Family Dinners and Becoming the Authors of Our Own Lives

Growing up, family dinners weren't exactly sacred, but they were our default mode. Most evenings during my first 18 years of life involved the five of us sitting down around the dining room table and talking.Much of what we talked about were or collective memories, especially as we got older. And when we get together, that's what we still tend to do. My wife of 40 years has heard our stories countless times by now. She's been a part of the family so long that she's part of many of them, even as she teases me that we hash and re-hash the same stories over and over again, year after year.If my family is typical, about 40 percent of our conversational time is spent doing this. Some scientists are attempting to make the case that the primary reason our species developed language at all is so that we could communicate our memories with one another.At one level, why that would be the case is obvious. If our prehistoric ancestors could accurately and efficiently share their memories of, say,…