our students, regardless of age or IQ, mimicked the developmental linguistics of the reading system. They organized their ideas by beginning with the noun-verb unit, and then on becoming more proficient elaborated this basic unit with the other part of speech. I called the noun-verb unit, in its simple or elaborated form, the story engram. Story engrams are meaning in a nutshell. That last sentence is an elaborated story engram - popularly known as a sound bite. Story engrams are how we impose a structure on the plethora of stimuli that surround us, how we communicate with others, how we communicate with ourselves. Which explains why sound bites are such powerful advertising tools, make such great headlines, and why politicians encapsulate their "vision" in story engrams.
Despite their importance to cognitive organization, the ability to build overarching story engrams and further develop them with subordinate story engrams, that ability is not measured by IQ and most aptitude tests. No wonder then that the accomplishments of our students bore little relation to their IQ scores. Further, as our older students demonstrated, the human ability to organize and build complex meanings with story engrams does not deteriorate with age. Quite to the contrary!
How did this unique human way of organizing information, which gets better as we age, come to be? We can trace its beginning to the early vertebrates. With a protected neural chord and encephalization, there emerged in vertebrates an important ability that is beyond the capacity of invertebrates. Vertebrates are able to organize a group of visual stimuli into an object, into an entity. They have, what psychologists call, object constancy. The importance of this perceptual and neural organization is twofold.
First, the ability to perceive a group of stimuli as an object imparts the knowledge that this entity. For example, an animal continues to exist even if part of it is hidden in shadow or all of it is hidden behind a rock. It means that vertebrates can infer that the predator who disappeared into the shadows may still be there and therefore continues to be dangerous, or that the prey that slipped behind a rock can still be had for dinner. Already in the earliest chordates the ability to differentiate objects improves with experience. This means that vertebrates get better at such discriminations they get older. Here is the raison d'être for the extended life span of vertebrates compared to the usually much shorter life of invertebrates - and the advantages that can come with age.
Secondly, the emergence of object constancy in vertebrates made possible the essential neurological framework for what would eventually evolve into the human concept of the noun. And the action component implied by a noun, for example, snake - bites, lion - run, was the neural organization required for the concept of verbs. Further, this linkage of an object with its action component became the evolutionary precursor of that important noun-verb unit, i.e. the simplest story engram.
Also learned through experience is that objects and their action components frequently imply a cause and effect relationship, i.e. causality. Such understandings of causality, for example the capacity to respond selectively to a variety of predators or prey, require extended practice. And that means an even longer life span to encompass the greater need for experience.
Language acquisition in human children recapitulates this vertebrate evolution of the story engram. A child's first words are nouns, then verbs, creating the noun-verb unit, the simplest story engram. After learning his/her first noun-verb units (story engrams), the child intrigued by the implications of causality, starts asking the "why" question. During this "why" phase she/he learns to use story engrams to elaborate ideas, to explain "why." But even after refining cause and effect relationships with adjectives, adverbs, connectives, prepositions, and those important answers of because, since, therefore, etc., decades of practice are required to achieve expertise in building solid cognitive edifices. And the experiences of life continue to enhance the art of creating meaningful explanations of causality
This fascination with and the clarifications of causality have become the most productive attribute of human thought. And as our older students demonstrated, once we humans learn how to use story engrams to build ideas, the capacity to construct solid cognitive edifices continues to grow with the experiences of life. The story engram creations of our student elders, the quality of what they built, their understanding of causality, was so much greater than that of youngsters with much higher IQs.
Is that not what happens with all of us as we age? We get better at understanding cause and effect relationships, better at summarizing our experiences into story engrams. It becomes easier to see the big picture because we are less constrained by hormones that channel our thinking, and because we have forgotten some of the inconsequential details demanded by schools which created the higher test scores of our youth. And so there may be an advantage to the lower test scores that psychology texts proclaim as our destiny. Rather than the curse of old age, less preoccupation with minutiae allows us to see the big picture to be summarized into story engrams.
Human history tells us of the wisdom of the matriarchs and the patriarchs of our ancient past. Their understandings helped their children and grandchildren lead successful lives. Families without elderly guidance were at a competitive disadvantage. Biblical Abraham with the knowledge acquired during his long life continues to have progeny to this day. Surely that was because his progeny, aside from inheriting his genes for longevity, had the advantage of elderly guidance to help them live long and prosper. Would that not explain why humans live decades after having created the next generation? Families with wise elders have better chances at survival and therefore have more descendants.
Does the anger of some of our youngsters stem from a feeling that their elders are not fulfilling this historic function? Are these youngsters overwhelmed by demands for which they don't have the experience - demands that experienced elders could and should fulfill? Human history indicates that we have an important function to perform as we become elders; a final gift we are to make to our progeny.
As we age we reminisce almost as though to aid us in seeing the big picture. We tend to forget the details that block out the grand vistas. We wonder about the implications, the meaning of what happened. Looking back at our life we see what was not apparent before. Events look very different when viewed in the context of a lifetime. The story engrams with which we build these realizations and understanding have been sharpened by decades of practice. We have learned to put in a nutshell the important conclusions that can be drawn from experience. And we have reamed to develop the summarizing story engrams with subordinate story engrams to describe complexities, thereby giving us a greater understanding of causality.
We have moved from the information age of our youth with its higher test scores, to the knowledge age of the middle years, to the integration stage of the elder. In this last stage we are distanced from the turmoil and hormonal tensions of youth, and from the competitiveness of the middle years. We have a clearer understanding of what are the determinant causes that create a meaningful life, what are the important effects that humans should seek. We are learning what really matters in the long run.
It is as though we are being prepared for the final gift we are to make to future generations, as though we were being prepared for our ultimate purpose. And this purpose is to structure and explain what we have seen and experienced, thereby to evaluate, to understand. The cognitive organization with which we achieve this purpose is the story engram. It gives us the tool with which to impose a structure on the plethora of stimuli that surround us, to build and therefore understand elaborate cause and effect relationships, to organize life into a coherent and meaningful story; and to share that meaningful story with future generations.
Some of our elders have seen the beginning of the 20th century, they have seen the most dramatic changes in the lifetime of our species. Having experienced the upheavals of this century, theirs has been a unique opportunity to observe the prize as well as the price of "progress." The historic function of these elders is to try to understand what they have seen. Is that not what in our human past has been the function of old age? Why else would we be the only species living decades after having created the next generation? And is that not the most important task any of us will ever have? For it allows us to give the greatest gift -- with story engrams as the building blocks -- to tell the amazing story of where we humans have been, and to develop the goals for the future that we hope will be.

About the Author
Dr. Renée Fuller, Ph.D., received her MA in experimental psychology from Columbia University, and her Ph.D. in physiological psychology from New York University. One of her experimental programs dealt with the cognitive changes following Ball-Stick-Bird intervention. For this work she received Fairleigh Dickinson University's Distinguished Achievement Award. At present she is continuing her work in developing learning programs and is consultant to numerous school systems, universities, departments of education, and other organizations.
To learn more about Renée Fuller and Ball-Stick-Bird, go to The Ball-Stick-Bird Publications website at: http://www.ballstickbird.com or write to her at:
Ball-Stick-Bird Publications
PO Box 429, Williamstown, MA 01267
telephone: (413) 664-0002
e-mail: info@ballstickbird.com

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