Stimulating Brains through Stories in Shishi...

Our first full fall semester is well on its way here in Shishi, China. One of the most exciting changes we are undergoing, during this spin of the wheel, is the empowerment of our Chinese team to guide our community in the cultural regenerative efforts by bringing back to life the dusty bones of the ancestral stories and songs seldom told, far less sung.

Three times a week our kindergarten gathers for Kric? Krac! (the name Originateve International has adopted from our Haitian Creole bards to honor the our gatherings around the globe for storytelling and song with children ages 0-12). On Mondays, we celebrate a wide breadth of folklore from a good number of English tunes gathered from every corner of the world where the Anglo-saxons long since carried their lore. Molly Malone, from the capital of Dublin, cries out among us trying to make a sale, just like "her father and mother before", on some fresh, a-live, seafood. The infamous jolly swagman from the land down under reaffirms the rebellious nature we each carry within by swearing to all that seeks to squelch our innocence that "you'll never catch me alive!" On Wednesdays, however, our songs, now, ring out in Chinese. Excitingly, our children are empowered in their bilingual curriculum of enriched literacy and lore to call upon both the eye-less and rumpless tigers of the east, as well as calling upon the memory of the great hunter Houyi and his beloved Chang'e who now longs for him from the moon where she ascending, long ago, into her immortality.

These two lovers are the legendary goddess and hero of the beloved chinese myth of the Jade Rabbit. This story in particular is remembered each year around the western celebrated time of Mabon. As teacher: Peng Xue Ting brought the story back to life for the children of our kindergarten, I looked out at a sea of children clearly entranced by the language and imagery of her story and the rhythm and beat of my drum. I was instantly reminded of the posit Sir Joseph Chilton Pearce made in his influential essay on "Imagination and Play",

"Let's look at storytelling. The child responds to storytelling very early, even before they can talk. The word comes in as a vibration: sensory input. And that challenges the whole brain, not just to create an image in keeping with each word, but to create moving imagery, fluid imagery that follows the flow of the words. It sets up an inner-world scenario, a whole inner-world scene in which the scene is constantly shifting according to the shifting of the words themselves.

This has been found to be a major challenge of the brain. The job is so enormous that the child goes into total entrainment. That is, all of the energy moves into this visual process of the inner world. The child goes catatonic: body movement ceases, the jaw drops, eyes get great big and wide. They are literally not in this world. Their eyes are wide open, but they are not looking at anything outwardly. They are looking at the marvelous world forming within them."

Pearce goes onto explain, in a much more technical language, that it is in these magical instances that the child's brain is being completely reconfigured.

"...the telling of the story challenges the brain into entirely new routing every time. Each new story necessitates the forming of new neural connections between all the fields involved in imagery; a reworking of the sensory maps of the brain involving the establishment of new fields and connections between them. The brain has to continually expand its neural connections. And it’s the neural connections that count, not simply the number of neurons...And since each new story demands a complete new, re-routing of the neural patterns themselves, the brain has to continually expand—operations, auditory, visual, sensory fields, and all the rest of it—with each one."

Awareness, alone, of what Pearce is articulating here on the affect of storytelling on the brain of our children is catatonic in and of itself. As I drummed along, I too, drifted into that place where we must all frequent often. There I was acutely aware of that faith that is required of all of us involved in the "medicine-work" of childrearing. We cannot always know what sort of neural connections are taking place in the brains of the little ones entrusted to us. Nonetheless, we can trust the reason that stems from our research and experience that something magical is at work.

What am I left with, when the story comes to its end? The satisfaction that, as up and coming bards in this southern nook of our planet we are doing what we can to bring story back to life, fully aware of the neuro-benefits for the children but also a keen sense of a fair bit more yet to be given language to.