The Dynamical Principles of Storytelling

When considering the opening part of 1800 short stories, we find that the first dozen paragraphs of the average narrative follow an action principle as defined in arXiv:2309.06600. When the order of the paragraphs is shuffled, the average no longer exhibits this property. The findings show that there is a preferential direction we take in semantic space when starting a story, possibly related to a common Western storytelling tradition as implied by Aristotle in Poetics.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 3 table

Narrative as a Dynamical System

There is increasing evidence that human activity in general, and narrative in particular, can be treated as a dynamical system in the physics sense; a system whose evolution is described by an action integral, such that the average of all possible paths from point A to point B is given by the extremum of the action. We create by construction three such paths by averaging about 500 different narratives, and we show that the average path is consistent with an action principle.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, 1 tabl

The geometry and dynamics of lifelogs: discovering the organizational principles of human experience

A correlation dimension analysis of people’s visual experiential streams captured by a smartphone shows that visual experience is two-scaled with a smaller dimension at shorter length scales than at longer length scales. The bend between the two scales is a phase transition point where the lower scale primarily captures relationships within the same context and the higher dimensional scale captures relationships between different contexts. The dimensionality estimates are confirmed using Takens’ delay embedding procedure on the image stream, while the randomly permuted stream is shown to be space-filling thereby establishing that the two-scaled structure is a consequence of the dynamics. We note that the structure of visual experience closely resembles the structure of another domain of experience: natural language discourse. The emergence of an identical structure across different domains of human experience suggests that the two-scaled geometry reflects a general organizational principle

The correlation dimension plot for NV’s images shows a two-scaled geometry.

<p>The bent-cable regression lower scale correlation dimension estimate is 6.06 and the top scale correlation dimension estimate is 14.27.</p

Takens’ delay embedding procedure: Recovery of the lower scale correlation dimension estimate for NV’s images.

<p>A time delay of τ = 10 minutes was used to construct the delay embedded vectors at each value of embedding dimension. As the embedding dimension is increased, the correlation dimension of the reconstructed delay embedded vectors asymptotes to the original lower scale estimate of 6.06.</p

Ratio of the number of pairs of images above the bend to the number of pairs of images below the bend in NV’s correlation dimension plot as a function of binned time difference plotted on log-log axes.

<p>The ratio is approximately 1 for a time difference bin of 21 to 34 mins which lies in the range of median and mean context durations (see text for details). The drop in ratio for certain time differences, marked with the rectangles, are signatures of periodicities in the data where recurrent visits to the same context spaced by those time differences contribute more pairs to the lower scale of the correlation dimension plot thereby decreasing the ratio. Note that the second time difference bin  =  [73,118) seconds and there are no transitions with these time differences in the data - images were captured by NV’s lifelogging device at approximately equal intervals of ∼60 seconds. The minimum time interval in the data is 59 seconds followed by 60, 61, 62 and 119 seconds.</p