Why These Eight

One of Our Difficulties.

A general answer to the question, "what is this all about, anyway?" seems to be something like this: the human brain appears to have a tendency to look for a unifying theme to the barrage of stimulation it experiences and to the choices it is forced to make--it wants to see itself as staring in some kind of story or to have both an after-the-fact and before-the-fact explanation of everything it does. Without this there would be chaos--no sense of "me". There would be no reason to choose one thing over another, and thus no differentiation among the human species. The claim that Lenore makes, or at least could make, is that this autobiography the brain writes tends to conform to one of 8 templates in any given person, which would be an exciting discovery, if true.

The question is, what do these "meaning filters" (a term Lenore herself coined on mailing list) have to do with the examples of behavior in her book? In many cases the link between the meaning filter concept and behavior is clear, but what about others? E.g., what does the manner in which a person fills his trunk with grocery bags reveal about the kind of story his brain is spinning? Is Lenore really dealing with two different subject matters, interesting for different reasons?

Why are there these 8 templates and no others?