![]() Neurologist Uri Hasson states that, in the joint act of storytelling and story-listening, the two brains “click” and become similar “in the ways that capture the meaning, the situation, the schema – the context of the world.” Mutual understanding is engendered, and what is understood tends to be retained in memory and used as knowledge in the future. Functional MRIs indicate that the brain activity of the story-listener synchronizes with that of a skillful storyteller, not just in the language processing areas of the brain, but also in the neural networks that process emotion, complex information, and even motor activity. Recent research illuminates how this intergenerational transfer may occur. Throughout time and across the world, Grammie and other elders have recounted stories to younger generations, stories that enable them to reflect on, mourn, and celebrate essential moments in their lives, stories that often become family memories that nurture, connect, strengthen, and encourage their descendants going forward. ![]() At the time, she was on the cusp of coming of age in Chicago as well, albeit two generations later. Claire was imprinted by Grammie’s vivid and joyful stories of her young adulthood. King Oliver and his jazz band, the Olivet Baptist Church, the Wabash YMCA, the Binga Bank, The Chicago Defender- and Grammie - all flourished in Bronzeville during the 1920s. She loved regaling her granddaughter Claire Hartfield about her life in Bronzeville, a seven-by-thirty block area on the South Side of Chicago that had emerged as the cultural and commercial hub of the rapidly growing Black community. ![]() 20-year-old Grammie was among those who doubled the city’s Black population to 110,000 in only two years. She worked as a nanny in New Orleans before being drawn to Chicago as part of the Great Migration, a mass movement of blacks from the south to the north that began in 1915. Born in Mississippi, she found herself parentless at the age of 14. Wing spent more than 45 years working to transform public schools in order to enable students in the nation’s cities to learn and achieve at high levels.
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