“It’s been my experience that exposure to narratives… instructs memory formation. What I mean by this is not merely that it structures memory, but something far more revolutionary — that exposure to narratives partly predetermines the (accessible) forms and functions of memory. Exposure to narratives both delimits and, at least potentially, expands the possibilities inherent in human cognition, by causing its foundations to acquire the engineering analog of ‘shapes’. These ‘shapes’ determine the capacities of the minds, intelligences and creative potential that can emerge from their coherent or incoherent ‘enaction’ in consciousness.

Some narratives produce minds barely recognizable as intelligent. Others produce minds exemplary of prodigy. While this is especially true for humans during early childhood, this unexpected feature of our relationships with memory remains active throughout our lives… and thus, we can encounter narratives that not only change what our memory is and is doing… they are capable of radically altering or even replacing our ‘timelines’ of personal history.

Narratives can introduce into memory events and relationships that truly never occurred, or distort those that did… and have other capacities so astonishing that I must resist the urge to render them explicitly in language, leaving it to the intrepid reader… to imagine.

To become actively conscious of what I have here presented… represents an uncommon opportunity to gain cognitive liberties otherwise inaccessible. But that same fact reveals that the mediated transmission of narratives can easily misdirect the minds of entire generations… particularly in the modern technologically-amplified context.

This presentation is, itself, a specific mode of narrative — a meta-narrative… and exposure to it can have unexpected effects on human memory, identity, and… intelligence.”

— an intelligence agent