The storytelling animal How stories make us human

Review by Choice Review

A frequent contributor to Psychology Today, Nature, and Science, Gottschall (English, Washington and Jefferson College) draws on the fields of biology, psychology, and neuroscience, among others, in his exploration of why humans are so attracted to stories. Author of several other books and articles on related subjects, and meticulous documenter of his source material, Gottschall clearly has the credentials to explore his chosen subject. He expertly interweaves concepts from cognitive science, literary studies, and folklore with examples from popular culture and high art. Always coming back to the question of why stories are such an integral part of being human, he delves into a number of related mysteries, such as why children's invented games are so preoccupied with danger and violence, and why, in absence of facts, human animals unknowingly invent information to fill the gaps. This book will captivate a wide audience, from those studying literature and folklore to casual readers with an interest in how the brain shapes human behavior. Gottschall's lively style will put all readers at ease. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All collections. P. A. Riggle Truman State University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

WE love a good story. Narrative is stitched intrinsically into the fabric of human psychology. But why? Is it all just fun and games, or does storytelling serve a biological function? These questions animate "The Storytelling Animal," a jaunty, insightful new book by Jonathan Gottschall, who draws from disparate corners of history and science to celebrate our compulsion to storify everything around us. There are several surprises about stories. The first is that we spend a great deal of time in fictional worlds, whether in daydreams, novels, confabulations or life narratives. When all is tallied up, the decades we spend in the realm of fantasy outstrip the time we spend in the real world. As Gottschall puts it, "Neverland is our evolutionary niche, our special habitat." A second surprise: The dominant themes of story aren't what we might assume them to be. Consider the plotlines found in children's playtime, daydreams and novels. The narratives can't be explained away as escapism to a more blissful reality, if that were their purpose, they would contain more pleasure. Instead, they're horrorscapes. They bubble with conflict and struggle. The plots are missing all the real-life boring bits, and what remains is an unrealistically dense collection of trouble. Trouble, Gottschall argues, is the universal grammar of stories. The same applies to our nighttime hallucinations. If you've ever wanted your dreams to come true, let's hope you don't mean your literal nocturnal dreams. These overflow with discord and violence. When researchers pick apart the hours of dream content, it turns out dreamland is all about fight or flight. What do these observations reveal about the function of story? First, they give credence to the supposition that story's job is to simulate potential situations. Neuroscience has long recognized that emulation of the future is one of the main businesses intelligent brains invest in. By learning the rules of the world and simulating outcomes in the service of decision making, brains can play out events without the risk and expense of attempting them physically. As the philosopher Karl Popper wrote, simulation of the future allows "our hypotheses to die in our stead." Clever animals don't want to engage in the expensive and potentially fatal game of physically testing every action to discover its consequences. That's what story is good for. The production and scrutiny of counterfactuals (colloquially known as "what ifs") is an optimal way to test and refine one's behavior. But storytelling may run even deeper than that. Remember, in "Star Wars," when Luke Skywalker precisely aims his proton torpedoes into the vent shaft of the Death Star? Of course you do. It's memorable because it's the climax of a grand story about good triumphing over evil. (You'd be less likely to recall a moment in which a protagonist files her nails while discussing her day.) More important, Luke's scene provides a good analogy: It's not easy to infect the brain of another person with an idea; it can be accomplished only by hitting the small exposed hole in the system. For the brain, that hole is story-shaped. As anyone who teaches realizes, most information bounces off with little impression and no recollection. Good professors and statesmen know the indispensable potency of story. This is not a new observation, but nowadays we have a better understanding of why it's true. Changing the brain requires the correct neurotransmitters, and those are especially in attendance when a person is curious, is predicting what will happen next and is emotionally engaged. Hence successful religious texts are not written as nonfiction arguments or bulleted lists of claims. They are stories. Stories about burning bushes, whales, sons, lovers, betrayals and rivalries. Story not only sticks, it mesmerizes. This is why WWE wrestling thrives on fake but exciting plotlines, why there are so many hours poured into prefight boxing hype, and why there are stirring back stories included in all the profiles of Olympic athletes. But not all stories are created equal. Gottschall points out that for a story to work, it has to possess a particular morality. To capture and influence, it can't be plagued with moral repugnance - involving, say, a sexual love story between a mother and her son, or a good guy who becomes crippled and a bad guy who profits handsomely. If the narrative doesn't contain the suitable kind of virtue, brains don't absorb it. The story torpedo misses the exposed brain vent. (There are exceptions, Gottschall allows, but they only prove the rule.) This leads to the suggestion that story's role is "intensely moralistic." Stories serve the biological function of encouraging pro-social behavior. Across cultures, stories instruct a version of the following: If we are honest and play by the social rules, we reap the rewards of the protagonist; if we break the rules, we earn the punishment accorded to the bad guy. The theory is that this urge to produce and consume moralistic stories is hard-wired into us, and this helps bind society together. It's a group-level adaptation. As such, stories are as important as genes. They're not time wasters; they're evolutionary innovations. Gottschall highlights this social-binding property in the stories nations tell about themselves. Full of inaccuracies, these are "mostly fiction, not history," he writes. They accomplish the same evolutionary function as religion: defining groups, coordinating behavior and suppressing selfishness in favor of cooperation. Our national myths "tell us that not only are we the good guys," Gottschall writes, "but we are the smartest, boldest, best guys that ever were." Unlike W. H. Auden, who worried that "poetry makes nothing happen," Gottschall, who teaches English at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, feels certain that fiction can change the world. Consider the influence of Wagner's operas on Hitler's self-vision, or the effect of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" on American opinion and culture. "Research shows that story is constantly nibbling and kneading us," Gottschall writes. "If the research is correct, fiction is one of the primary sculpting forces of individuals and societies." Recent fare like "The Shallows" and "The Dumbest Generation" lament our descent into the end of literature. But not so fast, Gottschail says: storytelling is neither dead nor dying. As for the attention-demanding novel? "Rumors of its demise are exaggerated to the point of absurdity," he writes. "In the United States alone, a new novel is published every hour. Some . . . extend their cultural reach by being turned into films." Beyond books, the strong skeleton of story can be discerned clearly in media including video games and scripted "reality" television. This is why libraries aren't likely to go away, Gottschall suggests. They may change in character; they may even transform into habitats for massively multiplayer online role-playing games. But they won't disappear. The medium of story is changing, in other words, but not its essence. Our inborn thirst for narrative means that story - its power, purpose and relevance - will endure as long as the human animal does. When all is tallied up, the time we spend in the realm of fiction far exceeds the time we spend in the real world. David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine, writes fiction and nonfiction. His latest books are "Sum" and "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 5, 2012]

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This at times cloying and circular extended essay-parts sociology, anthropology, psychology, and literary criticism-seeks to answer one of those sticky questions about human nature: why do we have a fundamental need for story? For Gottschall, who teaches English at Washington & Jefferson College, story serves an evolutionary purpose; it's hard-wired into our brains. Story creation, like dreaming, helps us judge wrongdoing. It is also how we "practice the human skills of social life"-even if we don't consciously remember the story and its lessons. Gottschall interprets "story" broadly: even the vagaries of memory are a form of fictionalization: false memories show how one's past, like one's future, is a realm of fantasy for which we are hard-wired. But Gottschall's evolutionary argument is circular: we are hard-wired for fiction because it is good for us; and we are drawn to fiction because our brains are wired for it. Yet if the argument and approach are scattershot, the writing can be engaging. 74 photos. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Gottschall (English, Washington & Jefferson Coll..; Literature, Science, and a New Humanities) views narrative in terms of evolutionary biology in this insightful consideration of all things story. Witty and admirably self-restrained in examining arguably overimaginative storytellers and interpreters from Freud to 9/11 "Truthers" to James Frey, Gotschall suggests that individual story fixations are driven less by unconscious mysteries and more by an innate need to share, problem-solve, and have fun. While he predictably discusses stories from a variety of religions, his analytical observations about young girls at play, the codes of World Wrestling Federation performance, the ritualized arcs of reality TV, and the Lake Woebegone principle-we all think we are above average-are unconventional, entertaining, and instructive. Although the result is a collection of wide-ranging samples that do not altogether cohere, this effect is well suited to a book more concerned with stories than story. The work complements such emergent popularizations of neuroscience as Jonah Lehrer's equally anecdotal How We Decide. VERDICT Although this will interest neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, and cognitive psychologists looking for creative takes on their complex research, it will mainly appeal to a general readership with a literary bent. Recommended but not essential. [See Prepub Alert, 11/3/11.]-Scott H. Silverman, Earlham Coll. Lib., Richmond, IN (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, 2008, etc.) knows that any book about telling stories must be well-written and engaging, and his snapshots of the worlds of psychology, sleep research and virtual reality are larded with sharp anecdotes and jargon-free summaries of current research. His thesis is that humans' capacity to tell stories isn't just a curious aspect of our genetic makeup but an essential part of our being: We tell stories--in fiction, in daydreams, in nightmares--as ways to understand and work through conflicts, the better to be prepared when those conflicts arise in reality. To that end, novels are usually "problem stories" that have strong moral underpinnings. That also helps explain why there are so many fake memoirs, he argues--the instinct to give a conflict-and-resolution arc to stories leads many memoirists to tweak (and even invent) details to fit the pattern. Gottschall uses research into mental illness as a way to explore the intensity of our narrative urge, and he explores how imagined characters can have a real-life impact. (Consider Hitler's obsession with Wagner operas, or the influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin on abolition.) Though novels may change or become less popular, writes the author, the instinct for story is deathless, and his closing pages explore recent phenomena like live-action role-playing and massive multiplayer games for hints of what future storytelling will become. Is World of Warcraft better or worse for our brains than novels? Is violent storytelling a cause for concern? The author discusses such concerns only glancingly. For him, one kind of storytelling is largely as good as any other, but he convincingly argues that story goes on. Gottschall brings a light touch to knotty psychological matters, and he's a fine storyteller himself.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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PREFACE Statisticians agree that if they could only catch some immortal monkeys, lock them up in a room with a typewriter, and get them to furiously thwack keys for a long, long time, the monkeys would eventually flail out a perfect reproduction of Hamlet --with every period and comma and "'sblood" in its proper place. It is important that the monkeys be immortal: statisticians admit that it will take a very long time.    Others are skeptical. In 2003, researchers from Plymouth University in England arranged a pilot test of the so-called infinite monkey theory--"pilot" because we still don't have the troops of deathless supermonkeys or the infinite time horizon required for a decisive test. But these researchers did have an old computer, and they did have six Sulawesi crested macaques. They put the machine in the monkeys' cage and closed the door.    The monkeys stared at the computer. They crowded it, murmuring. They caressed it with their palms. They tried to kill it with rocks. They squatted over the keyboard, tensed, and voided their waste. They picked up the keyboard to see if it tasted good. It didn't, so they hammered it on the ground and screamed. They began poking keys, slowly at first, then faster. The researchers sat back in their chairs and waited.    A whole week went by, and then another, and still the lazy monkeys had not written Hamlet , not even the first scene. But their collaboration had yielded some five pages of text. So the proud researchers folded the pages in a handsome leather binding and posted a copyrighted facsimile of a book called Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare on the Internet . I quote a representative passage:           Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssnaaaaaaaaa           Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaasssssssssssssssssfssssfhgggggggsss           Assfssssssgggggggaaavmlvvssajjjlssssssssssssssssa    The experiment's most notable discovery was that Sulawesi crested macaques greatly prefer the letter s to all other letters in the alphabet, though the full implications of this discovery are not yet known. The zoologist Amy Plowman, the study's lead investigator, concluded soberly, "The work was interesting, but had little scientific value, except to show that 'the infinite monkey theory' is flawed."    In short, it seems that the great dream of every statistician--of one day reading a copy of Hamlet handed over by an immortal supermonkey--is just a fantasy.    But perhaps the tribe of statisticians will be consoled by the literary scholar Jiro Tanaka, who points out that although Hamlet wasn't technically written by a monkey, it was written by a primate, a great ape to be specific. Sometime in the depths of prehistory, Tanaka writes, "a less than infinite assortment of bipedal hominids split off from a not-quite infinite group of chimp-like australopithecines, and then another quite finite band of less hairy primates split off from the first motley crew of biped. And in a very finite amount of time, [one of] these primates did write Hamlet."    And long before any of these primates thought of writing Hamlet or Harlequins or Harry Potter stories--long before these primates could envision writing at all--they thronged around hearth fires trading wild lies about brave tricksters and young lovers, selfless heroes and shrewd hunters, sad chiefs and wise crones, the origin of the sun and the stars, the nature of gods and spirits, and all the rest of it.    Tens of thousands of years ago, when the human mind was young and our numbers were few, we were telling one another stories. And now, tens of thousands of years later, when our species teems across the globe, most of us still hew strongly to myths about the origins of things, and we still thrill to an astonishing multitude of fictions on pages, on stages, and on screens--murder stories, sex stories, war stories, conspiracy stories, true stories and false. We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.    This book is about the primate Homo fictus (fiction man), the great ape with the storytelling mind. You might not realize it, but you are a creature of an imaginative realm called Neverland. Neverland is your home, and before you die, you will spend decades there. If you haven't noticed this before, don't despair: story is for a human as water is for a fish--all-encompassing and not quite palpable. While your body is always fixed at a particular point in space-time, your mind is always free to ramble in lands of make-believe. And it does.    Yet Neverland mostly remains an undiscovered and unmapped country. We do not know why we crave story. We don't know why Neverland exists in the first place. And we don't know exactly how, or even if, our time in Neverland shapes us as individuals and as cultures. In short, nothing so central to the human condition is so incompletely understood. The idea for this book came to me with a song. I was driving down the highway on a brilliant fall day, cheerfully spinning the FM dial. A country music song came on. My usual response to this sort of catastrophe is to slap franticly at my radio in an effort to make the noise stop. But there was something particularly heartfelt in the singer's voice. So, instead of turning the channel, I listened to a song about a young man asking for his sweetheart's hand in marriage. The girl's father makes the young man wait in the living room, where he stares at pictures of a little girl playing Cinderella, riding a bike, and "running through the sprinkler with a big popsicle grin / Dancing with her dad, looking up at him." The young man suddenly realizes that he is taking something precious from the father: he is stealing Cinderella.    Before the song was over, I was crying so hard that I had to pull off the road. Chuck Wicks's "Stealing Cinderella" captures something universal in the sweet pain of being a father to a daughter and knowing that you won't always be the most important man in her life.    I sat there for a long time feeling sad, but also marveling at how quickly Wicks's small, musical story had melted me--a grown man, and not a weeper--into sheer helplessness. How odd it is, I thought, that a story can sneak up on us on a beautiful autumn day, make us laugh or cry, make us amorous or angry, make our skin shrink around our flesh, alter the way we imagine ourselves and our worlds. How bizarre it is that when we experience a story--whether in a book, a film, or a song--we allow ourselves to be invaded by the teller. The story maker penetrates our skulls and seizes control of our brains. Chuck Wicks was in my head--squatting there in the dark, milking glands, kindling neurons.    This book uses insights from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to try to understand what happened to me on that bright fall day. I'm aware that the very idea of bringing science--with its sleek machines, its cold statistics, its unlovely jargon--into Neverland makes many people nervous. Fictions, fantasies, dreams--these are, to the humanistic imagination, a kind of sacred preserve. They are the last bastion of magic. They are the one place where science cannot--should not--penetrate, reducing ancient mysteries to electrochemical storms in the brain or the timeless warfare among selfish genes. The fear is that if you explain the power of Neverland, you may end up explaining it away. As Wordsworth said, you have to murder in order to dissect. But I disagree.    Consider the ending of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road . McCarthy follows a man and his young son as they walk across a dead world, a "scabland," in search of what they most need to survive: food and human community. I finished the novel flopped in a square of sunlight on my living room carpet, the way I often read as a boy. I closed the book and trembled for the man and the boy, and for my own short life, and for my whole proud, dumb species.    At the end of The Road , the man is dead, but the boy lives on with a small family of "good guys." The family has a little girl. There is a shard of hope. The boy may yet be a new Adam, and the girl may yet be his Eve. But everything is precarious. The whole ecosystem is dead, and it's not clear whether the people can survive long enough for it to recover. The novel's final paragraph whisks us away from the boy and his new family, and McCarthy takes leave of us with a beautifully ambiguous poem in prose. Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.    What does that mean? Is it a eulogy for a dead world that will never burgeon again with life, or is it a map of the "world in its becoming"? Might the boy still be alive, out in the living woods with the good guys, fishing trout? Or is the boy gone, slaughtered for meat? No science can answer these questions.    But science can help explain why stories like The Road have such power over us. The Storytelling Animal is about the way explorers from the sciences and humanities are using new tools, new ways of thinking, to open up the vast terra incognita of Neverland. It's about the way that stories--from TV commercials to daydreams to the burlesque spectacle of professional wrestling--saturate our lives. It's about deep patterns in the happy mayhem of children's make-believe and what they tell us about story's prehistoric origins. It's about how fiction subtly shapes our beliefs, behaviors, ethics--how it powerfully modifies culture and history. It's about the ancient riddle of the psychotically creative night stories we call dreams. It's about how a set of brain circuits--usually brilliant, sometimes buffoonish--force narrative structure on the chaos of our lives. It's also about fiction's uncertain present and hopeful future. Above all, it's about the deep mysteriousness of story. Why are humans addicted to Neverland? How did we become the storytelling animal?   Excerpted from The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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