Narrative, chunking and learning

The search for meaning and the structuring of perception are innately human. Part of the point is that there is a huge amount of info out there and we have finite capabilities both to perceive and to process. We seek to find or make order in it all. If all is well, the model we make is good enough to be useful. Sometimes not. Now we have more evidence about it.

Speer, ... surmised that if changes in neural activity occurred at the same points that the subjects divided the stories, then it could be safe to suggest that humans are physiologically disposed to break down activities into narratives (remember that the same subjects had no idea during the first part of the experiment that they would later be asked to segment the story). As expected, activity in certain areas of the brain increased at the points that subjects had identified as the beginning or end of a segment, otherwise known as an "event boundary." Consistent with previous research, such boundaries tended to occur during transitions in the narrative such as changes of location or a shift in the character's goals. Researchers have hypothesized that readers break down narrated activities into smaller chunks when they are reading stories. However, this is the first study to demonstrate that this process occurs naturally during reading, and to identify some of the brain regions that are involved in this process.

Narrativity really is part of human being. The ability, no: necessity, to 'chunk' information is part of that.
I guess, in terms of learning, that means that we need to make sure there are opportunities and encouragements to chunk information and to narrate it into individual coherence.
ScienceDaily: Human Brain Breaks Down Events Into Smaller Units

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