What is Mental Relativity?
Mental Relativity is a new model of psychology that grew out of the development of the Dramatica Theory of Story. Dramatica's central concept is called the Story Mind. According to the theory, every story has a mind of its own - the structure represents the mind's psychology and the storytelling develops its personality.
The Dramatica theory was used to create a computer model of the Story Mind, which was patented and became the core "Story Engine" of a software product, also called Dramatica, which is the best selling story development tool in the world.
The Story Engine is actually able to predict a psychological structure for a story based on an author's answers to questions about his or her dramatic intent. It wasn't long before it was discovered that this same Story Mind model was also able to predict the psychologies of real people in addition to characters.
In further exploring this unexpected outgrowth of the theory, we discovered that the model was predicting psychological patterns, structures, and dynamics that were unknown to the current understanding of the human mind.
Our first thought was that our model of the mind was somehow flawed. But it reexamining the algorithms we had developed, no flaw could be found. Rather, the elegance and symatry of the system, insofar as it made manifest the underlying theory, was beyond reproach.
So, we took the rather audacious leap of wondering if perhaps those new psychological dimensions predicted by the model might actually be suggesting hitherto undiscovered workings of the human mind. Emboldened by this notion and mindful of the interative interrelationships among the structural and dynamic elements of our model, we aptly, and rather arrogantly named our embryonic theory of psychology, Mental Relativity.
For almost twenty years now we have continued to refine the theory and to document its applications. And though we have become far more mellow and less evangelistic about our work, we have not yet found it in conflict with empirical data about the mental world.
Previously, we had published our work only on our web sites, contenting ourselves to let the Dramatica theory prove itself in practical application in the world of writers and story development. Now, after nearly two decades of success in that field, I find it high time to make our concepts more widely available in the hope that it might provide some modicum of insight to both individual and scientist as well.
With that purpose in heart and mind, I leave you to explore the ramblings of an old story theorist laboring under the grandiose delusion that perhaps her work may have wider application and may even contribute in some modest way toward a lessening of tensions among the thinking creatures of the world.
The Dramatica theory was used to create a computer model of the Story Mind, which was patented and became the core "Story Engine" of a software product, also called Dramatica, which is the best selling story development tool in the world.
The Story Engine is actually able to predict a psychological structure for a story based on an author's answers to questions about his or her dramatic intent. It wasn't long before it was discovered that this same Story Mind model was also able to predict the psychologies of real people in addition to characters.
In further exploring this unexpected outgrowth of the theory, we discovered that the model was predicting psychological patterns, structures, and dynamics that were unknown to the current understanding of the human mind.
Our first thought was that our model of the mind was somehow flawed. But it reexamining the algorithms we had developed, no flaw could be found. Rather, the elegance and symatry of the system, insofar as it made manifest the underlying theory, was beyond reproach.
So, we took the rather audacious leap of wondering if perhaps those new psychological dimensions predicted by the model might actually be suggesting hitherto undiscovered workings of the human mind. Emboldened by this notion and mindful of the interative interrelationships among the structural and dynamic elements of our model, we aptly, and rather arrogantly named our embryonic theory of psychology, Mental Relativity.
For almost twenty years now we have continued to refine the theory and to document its applications. And though we have become far more mellow and less evangelistic about our work, we have not yet found it in conflict with empirical data about the mental world.
Previously, we had published our work only on our web sites, contenting ourselves to let the Dramatica theory prove itself in practical application in the world of writers and story development. Now, after nearly two decades of success in that field, I find it high time to make our concepts more widely available in the hope that it might provide some modicum of insight to both individual and scientist as well.
With that purpose in heart and mind, I leave you to explore the ramblings of an old story theorist laboring under the grandiose delusion that perhaps her work may have wider application and may even contribute in some modest way toward a lessening of tensions among the thinking creatures of the world.
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