The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

Jonathan Gottschall, “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012, 199 pp.

Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Gottschall tells us what it means to be a storytelling animal. Did you know that the more absorbed you are in a story, the more it changes your behavior? That all children act out the same kinds of stories, whether they grow up in a slum or a suburb? That people who read more fiction are more empathetic?  Humans live in landscapes of make-believe. We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives (think OJ). Yet the world of story has long remained an undiscovered and unmapped country. It’s easy to say that humans are “wired” for story, but why?

Gottschall argues that stories help us navigate life’s complex social problems—just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult situations. Storytelling has evolved, like other behaviors, to ensure our survival.  Of course, our story instinct has a darker side. It makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, advertisements, and narratives about ourselves that are more based on a true story than really true. The Storytelling Animal reveals how stories shape us.  Stories engage our emotions; pie-charts not so much.  For instance: What to do if the accelerator sticks on your car?  It's best if you have reviewed this in your mind before it really happens with no preparation like it did to me.

My Notes:

Pg. xivff:  We are, as a species, addicted to story.  Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.  According to a 2009 survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American reads for just over twenty minutes per day, and that figure includes everything from novels to newspapers.  The page has been supplemented by the screen.  The average American spends several hours each day watching television programs, movies, etc.  Americans spend about nineteen hundred hours per year awash in the glow of television and movie screens (that’s five hours a day).

Pg. 41f:  The idea that gender has deep biological roots is something almost everyone accepts these days but still avoids saying in polite company.  It sounds too much like a limit on human potential, especially on the potential of women to move into positions of cultural equality.  But the spectacular changes in women’s lives over the past half-century—driven largely by the way that cheap and reliable contraception has given women control of their fertility—should allay our fears.  Nevertheless, sex differences in children’s play reflect the fact that biological evolution is slow, while cultural evolution is fast.  Evolution hasn’t caught up with the rapid changes in men’s and women’s lives that have occurred mainly in the past one hundred years.  Children’s play (when left to themselves) still seems to be preparing girls for lives beside the hearth and preparing boys for lives of action in the world.  This is the basic division of labor—men doing the hunting and fighting and women doing most of the foraging and parenting—that has characterized human life over tens of thousands of years.  Anthropologists have never found a culture where women do the lion’s share of fighting or men do most of the child care.

Pg. 52:  Fiction—from children’s make-believe to folktales to modern drama—is about trouble.  In life, conflict often carries a negative connotation, yet in fiction, be it comic or tragic, dramatic conflict is fundamental because in literature only trouble is interesting.  Stories are the flight simulators of human social life.  Just as flight simulators allow pilots to train safely, stories safely train us for the big challenges of the social world.   And like a flight simulator, the main virtue of fiction is that we have a rich experience and don’t die at the end. 

Pg. 67:  Fiction is a powerful and ancient virtual reality technology that simulates the big dilemmas of human life.  When we pick up a book or turn on the TV, we are teleported into a parallel universe.  We identify so closely with the struggles of the protagonists that we don’t just sympathize with them, we strongly empathize with them.  We feel their happiness and their desire and fear; our brains rev up as though what is happening to them is actually happening to us.  The constant firing of our neurons in response to fictional stimuli strengthens and refines the neural pathways that lead to skillful navigation of life’s problems.  We are attracted to fiction not because of an evolutionary glitch, but because fiction is, on the whole, good for us.  And we don’t stop simulating when we go to sleep.  

Pg. 76:  Dreaming is not limited to humans but is widespread in other animals.  REM, dreams, and the brain blockades that paralyze movement when asleep and makes dreaming safe have apparently been conserved across widely differing species, suggesting that dreams have value.

Pg. 80:  Studies reveal that an average person has three REM dreams per night and about 1,2000 REM dreams per year.  It is estimated that 860 of these 1,200 dreams feature at least one threatening event.  A conservative estimate, accounting only for REM dreams would suggest that we dream in a vivid and story-like way for about two hours per night.

Pg. 92:  Mental illness is prevalent in writers of fiction, fiction writers are fully ten times more likely to be bipolar than the general population.  It is hard to avoid the conclusion that most of the canon of Western culture was produced by people with a touch of madness.  

Pg. 96:  In the days before fMRI machines, split-brain patients were a boon to neuroscience.  Through studies of these people, it was determined that the left brain is specialized for tasks such as speaking, thinking, and generating hypotheses.  The right brain is incapable of speech or serious cognitive work; its jobs include recognizing faces, focusing attention, and controlling visual-motor tasks.

Pg. 102:  The storytelling mind is a crucial evolutionary adaptation.  It allows us to experience our lives as coherent, orderly, and meaningful.  It is what makes life more than a blooming, buzzing confusion.  The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence.  It is addicted to meaning.  If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them.  In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.  The human mind is tuned to detect patterns, and it is biased toward false positives rather than false negatives.  The same mental software that makes us very alert to human faces and figures causes us to see animals in clouds.  Our hunger for meaningful patterns translates into a hunger for story. 

Pg. 147:  Many stories that have had a huge influence on our culture:  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, D.W. Griffiths 1955 “The Birth of a Nation,” the 1975 movie “Jaws.”  Then there is “A Christmas Carol,” “The Iliad” that gave Alexander a thirst for glory, Orwell’s “1984,”  “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and on and on.

Pg. 151f:  When we read nonfiction, we are critical and skeptical.  But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard.  We are moved emotionally, and this seems to leave us defenseless.

Pg. 163:  We really do vividly remember the big and traumatic moments of our lives, but the details of these memories cannot be trusted (beyond the fact that the event happened).  People were asked by researchers immediately after the 1986 Challenger explosions what they had been doing when the Challenger blew up.  When the same people were asked the same question two and a half years later, a quarter of the people could not get one detail the same as they originally reported.  Yet they vividly remembered these now erroneous details.  On average, fewer than half of the details reported in the follow-up questionnaire matched those reported in the original questionnaire.

Pg. 170:  Memory is an unreliable, self-serving historian.  Memories are often pruned and shaped by an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.  We misremember the past in a way that allows us to maintain protagonist status in the stories of our own lives.

After raping and murdering thirty-three boys in the 1970s, John Wayne Gacy said, “I see myself more as a victim than as a perpetrator…I was cheated out of my childhood.”  He complained that the news media were treating him like a bad guy…”