Valerie's take on Schank Chapter 4

Schank is getting down to it - how do we find stories we wish to tell? By analyzing stories according to themes, we are able to file them away and then recall them as needed. Schank uses the language of Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding, Schank shows how themes are revealed according to the relationship of those four elements. Using the combination of a theme plus the application of the four elements, we can begin to relate and recall stories. Schank explains how to identify themes by associating them with things people talk about. He calls these things "personal preoccupations." Of course these themes may vary from individual to individual, but the important thing is that we recognize our own themes and be able to classify our stories accordingly for recall purposes. Schank suggests the best way to do this is to consider the lesson of the story as the over-arching catalyst to memory. If a story doesn't have an identifiable lesson, observable behavior might be a means of identifying a theme. Lessons and observable behavior are easily seen through the simplicity of Proverbs. Analyzing Proverbs would be a good way to understand Schank's Indexing theory more fully. This is good stuff for me - it defines a workable frame on which to hang stories. I'm not sure I don't do this already, at least to some extent, but my language is a little different. Stories stick in my mind in a different way, I think. My connections to stories are through sensory stimulants. I remember the way the grass felt in Fort Lauderdale, the weather, the colors, daily rainstorms. I seem to connect stories about my problems or people in my life to those things. It isn't difficult to come up with a lesson once I have remembered a story, but I don't think I categorize stories according to those lessons. I'll have to give that some more thought...