The Storytelling Computer

What is it exactly that makes humans so smart? In his seminal 1950 paper, “Computer Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing argued human intelligence was the result of complex symbolic reasoning. Philosopher Marvin Minsky, cofounder of the artificial intelligence lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also maintained that reasoning—the ability to think in a multiplicity of ways that are hierarchical—was what made humans human.

Patrick Henry Winston begged to differ. “I think Turing and Minsky were wrong,” he told me in 2017. “We forgive them because they were smart and mathematicians, but like most mathematicians, they thought reasoning is the key, not the byproduct.” Winston, a professor of computer science at MIT, and a former director of its AI lab, was convinced the key to human intelligence was storytelling. “My belief is the distinguishing characteristic of humanity is this keystone ability to have descriptions with which we construct stories. I think stories are what make us different from chimpanzees and Neanderthals. And if story-understanding is really where it’s at, we can’t understand our intelligence until we understand that aspect of it.” Winston believed storytelling was so central to human intelligence, it was also the key to creating sentient machines in the future.

Winston died in July at age 76. He is remembered as a remarkable scholar, a Mensch, and a beloved mentor to generations of MIT scholars, a teacher who always emphasized to his students the critical importance of developing their writing and speaking skills. “You cannot lead if you cannot communicate,” he taught them.

I met Winston while doing research for my book . I had become fascinated by storytelling and the possibility that a distinct part of the brain, the hippocampus, had contributed to our species’ capacity for building narratives and stories in the mind. The hippocampus is what allows us to remember past events, what is known as episodic memory, and imagine the future. It is also where we create representations of space, the so-called cognitive maps that we use