Schank, Roger C.
Tell me a story: A new look at real and artificial memory.
New York, NY: Charles Scribner, 1990.

Abstract

In Tell Me a Story, Roger Schank, one of the most innovative leaders in the field of artificial intelligence, looks closely at the way in which the stories we tell relate to our memory and our understanding. People talk about what happens to them, and they tell others what they remember. Telling stories and listening to other people's stories shape the memories we have of our experiences. Schank explores some of the remarkable aspects and implications of our ability to recall stories and relate them to new ones we are hearing.... "Our interest in telling and hearing stories is strongly related to the nature of intelligence," Schank observes. "In our laboratory today, we are attempting to build machines that have interesting stories to tell and procedures that enable them to tell these stories at the right time. Our machines do not solve puzzles, nor do they do mathematics. Rather, our aim is to make them interesting to talk to, an aspect of intelligence often ignored by computer professionals and intelligence assessors."... This is a bold attempt and it is bound to be controversial. In Tell Me a Story, Schank made a startling breakthrough by bringing together two of the most intriguing products of the human imagination: storytelling and computers.

Contents

Preface.
Knowledge is stories.
Where stories come from and why we tell them.
Understanding other people's stories.
Indexing stories.
Shaping memory.
Story skeletons.
Knowing the stories of your culture.
Stories and intelligence.
Index.

Reissued as Schank, Roger (1995). Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence. Foreword by Gary Saul Morson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Series title: Rethinking theory.