Can Science Explain Why We Tell Stories? — Vocabulary
Adam Gopnik
The New Yorker 5/18/2012
(Auto-generated)

"The only way to find out is to do the science," Gottschall says, reasonably enough, and then announces that "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" and that the studies show that therefore people who read a lot of novels have better social and empathetic abilities, are more skillful navigators, than those who don't.†3 more

Gottschall's encouraging thesis is that human beings are natural storytellers—that they can't help telling stories, and that they turn things that aren't really stories into stories because they like narratives so much.†1 more

Writers exist who have tried to alter or revise the "universal grammar in world fiction"—Proust and Joyce, for instance, but "aside from English professors, no one much wants to read them."†

He insists that storytelling is adaptive, on strictly Darwinian terms, but surely this would only have meaning if he could show that there were human-like groups who failed to compete because they didn't trade tales—or even that tribes who told lots of stories did better than tribes that didn't.†

Everything—faith, science, love—needs a story for people to find it plausible.†

But this claim, itself hardly momentous, then opens onto something sadly like a forced march of the platitudes: We all like stories.†

O.K. Anyone in dissent?†

Surely if there were any truth in the notion that reading fiction greatly increased our capacity for empathy then college English departments, which have by far the densest concentration of fiction readers in human history, would be legendary for their absence of back-stabbing, competitive ill-will, factional rage, and egocentric self-promoters; they'd be the one place where disputes are most often quickly and amiably resolved by mutual empathetic engagement.†

"Well, uh, it's sort of, like—it's sort of a fish out of water story..."and then as one pale incident succeeds the next, the tycoons emit a slow burn of polite disbelief and boredom, ending with a forced smile and a we'll-get-back-to-you.†

Surely if there were any truth in the notion that reading fiction greatly increased our capacity for empathy then college English departments, which have by far the densest concentration of fiction readers in human history, would be legendary for their absence of back-stabbing, competitive ill-will, factional rage, and egocentric self-promoters; they'd be the one place where disputes are most often quickly and amiably resolved by mutual empathetic engagement.†

Wilson, for instance, who despised "college professors" and their tastes, tackled the problem of the "boring" modern story at great and lucid length, ending with the intriguing conclusion that each age has its own acceptable boredoms, with Joyce's boredoms being no greater than Sir Walter Scott's.†

"So tell us the story," the suits say after a few minutes of banter and schmooze, and the writer gulps and jumps in.†

Are societies, like that of Europe now, which has mostly rejected religious storytellers, less prosperous and peaceful than ones, like Europe back when, that didn't?†

But—and here's the weirdly special sequel, Relativity II—if you went really, really, really fast, so that you were almost moving at the speed of light, and your friend just stayed in his carriage, time would actually slow down all around you!†

But to think that the invocation of empirical studies on a subject frees one from the job of finding out what the great instinctive psychologists have said about that subject before you got to it is just misguided.†

When we don't have a story we make one up—that's why the juxtapositions of film editing work.†

But—and here's the weirdly special sequel, Relativity II—if you went really, really, really fast, so that you were almost moving at the speed of light, and your friend just stayed in his carriage, time would actually slow down all around you!†

But to think that the invocation of empirical studies on a subject frees one from the job of finding out what the great instinctive psychologists have said about that subject before you got to it is just misguided.

Stories, more even than stars or spectacle, are still the currency of life, or commercial entertainment, and look likely to last longer than the euro.†

Since human groups are roughly three times larger than other primate groups, tactile gossip was no longer enough to produce the opiates that make social existence tolerable, even pleasant, for primates.†