Jerome Bruner Quotes

We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.

In sum, then, "thinking about thinking" has to be a principal ingredient of any empowering practice of education.

Being able to "go beyond the information" given to "figure things out" is one of the few untarnishable joys of life. One of the great triumphs of learning (and of teaching) is to get things organised in your head in a way that permits you to know more than you "ought" to. And this takes reflection, brooding about what it is that you know. The enemy of reflection is the breakneck pace - the thousand pictures.

Passion, like discriminating taste, grows on its use. You more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.

Contrary to common sense there is no unique "real world" that pre-exists and is independent of human mental activity and human symbolic language; that which we call the world is a product of some mind whose symbolic procedures construct the world.

The psychologist Jerome Bruner distinguished between two different modes of thinking, which he called the paradigmatic mode and the narrative mode.

To tell a story is inescapably to take a moral stance," wrote the psychologist Jerome Bruner. Every story we tell, of marriage or life involves judgement about the salient facts, the details to amplify, the impression we wish to leave. The techniques that great storytellers use to draw us in are not unlike the ones that intimate partners use with each other to promote fruitful conversation. Both ease the listener into their story by speaking in terms of possibilities rather than certainties. When one partner wants to invite the other to consider his perspective, he signals his belief that he doesn't have sole access to the truth...In doing so he invites curiosity...Trouble couples insist their partner's meanings are unambiguous.

Perhaps the most basic thing that can be said about human memory, after a century of intensive research, is that unless a detail is placed into a structured pattern, it is rapidly forgotten. Detailed material is conserved in memory by the use of simplified ways of representing it.

11 Jerome Bruner Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture (1990) A founder of cognitive psychology argues for a model of the mind based on the creation of meaning rather than computational processing.

Language allows us to represent autobiographical events in the past, present and future; we can imagine events that have not yet happened, that we wish to happen or fear will happen. Jerome Bruner first proposed narratives as the best candidate for how people give meaning to the world, themselves and dominated in our everyday representation of our lives, rather than narrower units that featured in the information processing paradigm at that time.

Como Vigotski comprendió claramente: CASI TODAS NUESTRAS INTERPRETACIONES DEL MUNDO ESTÁN MEDIADAS POR NUESTRAS TRANSACCIONES CON OTROS

Is there an evolutionary consequence to this distinctive quality of story? Researchers have imagined so. We prevailed, in large part, because we are an intensely social species. We are able to live and work in groups. Not in perfect harmony, but with sufficient cooperation to thoroughly upend the calculus of survival. It is not just safety in numbers. It is innovate, participate, delegate, and collaborate in numbers. And essential to such successful group living are the very insights into the variety of human experience we’ve absorbed through story. As psychologist Jerome Bruner noted, “We organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative,”37 leading him to doubt that “such collective life would be possible were it not for our human capacity to organize and communicate experience in narrative form.”38 Through narrative we explore the range of human behavior, from societal expectation to heinous transgression. We witness the breadth of human motivation, from lofty ambition to reprehensible brutality. We encounter the scope of human disposition from triumphant victory to heartrending loss. As literary scholar Brian Boyd has emphasized, narratives thus make “the social landscape more navigable, more expansive, more open with possibilities,” instilling in us a “craving for understanding our world not only in terms of our own direct experience, but through the experiences of others—and not only real others.”39 Whether told through myths, stories, fables, or even embellished accounts of daily events, narratives are the key to our social nature. With math we commune with other realities; with story we commune with other minds.

Educational psychologist Jerome Bruner of New York University cites studies that show that people only remember 10% of what they hear, 30% of what they read, but about 80% of what they see and do.

Narrative, in short. is more than literature, it is the way we understand our lives. If literature merely supplied entertainment, then it wouldn't be as important as it is. Great literature speaks to the deepest level of our humanity; it helps us better understand who we are. Narrative is not only the way we understand our personal and collective identities, it is the source of our ethics, our politics, and our religion. It is, as William James and Jerome Bruner assert, one of our two basic ways of thinking. Narrative isn't irrational -it can be criticized by rational argument- but it can't be derived from reason alone. Mythic (narrative) culture is not a subset of theoretic culture, nor will it ever be. It is older than theoretic culture and remains to this day an indispensable way of relating to the world.

I could not care less about the person's intention... The road to banality is paved with creative intentions.

You more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.

If you want to become an excellent communicator, you need to learn the Law of Storytelling because people see their own lives in stories. Cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner estimates people are twenty-two times more likely to remember a fact when it has been wrapped in a story. Why? Because stories are memorable, they help us grab the gist of an idea quickly, and they trigger emotion.

cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner (1977) wrote, “Grasping the structure of a subject is understanding it in a way that permits many other things to be related to it meaningfully” (p. 7).

To get a general notion of a particular "Self" in practice, we must sample its uses in a variety of contexts, culturally specifiable contexts. [...] One viable alternative is obvious - to do the inquiry retrospectively, through autobiography. I mean, simply, an account of what one thinks one did in what settings in what ways for what felt reasons. It will inevitably be a narrative, its form will be as revealing as its substance. Our interest, rather, is only in what the person thought he did, what he thought he was doing it for, what kind of plights he thought he was in, and so on.

From this ground zero, a modern meaning movement began to rise, eventually growing to include philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. If the symptoms of meaninglessness were alienation and emptiness, the balm was fulfillment and personal sense-making. The “central concept of human psychology is meaning,” wrote Jerome Bruner. And the central task of every individual is to make your own meaning. There is no single formula. But

The central concept of a human psychology is meaning and the processes and transactions involved in the construction of meanings. To understand man you must understand how his experiences and his acts are shaped by his intentional states; the form of these intentional states is realized only through participation in the symbolic systems of the culture. Indeed, the very shape of our lives - the rough and perpetually changing draft of our autobiography that we carry in our minds - is understandable to ourselves and to others only by virtue of those cultural systems of interpretation. But culture is also constitutive of mind.

You went to somewhere to do something with an anticipated goal in mind, something you couldn't do elsewhere and be the same Self.

Chess can therefore give us valuable forms of meaning in ways that information, explanations and rational analysis cannot. A chess game is rarely meaningful as a given, it is not data. The story only comes to life when we make meaning out of it and then it becomes what some scholars call capta. Chess has shown me that we need the unconventional language of capta every bit of much as we need the present exponential expansion of data. The philosopher of education Matthew Litman puts it as follows, in the context of how children learn to think but the point applies more broadly: “meaning's cannot be dispensed, they cannot be given or handed out to children, meanings must be acquired. They are capta not data. We have to learn how to establish the conditions and opportunities that will enable children with their natural curiosity and appetite for meaning to seize upon the appropriate clues and make sense of things for themselves. Some thing must be done to enable children to acquire meaning for themselves. They will not acquire such meaning merely by learning the contents of adult knowledge - they must be taught to think and in particular to think for themselves”. The point of the capta-data distinction is that the power of chess lies not so much in the moves created by the games but in our relationship to the stories we create through them. A chess game is rarely meaningful as a simple matter of fact, as data. The story only comes to life when we make meaning out of it and then it becomes capta. In the language of perhaps the greatest scholar of narrative thinking, Jerome Bruner, chess subjuntivises reality. It creates a world not only for what is, but for what might be or might have been. That world is not a particularly comfortable place but it is highly stimulating, it is a place says Bruner, that keeps the familiar and the possible cheek by jowl. In light of the power of metaphor, chess’s role as a meta-metaphor and the capacity of chess to illustrate that education is ultimately self education the question of what chess might teach us about life is worthy of some answers.

You are more likely to act into feeling, than feeling yourself into action.

El estudio de Jerome Bruner sobre los relatos o narratives también ilustra las posibilidades y las limitaciones de los guiones estratégicos. Él sugería los siguientes requisitos para su correcto funcionamiento: primero, aunque puede que no presenten la realidad con gran fiabilidad, deben ajustarse a los estándares de verosimilitud, esto es, a la apariencia de ser verdad. Segundo, deben predisponer a la audiencia a una particular y concreta interpretación de los acontecimientos y a una anticipación de lo que va a acontecer. No son necesarias verificaciones empíricas ni ofrecer una secuencia lógica paso a paso, pero deben generar sus propios imperativos. «El imperativo narrativo» es la otra cara del «imperativo lógico». Se pueden utilizar trucos como el suspense, presagios o recuerdos y flashbacks, y también se pueden permitir más ambigüedades e incertidumbres que en los análisis formales. En tercer lugar, aunque no se deben formular ni constituirse como la prueba formal de ninguna teoría general, estos guiones pueden utilizarse para demostrar un principio, para sostener una norma, para ofrecer una guía de cara al futuro. En cualquier caso, tales principios o normas deben surgir naturalmente de los relatos y no necesariamente deben exponerse explícitamente como conclusión. A menudo es imposible saber adónde conduce una buena historia hasta que se alcanza el destino. La audiencia debe llegar al punto que nos interesa por el «imperativo narrativo». Según Bruner, «un contador de historias innovador siempre va más allá de lo obvio». Para conseguir mantener la atención de la audiencia, la historia debe quebrar las expectativas creadas por un «guion implícito y canónico», para contener elementos que sean inusuales e inesperados.[22] El propósito de una narración estratégica de este tipo consiste no solo en predecir acontecimientos, sino en convencer a los demás de que actúen de tal modo que la historia propuesta siga el curso pretendido. Si no resulta convincente, la predicción naturalmente será errónea. Como con otras historias, estas deben relacionarse con la cultura del auditorio, con sus experiencias, sus creencias y sus aspiraciones. Para que se comprometa la gente, debe resultar verdadera y resistir un examen profundo, en términos de coherencia interna y solidez («probabilidad narrativa»). También tiene que tener ecos de las ideas históricas y culturales propias de su audiencia («fidelidad narrativa»).[23] Los principales problemas que debe afrontar un relato estratégico radican en su probable confrontación brutal con la realidad, y puede requerir ajustes inmediatos; y la necesidad de dirigirse a diferentes audiencias puede dar lugar a que se corra el riesgo de cierta incoherencia.[24] Podrían reconciliarse tal vez exigencias que parecieran incompatibles mediante un truco retórico o acumular ideas optimistas unas sobre otras, pero estos trucos no tardarán en quedar a la vista de todos. Es necesario ser sincero y no caer en la simulación.

Siegel, who codirects UCLA’s Mindsight Institute and is author of the scientifically acclaimed books "The Developing Mind: and "The Mindful Brain," broke down the essential sequence of surprise as expectation + violation of expectation. He quoted Jerome Bruner, one of the fathers of cognitive psychology, who said “narrative emerges from violations to expectations.