"Are you writing a book?"

I nodded, thinking that she certainly looked like a college student.

"Is it a book with a story," she continued brightly, and then her voice trailed off softly, "or is it the . . . other kind?"

I explained that it was indeed "the other kind."

"Oh," she replied, finishing the table with a dramatic sweep of her wet rag. She left without another word.

At that moment, I had an epiphany‹a sudden revelation, an understanding that caused me to change in a fundamental way my view of introductory college textbooks. The student had taught the teacher.

She had not taught me something new, but she had reminded me rather forcefully of a characteristic of the human mind to which I previously had paid little heed.

Psychological research has revealed, I knew, that the human mind is a pattern-making, pattern-recognizing system. Trying to understand the world, our mind seeks meaningful patterns. If there are none, it imposes those of its own. We seek patterns in literature, science, mathematics, and almost everything else, including nonsense syllables.

Psychological research also has shown that we develop many of these patterns by telling stories. We tell them at home, at work, in school, in taverns, in therapy, in the courts, in the media, throughout daily life. They appear in the ancient Odyssey, modern books, picture stories of the Eskimos, and the orations of Samoan "talking chiefs." They pervade mass media in our electronic age. They are found all over the world, wherever there is human life. There is a universality in this mode of expression.

In the pages that follow, therefore, I have used the age-old method of storytelling, employed as a supplement to the topical approach in this otherwise traditional textbook. Guided by the way life is lived, stories are a natural way of thinking about the world, even in science, especially at the introductory level.

I have found this approach useful and entertaining. I hope you do, too. And I like to think that the waitress who inspired me will be inspired by this book.

When we next meet, I certainly expect to say to her, "Hey, thanks for the tip."

Dodge Fernald

Cambridge, Massachusetts