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A recent study of evolving storytelling techniques concludes the opposite: that since the 1960s, filmmakers have increasingly evolved shot length and frequency of technical events to match the scattered, non-linear way our brains process outside stimuli. They follow a pattern called pink noise, matching the sensory complexity of our real environments.

This offers up the possibility that an attunement to a certain narrative rhythms is, like our responses to music, hard-coded into our perceptual/cognitive apparatus. Jagged, ever-fluctuating rhythms make more sense to our brains, and are thus more engaging, than flat or slowly fluctuating rhythms.We ignore rhythmic technique in storytelling at the risk of losing our audience’s attention on the deepest level possible.

The anxiety processing hypothesis proceeds from the assumption that there must be some evolutionary advantage to nightmares. Another explanation would be that they’re an unpleasant side effect of another advantageous adaptation. In his book The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness (previously discussed), Jeff Warren surveys a hypothesis that treats them as a consequence of our perceptual apparatus. Dreams, it says, result when our visual processing mechanisms are left running with no visual input to process. With nothing to perceive, the processing centers of our brains create images, drawn from our memories and imaginations. The brain’s pattern-recognition functions then kick in, wrapping an explanatory narrative around the resulting image jumble. By arranging them into a linear pattern, our brains transform these images into stories. The leaps required to connect the images result in fragmentary, surreal narratives, but narratives nonetheless. Such is the power and persistence of our pattern-making brains.

Some adherents of the jumbled images model argue that it blows out of the water the technique of dream analysis as practiced by Freud and Jung. Sounds like an overreach to me. Jung famously stated that an unexamined dream was like an unopened letter from the subconscious. Although not all of our dreams are necessarily meaningful on a literal level, the choices our brains make in weaving stories out of the image flood might be revelatory of our concerns, moods, and personalities. Certainly being trained, as one would while undergoing psychoanalysis, to find profound personal metaphors in dreams, would focus one’s pattern-making in that direction.

Given that the exercise of willpower is given over to the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that is overworked and underpaid, the traditional resolution is a poor mechanism for impulse control. It is better at generating guilty feelings than at breaking habits we want to rid ourselves of.

Instead, use resolutions to promise yourself a few new adventures in the year to come. Depending on your resources and wherewithal, they might be big, like taking up a new sport or language. More likely you want to pick easily achievable micro-adventures.

For example, my resolutions for the year are:

* achieve mastery over fennel, annexing it into the vegetable rotation
* investigate pozole, with an eye to making some

These, you have noted, are modest and easily achieved. (Well, maybe not the pozole; I haven’t looked into it yet.) If carried out, they will result in pleasure. And, since I couched them as resolutions, the agreeable sense of an action item ticked off the to-do list. If not achieved, I will go over to Mexitaco and have their delicious pozole—a more than acceptable alternate outcome.

Needless guilt bad. Giving a gift to yourself, good.