The Mind is a Storyteller

Write about the sources that you found for your reading this week. Be sure to give full citation information for them. Relate them to Gottschall's 5th chapter and to your emphases. Discuss why you chose them and how you found them.
I was very intrigued with the idea that creativity is associated with madness, or mental illness  I had often wondered why some of the most notable fiction writer, artists, and poets have had a history of mental illness, and if that dysfunction-for lack of a better word- contributes to the story. I look to Google Scholar to initially seek out research, at Google Scholar you don't have to be as specific in the search engine as you would with other sites like Ebsco Host or Jstor. I simply googled "mental illness and creativity"- and found loads of scholarly articles. After reading through a few, I found this one, "Strong imagination: Madness, creativity and human nature", by Daniel Nettle, (who is also quoted in our text). In our text Lord Byron is quoted as saying, "We of the craft are crazy"(92). The article from Google Scholar caught my attention from this one statement,"The author argues that our minds evolved to give us a faithful understanding of reality, to allow us to integrate into our communities, and to help us adapt our behavior to our environment. Yet, in serious mental illness, the mind does exactly the opposite of these things." The statement is reminiscent of what we read in the last chapter of our book, but furthermore relates to "The Mind is a Storyteller." The article further examines the link between creative genius and the madness the usually accompanies it. Are people that have gone mad just trying to make sense of their world? And I became curious after reading the line, "Could it be that something about the writers life- the loneliness, the frustration, the long rambles through imagination actually triggers mental illness?"(93) - The curiosity I had was, does the mental illness cause frustration or does frustration cause mental illness? Conspirators, I feel like their frustration with people not taking them seriously would cause them to go mad. 
Another section in our book that really interested me was the chapter on confabulation. Our minds need to make sense of situations- storytelling seems almost imperative for us not to go crazy. The experiment of the two ropes and the pliers was interesting. The subjects made up a story to substantiate why they came up with their idea to tie the pliers to a rope and swing it- but subconsciously they had seen a researcher swing it out of the way. Our brain cannot have gaps- it has to make sense of whats going on and Gottschall is saying storytelling  is the key. I found an article through Google Scholar that discusses whether or not confabulators try to remember the things they are confabulating- or whether it is all just fiction. The article is titled, "Do confabulators really try to remember when they confabulate? A case report." The report concluded by stating,  "We conclude that the memory dysfunction exhibited by our patient represents one of many manifestations of a more general underlying disorder characterized by an inability to select the cognitive process that matches the task requirements in conjunction with a compulsion to provide verbal responses."(Zanino, Barban, Caltigirone) The patients had a compulsion to provide verbal responses. Our minds need to make sense of its surroundings- it is not content having gaps. Storytelling is the glue to avoid conscious insanity. 
This chapter, in fact this whole book so far- seems to have been written for my emphases'. All the facts that pertain to the brain, the disorders that are discussed, ie- confabulation, the splitting of the corpus callosum to inhibit left and right brain communication is directly biological. Furthermore, the inhibition of communication to either parts of the brain deals with communication. If you dig a little deeper this last chapter really discussed a lot of intra-personal communication. 

Nettle, Daniel. "Strong Imagination: Madness, Creativity and Human Nature." PsycINFO.APA. 8 (2012): 235. 
            PsycINFO. Web. 29 Sept. 2013.Zannino, Gian Daniele, Francesco Barban, Carlo Caltagirone, and 

Giovanni A. Carlesimo. "Do Confabulators 
            Really Try to Remember When They Confabulate? A Case Report." Cognitive Neuropsychology 25.6 
            (2008): 831-52. Print.