The brain is a wonderful interpreter. It can make meaning out of almost-random bits of evidence and postulate an explanation that makes sense in its own context.
Take space aliens. The 1980s were full of them. Between E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, and all those late-night “documentaries” about UFO sightings in cornfields, the world seemed brimming with cosmic visitors. If you were a teen back then, you probably half-expected to see a glowing spaceship land in your backyard, or at least some suspicious lights over the local water tower. Those stories gave shape to something deep in us: the need to explain what we can’t otherwise understand. When faced with odd lights in the sky or strange coincidences, the mind goes searching for narrative explanations.
More recently, however, space aliens are on the wane, at least in the circles in which I run. (Medievalists don’t have a lot of time for space aliens; we are more interested in the fabrication of data and plagiaristic activity that came out over Christmas vacation a couple of years ago. Best holiday ever, scandal unfolding in real-time!!!)
But me, I generated space aliens all my own in a dreamscape this weekend. Cold. Clammy. Tentacles everywhere. Space ships flying low over the civic stairs that we were climbing. (Funny how one never descends the steps in a dreamland).
And then I woke up.
And found this guy.
My little tree-frog had gotten into the camper and was bee-bopping around looking for the door.
Eventually, we captured him and put him back outside in the colder and wetter world to which he belonged.
But my tree frog story is not, in fact, quite as pointless as it might initially sound. As a story of how our brain works, it’s a reminder that sense-making is built in. My dreaming mind took a few sensory impressions – something cold and damp brushing my arm, a flicker of shadow against the window as the window-shades clanked – and built an entire alien narrative out of them.
So take that pause with your data. Acknowledge that your brain might be overwriting the blurrier boundaries of historical truth. Go back and triple check those changes you thought you saw in the patterns. Are they there, or are they an artifact of a ghost frog telling your waking self a story that’s actually three parts unexpected nighttime encounter?
If the data support that insight, you’re golden. Please publish; your insights are marvelous.
If they don’t, accept that sometimes the brain sees patterns in clouds. But those cloud-pictures – dragons, faces, ships with sails – come from inside us. They don’t inhere in the cloud itself.
Being aware of what is “pattern” and what is “artifact” is one of the reasons I keep going back, and going back again to my primary sources. What word was used? Does an object list of this kind of thing or that kind of thing reinforce this change I think I see? Could there be another explanation? (That kind of meticulous cross-checking work is important, and not just an avoidance of the vacuum cleaner as my household sometimes maintains!)
Mondays seem a good day to check the stories you tell yourself.
And it can be quite wonderful when historical stories come true.
Space aliens? Not quite so much.
May you – may WE ALL – have historical storytelling luck this week.
And may we all stick to sources we’ve consulted directly!
Now to go re-count the things...
REFERENCE:
Peter Kidd, "Nobody cares about your blog!" Medieval Manuscripts Provenance [Blog], December 2022: https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/nobody-cares-about-your-blog.html
Charlotte Gauthier, “#ReceptioGate and the (absolute) state of academia,” The Critic, 4 Jan 2023, https://thecritic.co.uk/receptiogate-and-the-absolute-state-of-academia/
Or perhaps you’d like to dabble in a different perspective on the matter: “Receptiogate” (“the official documentation site”): https://www.receptiogate.org/
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