The storytelling animal: Jonathan Gottschall at TEDxFurmanU

this seems like a good way to start once upon a time a man walks into a bar and he sees his best friend sitting over there at a table he walks up to him his best friend is staring down at the

table toop where is this very small man playing this very small piano very beautifully and the hero of our story we'll call him Fred asks his friend oh my gosh he's so little and he's so good

at the piano where did you get him and his friend doesn't even look up from the tabletop he just stares down he says there's a genie out in the alleyway he's giving away wishes and Fred wants some of this so he rushes out to the back of

the bar throws open the door and sure enough there's this huge Splendid Genie standing there in the alleyway and he kind of screws up his courage he says jeie please Grant my wish I'd like a

million bucks and the genie looks at him for a moment then he nods his great head and there's this blinding flash of light in the alleyway and when Fred can open his eyes

again the whole alley is full of the stench and the clamor of a million quacking Ducks not bucks Ducks there's a million of them so there maybe this high on him they're in his face they're

pecking him they're he's got to get away so he gets the door to the bar open again he runs inside he's got his cloud of ducks following after him and he yells to his friend he says can you

believe that stupid Genie I asked him for a million bucks he gave me a million ducks and his friend finally looks up from the tabletop and he's got this single tear rolling down his face he

says yeah do you really think I asked the genie for a Pianist that was 12 in long so that's kind of a it's kind of a lame joke an old joke but I have a point

about it the point is that a joke is a story when we tell each other jokes we're telling each other these small funny stories you go see a standup comedian you're going to see a a

virtuoso oral story performer and I think it's this great example jokes of the way that story infiltrates just about everything that people do but in

ways that we are hardly aware of I wrote a book about this called the storytelling animal and the book gets in on this

ancient simple debate and the de the debate is what is a human being what is it what is it that most sets our species

apart from the rest of creation and when you call the species Homo Sapien that's an argument the argument is that it's our sapients it's our intelligence it's our big human brains that most sets us

apart but other scientists other philosophers say no really we're not all that reasonable all that logical most of the time really it's our upright posture it's our opposable thumbs it's how

sophisticated our cultures are how sophisticated our languages and I'm not here to argue against any of that these things are all important I'm just saying that one thing of equal stature is left

off this list and that's the way that human beings live their lives inside stories so homo sapien that's a pretty good definition for the species but

homopus fiction man that's about equally accurate man is a storytelling animal let me give you a little sense for what

I mean it's the 1940s there's these two psychologists named Haider and siml and they create this very short very crude

animated film and they show it to 120 people I'll let it run uh while we talk they show it to 120 people at the end they asked them a very simple question

what did you see and at the end only three of those 120 people gave a truly reasonable

rational straightforward response what did I see I saw triangles circles moving around on a blank screen that's all I

saw I saw geometry everyone else 117 out of 120 they see a story they see a little soap opera they see a little romance a little

comedy a little epic a little tragedy and it's this wonderful illustration this experiment has been replicated many many times by now it's this wonderful

illustration of the storytelling mind at work it's not only that your mind is capable of taking these raw crude

geometrical cues and turning them into a rich confident story it's that most of us can't not do it we simply can't help

ourselves we do it automatically reflexively without even trying and what's also important is if you ask those 120 people What story did you see they all see different stories it's a

tremendous amount of diversity that's important because what it shows us is that when you view this little this little film you're not experiencing

fiction you're not consuming fiction you're the one who's creating the fiction and you're doing it effortlessly and on the fly now of course the point has nothing

to do with how your mind responds to simple animation the point is that this is what we are doing all the time every day in

our lives we are trying to impose the order of story structure on the chaos of existence so we all know the story of

Peter Pan he's the boy who won't grow up he's the one who will not leave the Land of Make Believe behind but we're all a lot more like Peter Pan then we know we

never really leave the land of fun imaginative simulation the Land of Make Believe We just change how we do it so instead of making up our little pretend scenarios and playing them out like we

do when we are kids as we get older we increasingly enter into pretend scenarios created by other people novels films short stories these are all

provinces of Neverland we're just addicted to these things the average American through this screen alone through the television screen is getting more than 4 hours of

Storytelling per day means we're just addicted to news stories and sports stories and sex stories and murder

stories and the interactive stories of video games which are really cool and allow you to become the rock jawed hero of the action film and there are reality

stories this is one of the jackasses from Jersey Shore uh there's commercial stories there's the holy stories that are at the center

of all of the world's religious Traditions there's the stories that we get from Stone that artists tell us in

stone or in song or in paint or in human movement and of course there's the stories of dreams we go to sleep at night but not our brains they stay up all night long telling themselves stories we wake up in the morning we

keep daydreaming we have these little films that play in our head head where all of our sick little fantasies uh come true and of course story is the fabric of our social lives it's what human

social interaction largely consists of what do you do when you get together with your friends you sit down you trade stories from your life back and forth over the beer over the coffee you gossip

tell stories about other people so you get my point the point is that human beings live inside a storm of Stories We Live in stories all day long

we dream in stories all night long story is how we communicate with each other it's how we connect with each other it's how we learn it's how we think and without story to organize your

experience on Earth you'd experience your life as a blooming buzzing confusion it would be all Sound and Fury it would signify

nothing stories ubiquitous stories powerful nothing in Human Experience rivets atten hooks human attention holds human attention like a story but I want to

Pivot a little bit now and ask why what are this what are some of the sources of this power and to get some insight into this I want to watch another film so I

want you to First imagine that it's 1896 and you're living in Paris and you're going to see something that you've heard about but you've never

actually witnessed and you walk out of these hot bright streets into this cool dark theater and you sit down in a chair much like the chair you're sitting in now and you

uh look up at a screen that is much like the screen you're looking at now and at some point the screen just erupts in light and it's like this window has been ripped open on an alternative world and

what you see in that window terrifies you you're at one of the world's first public film screenings and we're going to watch this film now it's from 1896 it's a Lumiere

Brothers It's called the arrival of the CR but I want you to brace yourself because arguably this is the world's first horror film

okay nothing happens a train shows up at a station and a bunch of people in funny clothes Mill around that's it so none of you were terrified I didn't see anybody

gasp or scream but according to film lore the original audience for this film was so scared they leapt up out of their seats and stampeded for the back of the theater they didn't want to get run over

by that train now unfortunately film historians have sort of reigned on this parade they're not really sure it happened this way they think the story

is maybe a little bit exaggerated but whether the story is true or false doesn't really matter for our purposes what's important is what the story is trying to convey it's saying that that original Parisian audience those people

were Rubes they were highly unsophisticated about the illusion of film but nowadays after 100 years we're all very sophisticated about film and

movie trains don't scare us anymore but is that actually true not so fast let's look at one more clip this is from the horror movie franchise Paranormal

Activity it's a superb ad campaign because it not only puts the shows you what's happening on the screen it turns the camera around and it shows you what's happening in the audience

what's going on here you know movie trains aren't supposed to scare us anymore so seriously what's going on these people are not not idiots this is not their first movie they know that

blood isn't real they know there's no goblins or monsters in the theater they know everything they're seeing is just flickers of light on a two-dimensional background so why are these people treating these fake things things they

know are fake as though they're real and the Neuroscience of the brain on story gives us a bit of insight into this you can slide a person into an fmri

machine and the Machine will read the brain as the brain is reading a story it can watch the brain while the brain is watching a story and one of the cool things that come out of this research is

that the brain looks less your brain looks less like a spectator on the action than it does a participant so if Clint Eastwood is up there on screen and he's angry your

brain looks angry too if the scene is sad your brain looks sad too not like you're sitting back passively and watching someone else get angry or sad but you are actually experiencing the

emotions yourself and you see that in the Paranormal Activity clip these people are treating fake things as real they're dancing around in their seat to avoid the knife they're screaming why do

people scream they scream for help I like it when they pull in their elbows and scrunch in their knees you know they're balling up to protect their vital organs their brains are instructing

their bodies to do all of the things that they would do if they were actually under mortal attack so story is so powerful for us at least in part because

at a neur logical level whatever is happening on the page or on the stage isn't just happening to them it's happening to us as well we know it's fake we totally know it's fake but that

doesn't stop unconscious parts of the brain from processing what we're seeing as though it's real so what are some of the implications of this of the way that we

spend our lives huge hunks of Our Lives marinating ourselves in these authentic simulations of human experience these fictions I think there's a lot of implications to

this we'll just talk about one so if I'm in my English class and I ask my students hey you know have you ever thought about this it's kind of weird that people like stories so much why do

we care so much especially about fiction about the fake struggles of fake people why is that interesting to us and mostly the students have never thought about it before and they scratched their heads a little bit but they always come up with

the same answer someone them will hesitantly raise their hand and they'll say well it's escapism it's escapism my life is hard but Storyland is easy I

go into Storyland I get this little vacation from the struggles of my life I have a nice time doing it I walk away unscathed unchanged but if we think that we're

wrong for more than a decade now this studies coming out of the psycho psychology lab are showing that the stories we consume shape us profoundly

they shape our attitudes our beliefs our behaviors just just one piece of evidence from this rather large research program you get a bunch of people in a

psych lab and you show them episodes of a TV show like Will and Grace a TV show that treats homosexuals and homosexuality in a non-judgmental way

you can measure people's attitudes and they reliably move in the same non-judgmental direction and if a lot of us watch shows with likable gay

characters shows like mod family and Will and Grace and Glee and so on and so forth then you can have a mover of massive social

change so American attitudes towards homosexuality have been liberalizing with dizzying speed and social scientists give TV a lot of the credit they have even have a

name for the liberalizing trend it's been called the Will and Grace effect so as I sum up I want to leave you with with two of my favorite images

of the storytelling animal in action first one you'll remember from earlier in the presentation these are Kung San Bushman from 1947 the Storyteller is there in the middle he's got his arms up in the

air he's like a wizard he's like a conductor he is orchestrating all of the feelings in these people's hearts all the thoughts in their heads he's brought his people together skin up against skin

mind up against mind he's wielding enormous power and he's doing so only with the most basic simple human toolkit

he's got his hands his expressive hands his expressive face and his story and I don't have anything smart to say about this I just think it's quite wonderful

that this is the kind of animal that we were and it is the kind of animal we still are an animal that helplessly needs stories in the best times and the

worst times so these are storytelling animals from London during the blitz they're living in a time of real fear and privation real danger and yet here they

are picking through the bombed out remains of this library in search of the Solace of story thanks very much