Now the moment you begin to tell a child a story and they catch on to what happens, you can never feed them enough stories and I am talking about very, very early, long before they are learning to speak. If they have attached name-labels to objects they then catch on to storytelling. The word of the story comes in and instantly the brain goes into full operation. Full entrainment we call it. Every ounce of the brain, all levels, total cooperation is needed to create the flow of inner images, and connecting them together.

We have our child who has a visual stimulus. They see a something which galvanizes the whole system to move toward it and interact with it if it’s within the safe confines of the nest which is the parental environment. And then they want a name for it. Give them the name for it after they’ve tasted it, touched it, felt it, smelt it, and looked at it intently and so on, all of which of course is built in as an auditory image with all the sensory maps concerning it, a full construction of knowledge of that, and the name is given, the name being an integral part of that new structure. What is the advantage of that? The name can call forth or bring forth an activation of those neural patterns, those neural fields and all the association they imply. So that, in the absence of the object, the name. What does the brain do? It calls up the image of it, what we think of as memory. It may not be quite as clear but it is a reasonable facsimile of it. Now, what is the advantage of that?

Well, let’s look at the next aspect of nature’s agenda, the unfolding game going on here, we find in play and in storytelling. We find that the early child when it is still in-arms, long before the lolling, the babbling they do begins; they are intensely fascinated with adult speech. The get very quiet and look intensely at the adults talking. Why? Because word has started to profoundly affect their whole physical muscular system from the seventh month in utero on. Now, when we start telling a child a story, as soon as comprehension of words has been established, as soon as enough objects have been named, that we have neural fields in the brain cognizing objects as named events, enough of these named events to create a series of images and the internal world begins to form and storytelling begins to open up.

Now the moment you begin to tell a child a story and they catch on to what happens, you can never feed them enough stories and I am talking about very, very early, long before they are learning to speak. If they have attached name-labels to objects they then catch on to storytelling. The word of the story comes in and instantly the brain goes into full operation. Full entrainment we call it. Every ounce of the brain, all levels of the brain, what takes total cooperation of the entire brain to create the flow of inner images, and connecting them together. Now, what does connecting these images together do? These individual name-label objects that the brain has built up, created a pattern for, what we call a sensory map, but these are individual maps in the brain. But now we are getting a series of words all connected together which are firing in images. If we keep the story going and repeat if enough these different fields of the brain start connecting or linking together. Long axons link together connecting heretofore unlinked fields and with use over and over they begin to myelinate. They begin to lock in as mature, permeant fields. The brain is literally growing more and more connecting links and extending their operations more and more, involving more and more of the brain in a single story. It challenges the brain on every level. Because you are hitting it from an auditory-visual stand point and that demands the majority of the brains capacities.

Bruno Bettelheim insisted that the child was always picking up from the environment, the parent, the teacher the society, on two levels. One was what they were physically saying or looking like experienced physically, and the other is how they were feeling. We know that is the case. If these, by the way are in conflict, if the adult is smiling on the outside and crying on the inside the child is in ambiguity, totally confused, because the signals more or less cancel the other out. And the same thin in the pointing syndrome. The child picks up the parents negative feeling about the object even though they don’t express it physically. Obviously, the same thing will take place in storytelling because the parent, when they are telling the child a story are imaging and feeling themselves.

Many people don’t think they can image internally but the brain operates primarily by imaging. Most transfer of what we think of as information in the brain, in blocks, take place through imagery. They speak of auditory imagery as well as visual imagery in the brain. So you have that shared imagery, which is linked intimately with language as a function.

Now, the strongest thing a parent can do with storytelling is the bed time story. If the parent will make up or remember stories to tell, in the dark, they will find in themselves that imager becomes extremely clear and bright. And I have often been suspicious that the prolonged imagery in storytelling between parent and child that the imagery might be shared. We do know that lucid dreams can be shared. This has been established beyond question. We do know that hypnotic dreaming can be shared between two people. They can enter into shared internal imagery between themselves. So, the probability of this happening between parent and child is extremely strong. I know it is the case because it happened with me and my daughter. That enters in as another realm of communication that storytelling sets up.