While getting him awake is not often a problem, his grandparents say, getting his feet on the floor usually is. He loves to lay in bed, eyes wide open, eyes very active in fact. Looking first in one direction, then another, though almost never at you. Ask him what he’s doing, and you are inviting a minor Vesuvius of emotion, they report. “You are interrupting my story!” they say he’ll protest. It is clear that their grandson does not like his story-making interrupted. And I’ve come to realize that few of us do.

I’m going to assume that most of the emotion is being generated by his right hemisphere, which is irritated that its understanding of what the left side of his brain is currently up to has been disrupted. That’s because for a lot of things, until the left side of our brain supplies an explanation, the right side is left pretty much without one. This, at least, is what neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga suggested years ago, and continues to suggest, with his theory of the interpreter.

Residing in the left hemisphere—or so “split brain” expert Gazzaniga concluded, as he explained (among many other places) in The Mind’s Past (page 174)—“The interpreter constantly establishes a running narrative of our actions, emotions, thoughts, and dreams. It is the glue that keeps our story unified and creates our sense of being a coherent, rational agent. It brings to our bag of individual instincts the illusion that we are something other than what we are. It builds our theories about our own life, and these narratives of our past behavior seep into our awareness.”

Ever since reading Dr. Gazzaniga’s theory of the interpreter, I’ve tended to tell anyone curious about what I do professionally that I’m a deadly serious student of the stories people tell themselves and others to explain who they are. You can notice this persistent thread running through nearly all of our models, books and assessment tools here at Brain Me Up. And few things interest me more than the “core” story people tell about themselves.

I’ve concluded that there aren’t very many core stories. And that understanding what your core story is and admitting to its realities, and constantly assessing when and where it makes sense to submit to guidance from your core story, are crucial to being an effective human. (Of course, not every core story equips its user to know or even to care whether they are an effective human as well as some core stories do.)

Any scholar or researcher who professes to be a “developmental” person, following how one person over time and how all persons over the generational expanses of time, assemble and enable and sometimes limit their personal qualities and skills, is hard at work seeking to understand the stories people tell themselves and others in an effort to explain who they are.

Years ago, I was introduced to the pioneering, self-described “biopsychosocial” theory of self-explanatory storytelling of the late Clare W. Graves, the American psychologist. I’ve yet to discover a better model. So I’ve spent much of my career seeking to make his model—which is sometimes called “the theory of everything” and can quickly overload anyone who comes to it just wanting to know a little bit about a few things—more accessible to ordinary souls.

I love all my model-children equally, but first among equals is the schematic that Dr. Paul Kordis and I put together a couple of decades ago and still continue to expand. That would be the water creatures model that was the focus of our book, Strategy of the Dolphin.

The users of the Carp story explain themselves to themselves as perennial victims. They see the world as being against them, and much of the time, they can be forgiven for thinking so. Life is hard. There aren’t a lot of opportunities to bootstrap one’s way upward economically, socially and culturally. There are more Carp storytellers on earth than any other kind. The Carp story reeks with vulnerability. Where it is heavily in use, there is often much resentment and anger and suffering. Can IEDs, suicide bombers, child and spousal abuse, public protests that turn bloody and political Tea Parties that turn shrill and accusatory be far behind?

Next comes the Shark storyteller. The user of the Shark story usually feels entitled. And often for good reason. They hold most of the cards and many of the marbles. The easiest way to learn how to tell the Shark story is to be the daughter or son of someone who told it well. In the 21st Century, the most formidable redoubt of the Shark storyteller is the major corporation and governments and other agglomerates (like universities) that act like one. It is important to the Shark story user to appear confident, in the know, on top of things, and really a pretty good Jane or Joe. Funny thing, though, how often Shark waters turn bloody, good Jane, good Joe or not.

Someone who isn’t forced by dire life circumstances to use the Carp story and who has the sensibilities to understand what a dead-end the Shark story tends to be often gravitates toward a much more fructiferous story. In fact, it sometimes seems to me like the brain has suddenly discovered itself when it arrives at the ability to tell this next story. That’s because, welcome improvement that it is, the new story and its user soon seem to be surrounded by wretched excess. Not by money, necessarily, although users of this story often do well enough. But a wretched excess of ideas, possibilities, symbols, connections and desires. Originally, Dr. Kordis and I called this the Pseudo-Enlightened Carp story. But we eventually came to realize that this was probably too harsh and an unnecessary diversion.

Because in being censorious of the premature assumption by persons suddenly able to tell this story that they have arrived at enlightenment, we were probably steering people away from a realization that they are very close now—psychologically, operationally—to a radically new, fecund, competent kind of story that people on the planet increasingly needed to hear and to which they need to self-adapt.

And so we changed the name of this new story to First Dolphin. It is only a beginning, important as it turns out to be. Truth be known and acknowledged, the First Dolphin story is the story being told of themselves by many of the people who are now feverishly connecting through Facebook and Twitter, who are raising the alarums about global ecological injury, who are scanning the heavens for signs of other intelligent “beings” in the universe, who are protesting against the treatment of the Carp storytellers and the abuses of the Shark storytellers and propagating the desire for a fairer, safer, more peaceful world.

Users of the First Dolphin story are nowhere near being able to live up to all their precepts or deliver on all their promises. But their story is a great improvement. And a critical spawning grounds. Already, at Brain Me Up, we are tracking two additional stories that have grown from the First Dolphin’s: the stories of the Prime Dolphin and of the Deep See Change Dolphin. It is one of these stories that, if the audacious theories of The Singulatarians come to pass, is most likely going to be the leading candidate for implantation in the “mind” of the artificial intelligence that they are predicting is destined to exceed our own.

But enough for now. If you’d like to know which of these stories you currently use to explain to yourself and others who you are—well, that’s the intended function of our newest Brain Me Up assessment. It’s called the Yo!Dolphin!™ Worldview Survey. Go here to know more. Be assured, our purpose is helping you understand and put to good use your life-story-making, not interrupt it, whether you are lying in bed musing about it or have your feet on the floor.

In general terms, this kid’s brain cycles between chaos and stability again and again, moment by moment, hour by hour, day after day, moving first one direction and back again. He’s predictably unpredictable on the outside and we can suspect on the inside, too, and it really takes a toll at times on the people around him, particularly those who love him most.

It is increasingly clear to his mother and father that something different is going on in their child’s head compared to many other children’s heads. And that this is surely going to be a continuing challenge to the adults in his life if they are not (1) agile enough in their own thinking to appreciate just how different his thinking is and (2) if they are not willing to work with the extra demands and needs this difference brings. Because we aren’t talking about a youngster whose behavior has him lagging behind. This kid is a kindergartner who already reads at a second grade level.

Noticing the things that don’t fit
Early on in my conversation with this often-exasperated mom, a snippet of dialogue from Sherlock Holmes’ famous story, “Silver Blaze,” popped into my mind. It goes like this:

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?

Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

This child seems to be just the type of thinker who, like the ever-curious, ever-observant master sleuth from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, would notice that the dog did nothing in the night and wonder why not.

Then a few days later, while reading one of my favorite blogs, one that tracks children’s brain and learning research, I spotted a quote from another famous figure, the late, great scientist Richard Feynman. Feynman once said, “The thing that doesn’t fit is the interesting thing.”

And I knew instantly that Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide, the two gifted Edmonds, WA, physicians who write this blog, were onto something that the frustrated mother and father were going to find intensely interesting. (And, believe me, they have!)

Little people locked in a big-picture mind
It was yet another blog item that had triggered the Eides’ blog item. They had been reading management consultant Andrew Sobel’s thoughts on big-picture thinking. It’s the kind of thinking that CEOs will practically kill for. Henry Kissinger has been brilliant at it, for example. In 1968 he realized that the Soviet Union and China could both be encouraged to seek a common bond with America; this triangulation dominated superpower relations for 20 years, thanks to Kissinger’s big picture thinking skills.

Sobel’s revisitation of Kissinger’s and other leaders’ big picture thinking skills prompted the Eides to wonder if big-picture skills are showing up far earlier and more often in our children than parents, teachers and other gatekeepers for the young are realizing and responding to. And immediately they concluded, “Pint-sized big picture thinkers really do exist and they seem to be over-represented among gifted children who underperform or cause behavioral disruptions in their early elementary school years.”

Moreover, the Eides suggest that the issue is not that pint-sized big picture thinkers can think this way but rather that they really can’t think any other way. And that the implications of this are manifold:

• Count on it, these children are going to have time management problems. For them, their learning environment is upside down and can be a real impediment.

• Writing assignments are hard not because they know too little but because they know too much.

• They feel like if they are going to understand anything at all, they have to understand a lot of things better. They are driven to know the overarching framework into which new bits of knowledge fit.

• They need to know why something is true, not just that it is true.

• They like discovering novel things, and they use novelties to generate new hypotheses or rules; they are inductive, not deductive, learners.

• For them, complexity often brings simplicity because with enough
examples, a pint-sized big picture thinker can often spot a new pattern of meaning.

By now, I was hooked. I immediately forwarded the Eides’ blog item to the parents of what I’m just sure is another pint-sized big picture thinker in the making.

Meanwhile, I was off to surf the Internet for new findings on what’s happening inside such a child’s brain.

Butterflies are out, sand piles are in
One of the most intriguing discoveries of late was made just down Interstate 75 from me—at the University of South Florida, in Tampa. It involves self-organizing criticality, the behavioral pattern I mentioned at the first above.

Self-organizing criticality is a kind of chaos. When brain scientists first began trying to apply chaos theory in the late 1980s, they were all a’flutter over the so-called “butterfly effect” (so named because thanks to deterministic chaos, if a butterfly in China flaps its wings the small perturbation may eventually cascade into a blizzard over New York City). But they could find little in the brain’s electricity resembling the butterfly effect.

However, in the 1990s, a growing sand pile effect was quickly evident. If you keep piling on sand grains, eventually you are going to get an avalanche. This is self-organized criticality. For a while, the pile grows predictably, and then suddenly and without notice, it “goes a grain too far” and collapses. We now know that the brain makes frequent and apparently fundamental use of self-organized criticality.

Which brings us to what USF researcher Robert Thacker found. If you can keep the collapse of certain of the sand-pile-like electrical patterns in the brain moving for as little as a single additional millisecond (out of a typical 55 milliseconds), you can add as many as 20 points to a child’s IQ.

And how do you do that?

Well, how do create a suitable classroom and home environment for a pint-sized big picture thinker?

Big-picture brain research needs a kick in the pants
The Drs. Eides have suggested that you make such a child’s environment as rich and varied sensorially as you can. They think you should throw “chronologically advanced experiences” at the youngster out the kazoo (second grade literature for the kindergarten big picture thinker is just great!). Patiently answer their questions and feed them more. And especially feed their hunger for subjects, phenomena and ideas that can be compared and contrasted.

And probably—and this is my observation, not the Eides—this is going to help extend the duration of the sand pile collapses in a big-picture child’s brain, too.

If there is a fertile field in dire need of big-picture thinkers, it is brain research. As veteran split brain researcher Michael Gazzaniga says, “neuro” research badly needs a unifying theory. Currently, it is vastly fragmented and having to resort more often than not to borrowed story lines from fields like motivational thinkers and management theorists (thank you, Andrew Sobel!) to bring some coherence to all the insights and observations tumbling out of things like fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) laboratories.

Maybe that patience-testing, ever-questioning six-year-old kindergartner who is already reading at a second grade level will turn out to be the one who provides the new theory that Dr. Gazzaniga yearns for. Gazzaniga says it will come from giving neuro-research a good kick in the pants. And our friends’ son seems to be in training for participating in just such an act of levitation.