objects and people and the environment would have to be simulated, which
means continual checks to ensure that two objects don’t pass through one an-
other, that the force of gravity worked properly, and that impossible actions
did not take place. It would be a complex programming job, and one that put
enormous computational demands upon the brain.
How much easier to simplify the computations. Let objects pass through one
another. Let gravity work in inadequate ways. Free yourself from the con-
straints of the real world and you reap enormous benefits. The effort is much
reduced and the result much more intriguing. Now the human interpretive
system can go to work on the products of its own (inadequate?) simulation. It
frees up the creative spirits, allows us to contemplate the impossible, amuses
and entertains, and creates the industry of dream analysis. Imagine, all these
side effects result from simplifying the computational load of the simulation.
Why Accuracy Is Not Always Important
In the days of oral tradition, before reading and writing were widespread, it
used to be common for storytellers to go from village to village, telling stories,
passing news from one place to another. Here what was important was style
and content. These storytellers were famed for prodigious feats of memory,
for they could often tell stories that lasted for hours to an enthralled audience.
The stories were all memorized. And when modern scholars studied the few
remaining storytellers in the few remaining preliterate cultures, they were
proudly told how accurate the memory of these storytellers was.
But when the stories were tape-recorded and compared, any particular story
varied tremendously from telling to telling. Where was the accuracy? One
telling might be twice as long as another. Yet to a villager who had heard
both renditions, they were identical, except that perhaps one was better than
the other.
To the listener and teller both, word-for-word accuracy was unnecessary. The
very notion is not even understood by a completely oral culture. It is only with
the advent of writing and tape recorders that we care about such things. It is
only the scholar who carefully writes every word of one telling and compares
it, word for word, with the next. As for the rest of us, in our normal group set-
tings and activities, who notices, or even cares?
The storytellers didn’t memorize the stories, at least not in the sense of the
word-for-word learning that we call memorizing today. Basically, the story
framework was learned, plus formulas for filling out the phrases and color. The
fact that the tales were told in poetry helped, for this put further constraints on
the possible wording: The story had to follow the story line, fit the well-known
formulas, and fit the meter and rhyme of the poem. The storytellers were able
to construct the story anew for each telling, varying it according to the charac-
teristics of the audience. But still, it was the same story, and the listener who
heard it once when it lasted one hour would insist it was the same thing as
heard the previous week or year when it might have lasted two hours. It was
the same story, except for the details of the telling. The fact is, we are social,
interacting people, always alert to interpretations, meanings, and reasons. We
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