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I was lucky enough to be invited to Baltimore with my roommate to spend the Thanksgiving holiday. Following two dinners with her various family members, we were invited back to my roommate's dad's house. As a neuroradiologist, he was kind enough to show me a variety of brain scans on his computer- highlighting symptoms of the patients and the differences in the scans pre and post surgery.

This experience got me thinking about, not only the role of the different lobes and parts of the brain, but also about how little we really know about this organ. In my previous classes in which the brain was discussed, little was said besides "the parietal lobe does this..." and "the hippocampus does this...", etc. The only other major point that has been made in my classes was that discoveries about which part does what were made when people who sustained brain injury were studied. Sure, we also talked about Freud's psychoanalytic theory but we did so in the same day in which we learned about this "penis envy"- thus, we wrote him off as a quack pretty quickly.

I don't really know where I was going with that but point is, we don't know much about the unconscious. As far as story telling goes, the unconscious IS our story telling because it is what makes us unique and individuals because it is affected by our personal life experiences. Without our control, the unconscious absorbs our experiences and stores them in such a way that they affect our new experiences by determining the way in which we will react to them. If it were not for our unconscious, life would be boring due to the fact that we would all share common beliefs, feelings, reactions, and understandings that would be easily influenced by the present instead of being based on our prior experiences.