Despite their importance to cognitive organization, the ability to build overarching story engrams and further develop them with subordinate story engrams, that ability is not measured by IQ and most aptitude tests. No wonder then that the accomplishments of our students bore little relation to their IQ scores. Further, as our older students demonstrated, the human ability to organize and build complex meanings with story engrams does not deteriorate with age. We can trace its beginning to the early vertebrates. With a protected neural chord and encephalization, there emerged in vertebrates an important ability that is beyond the capacity of invertebrates.
Vertebrates are able to organize a group of visual stimuli into an object, into an entity.
They have, what psychologists call, object constancy. The importance of this perceptual and neural organization is twofold. First, the ability to perceive a group of stimuli as an object imparts the knowledge that this entity. It means that vertebrates can infer that the predator who disappeared into the shadows may still be there and therefore continues to be dangerous, or that the prey that slipped behind a rock can still be had for dinner. Already in the earliest chordates the ability to differentiate objects improves with experience.