Mental Relativity Development Notes (Transcription)

These are rough notes recorded on micro-cassette pertaining to the online psychological aspects of the continuing development of the Dramatica theory of story structure and the Mental Relativity theory of the narrative mind.

It’s Monday, February 6, 1995 at about nine-thirty in the morning.

Just a thought on relationships for alter ego [the self-improvement software program we were developing at the time], in terms of blind spots.

Men clearly see something they posses or don’t posses and so they are able to see that quite clearly in terms of relationships as to whether somebody is their girl or their woman that they, their wife it is all a possessive type thing.

Whereas women are looking at how a relationship is changing, meaning that women, in general, don’t have a tendency of being as possessive of their mate, as they are of looking at the strength of the relationship.

But the blind spots that each has is that, men will not see relationships changing. They will assume that once they have possession of something they own it, they will assume once they have a relationship that is what the relationship is and it will stay there. They can not see that maybe feelings evolve over time, maybe the other party involved in the relationship is no longer the person that they thought they had, maybe the relationship is no longer what they had. Which is why a marriage can go far a rye before a husband ever realizes it has.

But a women is aware that a relationship is going awry right at the beginning. But her blind spot is that, though they no longer have possession of someone’s heart, they are not even going to think about that. They are going to think about a matter of degree like you don’t love me like you used to or we don’t talk anymore, that is sort of the blind spot.

Men think that they just don’t love you anymore but they are still yours but women are not going to look at that, they are just going to watch the relationship go up and down. And men are going to look at a relationship and they are going to be saying things like what are you doing spending all this time with him because they are going to assume that there is a fixed relationship based on possession.

So it’s one of those things that kind of does a double reverse, see you start having the area that you are good at which is possession. But as a result for men, is a result of that, they are not going to aware of a relationship changing and because they can’t see a relationship changing, suddenly they may find that they no longer have possession and not see it coming. So it comes back to –?– them right were they see it most clearly, they just don’t see it coming because they don’t see process that leads to it.

And for women, women are generally looking at someone who they feel is caring for them, that loving them by looking at the way relationship is going and then they do not have a blind spot in that area. But they do have a blind spot in the fact that somebody may no longer be in their possession. In other words, maybe someone else comes into the picture that is of more interest or has a better situation surrounding them and the women no longer possess the man and all she senses is that the relationship is –?–. Then it comes back to haunt her later, it slaps her in the face that the relationship has now gone into a declining spiral and will eventually reach no relationship at all because of the fact that she has lost possession of the man.

A lot of folklore and old wives tales as it where, talk about how to get a man and keep a man. “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” Well indeed that is saying basically that if you supply the needs that a man has, whether in bed or on the table that supposedly that will provide so much that it’s going to require quite a holistic alternative in order to go away from the sure thing that is working really well. But if you let any of this lag, the moment you let it lag the man is going to start not wanting what he has.

There is a line in a Beatle song that says and I think I quoted it in here earlier, that says “I’m no fool ’cause I won’t take what I don’t want”. Well the same thing is true with men, they won’t keep what they don’t want. The whole idea is to shun yourself of things that are no good and to grab on to things that are. This leads into the whole discussion of looking at start and stop in our story engine, that start and stop is –?– yourself of something or adding something. That is not really appropriate to women when you’re looking at start and stop.

Talking about story now, there’s these four areas that you are going to find a quad in each one of these dynamics. And for Dramatica now, this should be put in the Dramatica file. I really think that the dynamic model that we want to create, the alternative emotional model that we want to create that deals with the heart instead of the head is going to not deal with dynamics in terms of these binary choices of good or bad, of start or stop, or change or sted-fast, but deal with a quad of four.

Now I thought of this at three in the morning and I don’t know if I can remember this part of it anymore. I may have to re-work it, so this may be a little rocky. If we deal with four things, on say, start and stop now you have a guy in change or steadfast is going to determine for main character say, boy this is rocky….

For main character you are dealing with change and steadfast that aside, you look at is the audience waiting for something to start, is the audience waiting for something to stop?

Now it may be that the main character is trying to bring something about or it may be that the main character is going to begin something in themselves. It may be that the main character is trying to bring something to a conclusion or it may be that the main character has to conclude something. Sometimes you have to give up your grief and sometimes you have to wait for what is causing your grief to go away, as it were.

So in fact there are these four aspects of these start- stop question that exists independently of change and steadfast, however change and steadfast have an influence upon them. Just like the rest of our appreciations, just like the side of the structural model.

Now, what you end up with when you go to change and steadfast, what is the quad based out of change and steadfast? Well certainly one is that the character is makes the decision to change and the other that the character makes the decision to remain steadfast. The two other one’s that we just recently discovered are in the non-leap of faith stories, in which the character is changed or the character remains the same without really making a choice, without being aware of it. It is a passive and active nature, so that you have passive and active are the functional delineation of the two dynamic pairs in a changed, steadfast quad.

But when you deal with a start-stop quad, it’s internal and external that are the two perimeters that grow out of the start-stop quad. So now the task I have for everyone in the department, if we haven’t done it by the time this is transcribed already, is to go through and take all of the eight dynamic questions and try to work exactly what the quad of options are in those dynamic questions. And then having worked out the quad of options, then figure out the binary driver of each one, and then figure out the quad of the binary driver.

So in that manner we could say change and steadfast, whether it is active or passive creates a quad of four item, and then that is determined by the active passive. Now if you have active and passive, then what would be the quad built out of active and passive and so one.

And eventually as we create this we will begin to see that we come up with the lower level of the dynamic structure, as it were. We come up with the element level of it because when we move up a level in this sense, we’re really moving side ways. We aren’t saying that above this dynamic structure is another set of four exactly, we’re saying that next to it are four other things that have an influence on it.

And then once we mapped out all of these, of which there should be again sixty-four different items and four different arrangements and what we’ve come up with all of these quads of things, in that kind of progression, then we will need to move up to the variation level. I think this is were we’re going to start seeing things at the variation level, that have to do with greed and lust and love and hate and all of that that’s going on.

And then we move up to the Type level, which I have no idea what it is and perhaps up at the highest level it may turn out that the four things we have, that are the dynamic classes as it were, would be I, you, we, and they, we’ll have to wait and see about that one. Anyway that is enough for today, I’ve go to get on to work.