Daily Archives: February 2, 2013
The Storytelling Animal: The Science of How We Came to Live and Breathe Stories
by Maria Popova
Where a third of our entire life goes, or what professional wrestling has to do with War and Peace.
The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser memorably asserted, and Harvard sociobiologist E. O. Wilson recently pointed to the similarity between innovators in art and science, both of whom he called“dreamers and storytellers.” Stories aren’t merely essential to how we understand the world — they are how we understand the world. We weave and seek stories everywhere, fromdata visualization to children’s illustration tocultural hegemony. In The Storytelling Animal, educator and science writer Jonathan Gottschall traces the roots, both evolutionary and sociocultural, of the transfixing grip storytelling has on our hearts and minds, individually and collectively. What emerges is a kind of “unified theory of storytelling,” revealing not only our gift for manufacturing truthiness in the narratives we tell ourselves and others, but also the remarkable capacity of stories — the right kinds of them — to change our shared experience for the better.
Gottschall articulates a familiar mesmerism:
Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds.
One particularly important aspect of storytelling Gottschall touches on is the osmotic balance between the writer’s intention and the reader’s interpretation, something Mortimer Adler argued for decades ago in his eloquent case for marginalia. Gottschall writes:
The writer is not … an all-powerful architect of our reading experience. The writer guides the way we imagine but does not determine it. A film begins with a writer producing a screenplay. But it is the director who brings the screenplay to life, filling in most of the details. So it is with any story. A writer lays down words, but they are inert. They need a catalyst to come to life. The catalyst is the reader’s imagination.
In discussing the extent to which we live in stories, Gottschall puts in concrete terms something most of us suspect — fear, perhaps — on an abstract, intuitive level: the astounding amount of time we spend daydreaming.
Clever scientific studies involving beepers and diaries suggest that an average daydream is about fourteen seconds long and that we have about two thousand of them per day. In other words, we spend about half of our waking hours — one-third of our lives on earth — spinning fantasies. We daydream about the past: things we should have said or done, working through our victories and failures. We daydream about mundane stuff such as imagining different ways of handling conflict at work. But we also daydream in a much more intense, storylike way. We screen films with happy endings in our minds, where all our wishes — vain, aggressive, dirty — come true. And we screen little horror films, too, in which our worst fears are realized.
From War and Peace to pro wrestling, from REM sleep to the “fictional screen media” of commercials, from our small serialized personal stories on Facebook and Twitter to the large cultural stories of religious traditions, The Storytelling Animal dives into what science knows — and what it’s still trying to find out — about our propensity for storytelling to reveal not only the science of story but also its seemingly mystical yet palpably present power.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/05/03/the-storytelling-animal-jonathan-gottschall/
From the Explore blog, dated: May 5, 2012:
“The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. 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 make us rubbery and easy to shape.
But perhaps the most impressive finding is just how fiction shapes us: mainly for the better, not for the worse. Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds. More peculiarly, fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place.”
Jonathan Gottschall, author of the excellent The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, on why fiction is good for you.
http://exp.lore.com/post/22456484228/the-more-deeply-we-are-cast-under-a-storys-spell
How Losing Yourself in a Book Makes You a Better Person
A Dutch study explains the science of ‘getting lost in a book’ and how it makes us more empathetic.
By The Healthline Editorial Team | Published Jan 30, 2013
A novel has the ability to transport us beyond the confines of space and time as we travel with vivid characters through the trials and tribulations that make up their stories.
During the act of reading engaging fiction, we can lose all sense of time. By the final chapter of the right book, we feel changed in our own lives, even if what we’ve read is entirely made up.
Research says that’s because while you’re engaged in fiction—unlike nonfiction—you’re given a safe arena to experience emotions without the need for self-protection. Since the events you’re reading about do not follow you into your own life, you can feel strong emotions freely.
That’s exactly what a new study conducted in the Netherlands reveals about our reading habits and the effect they can have on our psyches. The study, published in PLOS ONE, examines how people experience empathy after reading fiction they find engaging.
The key metric the researchers used is “emotionally transported,” or how deeply connected we are to the story. Previous research has shown that when we read stories about people experiencing specific emotions or events it triggers activity in our brains as if we were right there in the thick of the action.
As Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Styron put it: “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
The Dutch study found that good fiction—the kind that sucks you in with characters you can identify with—can have a lasting effect on a person’s expression of empathy. Bad fiction, the kind you can’t really get into, has exactly the opposite effect.
How the Study Was Conducted
The researchers from VU University in Amsterdam wanted to build on theories regarding how—and to what extent—fictional stories can change our real personalities.
Researchers gathered a total of 163 Dutch students who were compensated with course credit. In two separate tests, the students read either the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” a chapter from Blindness by Jose Saramago, or newspaper reports about the Libyan riots and the nuclear disaster in Japan. These works were chosen so that readers could identify with the main characters and so be transported into the story.
Research subjects each ranked how well they identified with the stories, their level of engagement with the material, and any feelings of empathy they experienced. For the second test, researchers followed up with the students one week after they read the aforementioned stories.
How Fiction Affects Empathy
Empathy, the ability to identify with others, is an important characteristic because while we experience the thoughts, decisions, and emotions of fictional characters we also carry those experiences over to our own lives. Empathy has been proven to increase creativity, work performance, and positive and cooperative behaviors.
Those Dutch students who said they were transported into the fictional stories showed the greatest level of empathy right after reading and for up to a week thereafter. Researchers found that fiction that engages the reader can have a “sleeper effect,” in which the full emotional effects manifest over time.
“The current study has shown that the effects do not present themselves immediately, but the effects are guided by an absolute sleeper effect,” the study concludes. “Theoretically, fictional narratives are more likely to influence behavior over the course of a week rather than directly after the narrative experience because the process of transformation of an individual needs time to unfold.”
Those who read nonfiction stories reported no changes in their levels of empathy.
The most surprising finding is that those participants who read fiction but who weren’t transported into the story had lower levels of empathy overall. It seems the experience left them a little bitter.
So, if you’ve read a book you’re unable to put down, its full effect on your life won’t be immediate, but it will be there and it will be positive. If you read something you don’t care for, it will have the same effect, but in reverse.
The Final Word
Whether you’re reading Where the Wild Things Are or Into the Wild, if you enjoy the story, you’ll become a better person for longer than you realize.
In the immortal words of Dr. Seuss: “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” Happy reading.
— Brian Krans
(author of the novels A Constant Suicide and Freeze Tag on the Highway)
http://www.healthline.com/health-blogs/healthline-connects/reading-fiction-increases-empathy-013013
ELA in the middle 