Dan Siegel, again

This is a passage that jumped out at me:

In 1988, Siegel heard one of the pioneers of attachment theory, Mary Main, give a talk about her work on what she called "coherent narrative." Main and her colleagues had devised an instrument called the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), in which parents were asked about their recollections of their own childhoods. What Main's research indicated was that the way these parents told their own stories-how they made sense of their past lives, or didn't-was the most powerful predictor (85 percent accuracy) of whether their own children would be securely attached to them.

If adults could create a reflective, coherent, and emotionally-rich narrative about their own childhoods, they were likely to form a good, secure relationship with their children-no matter how "insecurely attached" they themselves had been as children or how inadequate or even abusive their own parents were. It wasn't what happened to them as children, but how they came to make sense of what happened to them that predicted their emotional integration as adults and what kind of parents they'd be.

I think a key aspect here is "emotionally-rich". Many very unhappy people- rigid, judgmental, etc- have coherent narratives. Think of all the people we've known over the years who not only tell the same story of their lives, but with details emphasized the same way, as if the audience and context never changes. This is a lack of engagement, a lack of communication and mutuality, that really shrinks a person's social world.

Reflective speech can be learned: think "therapized". But "emotionally-rich" means the speaker is being generous to his or her listener. This empathy, or understanding of another, is a crucial frontal lobe function.

Our own coherent narratives- much like in traditional folk tales and post-modern fiction- is open ended. But not formless or sprawling. Each narrative loops back through the listener to the speaker, changing slightly, accommodating subtle social information. Irrelevant details are maintained in a low energy state, perhaps to be charged with significance at some later time.

In this way, the previous post regarding an older reader's slowing down over apparently irrelevant details points to another quality of the brain: each area seems to suppress other areas. Life changes such as injury, open up other possibilities. When we are telling our stories, we keep in reserve details for other situations and other audiences.

Perhaps older brains tell richer stories as well- less purposeful- but emotionally deeper. And maybe this is a quality we associate with wisdom.