Keep Those Neurons Busy!

Watched North by Northwest last night. I’d never seen it before. I liked it a lot.

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There’s a story about how North by Northwest came to be written.

Alfred Hitchcock had actually hired screenwriter Ernest Lehman to adapt a novel called The Wreck of the Mary Deare, but after laboring over the script for several weeks, Lehman found himself horribly blocked.

Lehman went to complain to Hitchcock. “I can't do this,” he said. “I want to make the ultimate Hitchcock movie.

Hitchcock thought for a moment. “I’ve always wanted film a chase on Mt. Rushmore.”

“I could do that!” Lehman said.

“And a homicidal crop duster. And a murder at the U.N.”

Bingo.

North by Northwest’s plot—such as it was—was entirely incidental. Merely a framework for the images that bubbled up from Hitchcock’s brain.

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That’s more-or-less the way narrative works in real life, too.

Your sensory apparatus takes in a constant stream of images, sounds, tastes, smells, tactile experiences, and the neurons in your brain process this data into mental constructs like memory, identity, hierarchy.

Other neurons spin those first-degree mental constructs into second-degree mental constructs called narratives. Narratives include stuff like ideology, religion, ethnicity, social roles.

Then there are all the collaborative narratives like religion, money, governments, politics, laws, language.

None of these narratives actually exist in any real sense of the word. But because you think they exist, you can be easily distracted—simply by adjusting the narrative.

Just one more thing to think about. Keep those neurons busy!

PS: North by northwest isn't a real direction.