We are a “storytelling animal”

Watch a human brain while engaged in a story and that brain looks as if that person is actually experiencing the story, rather than observing it.

That’s why stories are so sticky: why we eavesdrop on other stories, watch movies, listen to music, read novels and gossip. It’s a defining characteristic of humanity.

That’s the thrust of the 2012 book “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human,” written by professor Jonathan Gottschall. Though he argues examples of story’s power shows up all over the place, from effective marketing to biography books and new journalism, this book centers around fiction. Fiction appears better at convincing than nonfiction, exactly because fictional stories put us in a kind of trance, lowering our defenses. How nations and cities, friends and companies, organize are all reliant on stories. (I referenced Gottschall’s work in my recent ‘case for storytelling’ conference speech.)

“Story is the grease and the glue of society,” wrote one psychologist. “Story is the center without which the rest cannot hold”

However the future of fact-based storytelling goes, there appears to be no decline in story in our lives, as disinformation campaigns and bestselling video games both show. As one gamer puts it in the book: “the future looks bleak for reality.” 

Below I share my notes for future reference.

My notes:

• New journalism from 1960s uses fictional techniques (of character development, and first-person narration)
• How screen time is dominated by stories
• Dreaming is storytelling – and we all dream at night, and daydreaming is prevalent
• “Storytelling is the spine of televised sports”
• Commercials are “fictional screen media” in which we tell stories
• Storytelling: “just lucky accidents” or more from evolutionary design 
• Vivian Paley: girl and boy play
• “Play is the work of children” – rehearsal for adulthood
• Aristotle in Poetics: we are drawn to fiction because it gives us pleasure but the fiction we consume is deeply unpleasant
• New Grub Street novel (1891) includes an example of hyperrealism within it: a character writes Mr Bailey Grocer
• Neither hyper realism nor perfect escapist happiness fantasy work because it lacks the key plot device of “trouble”
• Charles Baxter: “Hell is story friendly”
• Story = Character plus predicament plus attempted extrication 
• William James once wrote “there is very little difference between one man and another, but what little there is, is very important” — this is just like story; even though they all follow the same structure isn’t a problem
• Unlike Dubliners (1914), Finnegans Wake (1939) was inventive but you can’t celebrate that James Joyce novel as a comprehendible story
• “There is a universal grammar in the world of fiction, a deep pattern of heroes, confronting trouble and struggling overcome.”
• “The human mind was shaped for story, so that it could be shaped by story.”
• Janet Burroway: “Literature offers feelings for which we don’t have to pay.”
• Keith Oatley: stories are flight simulators for life
• Mirror neurons: Marco Iacoboni “our brains recreate for us the distress we see on the screen”
• The Media Equation (1996) by Byron Reeves: “media equals real life” and our brains map that way
• Dartmouth Anne Krendl: fMRI machine shows viewers brains “caught” the emotions of a Clint Eastwood character
• Mbemba Jabbi fMRI research in 2008: “Reading a book and viewing a movie can both make us feel as if we literally feel with the protagonist is going through.” (62)
• This “flight simulator” model is different subtly than the model from Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works (1997) of a “mental file” of ways to respond. Stories don’t give us literal examples to follow (usually) but rather is just sparring partner to practice 
• Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar: heavy fiction readers do have better social skills than nonfiction readers (type of reading is more predictive than IQ)
• Dreams are “night stories”
• Francis Crick: we dream to forget (proved wrong)
• Owen Flanagan: dreams are like your stomach growling, a byproduct: dreaming is like pooping, a byproduct of a necessary function (mostly proved wrong)
• Michael Jouvet: cats dream, and though he was initially overshadowed by Freud, his argument that the dream as practice theory held
• William Dement: “We experience a dream as real because” from the brain‘s perspective, “it is real.”
• We don’t remember all our dreams
• Because we have implicit (and explicit) memory and in the same way we don’t remember all the stories we consume, dreams still are training
• Most dreams are realistic (as dream studies show), we only remember the bizarre ones, and that’s now become a cultural trope but it isn’t statistically true
• Arnold Ludwig’s Price of Greatness (1995): eminent poets and writers are far more likely to have mental disorders than leaders in other fields
• Kuleshev effects: two sequential scenes or elements put together elevate more than any one on its own 

• Hart Crane: most don’t think the skies are “ungoded “
• Dawkins: religion is a virus of the mind
• David Sloan Wilson’s 2002 Darwin’s cathedral: religion made human groups work better
• David Hume: “imaginative resistance” to moral code (we can imagine anything for a story except that what we view as bad is good): we view bad behavior “but storytellers never ask us to approve” 
• Leo Tolstoy: fiction is moralistic
• Charles Baxter: burning down the house
• Motel Laboratory by Jèmeljan Hakemulder. fiction benefits moral and empathy development
• Shelley: poets are the acknowledged legislators of the world
• Markus Appel: fiction TV viewers had more “just-world” beliefs than news watchers
• “Story is the grease and the glue of society,” he wrote. “Story is the center without which the rest cannot hold”
• Fiction appears to be better at convincing than nonfiction, even though that is its expressed purpose 
• Green and Brock: entering fictional worlds “radically alters the way information is processed” — absorbed readers ignore “false notes” and can be consumed or changed in way they aren’t when consuming nonfiction 
• Prophetically one of the books burned by the Nazis in 1933 was the 1821 play Almansar, which has the famous line “where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.”
• David Carr’s 2008 in The Night of the Gun: “People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived” 
• “A life story is an intensely useful fiction”
• Lauren French: how people remember their “flashbulb memories” are much less accurate than they think they were
• In our minds, the future is a probabilistic simulation and the past is a probabilistic recreation, pieced together and highly subjective to error — neither are hard fact no matter how clear the story is in your mind
• Lake Woebegone effect: in many ways most of us think we are above average in way more skills than is mathematically possible
• Shelley Taylor: a healthy mind tells itself flattering lies
• EM Forster. Characters must be round not flat
• Reality TV is fiction that gets its lies “in the editing room, not the writing room” (186)
• RPG and LARP s future of story
• Edward Castronova: exodus to the virtual world argued m we are in the Mozart of the largest migration of human history to digital world 
• Brian Boyd: “mental diabetes epidemic”