A narrative, darkly

Nature published some interesting pieces on narrative over the last few months. What is narrative, you might ask. For me, it is the idea of sharing knowledge by telling a (true) story. I tend to see narrative as a way to help my audience understand and remember. But there is a darker side of narration, as Nature discusses.

The discussion (Nature 441, pp922) revolves around a new film, A Scanner, Darkly (Dir. Richard Linklater), which is based on a Philip K. Dick novel. The film exploits a technique called rotoscoping, in which real film images are overlaid with a cartoon-like skin, frame-by-frame, to create a cartoon film based on real-life action.

This unreal-imagery is experienced to be somehow more real than the real thing. Various lines of evidence suggest that people find things more believable when the original content is papered over with an engaging exterior. In the Nature piece, several prominent neuroscientists claim this to be evidence that "the brain will swallow almost anything, provided it comes in the form of a story".

A scary conclusion. Can it be that the act of creating a narrative is motivated, deep down, by the desire to manipulate? Next came a piece on "interactional expertise" (Nature 442,pp8), in which sociologist Harry Collins, of Cardiff University, claims that a non-expert can develop a kind of scientific expertise without possessing the underlying scientific knowledge.

As evidence, Collins duped several physicists into believing that his treatise on gravity-waves could have been written by one of their own. One of the physicists admitted that "it's not obvious that [Collin's brief explanation of gravity-wave measurement was] not by a graduate scientist".

Collins claims that interactional expertise might be important for grant reviewers, who must evaluate topics outside their immediate field. And the author of the piece claims that interactional expertise constitutes evidence that one can understand a culture vastly different to one's own, a hot topic among anthropologists who claim that we don't.

I must confess to being mystified by all this. Did Collin's text make sense from a physics perspective, or not? If the reasoning is flaky, then his text must surely be regarded as neither interactional, nor "contributory": the other kind of expertise discussed, and the stuff that is required for "doing experiments and developing theories".

These themes are close to my heart. If I could distill my writing activities to a single sentence, it would be that I make digestible stories from indigestible lists of technical content. But I have developed a special review process to ensure the content is valid. And I'd like to think that my theme, that research is valuable, isn't an especially sinister message to get people to swallow.