Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to venture into the vault, this time for an
Speaker 1: episode from August of This was an episode that I
Speaker 1: really enjoyed where we got to talk about some of
Speaker 1: the weirder grim fairy tales if I recall, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: just like, how counterintuitive does a narrative need to be
Speaker 1: to really work as a myth or a fairy tale?
Speaker 1: And then at what point did it does it become
Speaker 1: too convoluted to really have any staying power in the
Speaker 1: in our zide geist. Uh? Yeah, it was a really
Speaker 1: fun discussion. Now. I remember after this episode, I really
Speaker 1: really wanted us to get in our T shirt store
Speaker 1: online to get like a mock up of a cover
Speaker 1: for what would be basically Walt Disney's The Donkey Cabbage Is. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know what would that look like as a Disney poster?
Speaker 1: And we never got to make that happen. But hey,
Speaker 1: if you're an artist out there, especially if you're in
Speaker 1: I don't know, ooster design or whatever, will you make
Speaker 1: us a Walt Disney's The Donkey Cabbage Is poster or
Speaker 1: VHS box cover. Oh yeah, and by the way, we
Speaker 1: do love listener submitted art. If you're ever inspired to
Speaker 1: create art based in an episode or a vault episode
Speaker 1: that you hear, or if you're inspired to do so
Speaker 1: based on an episode of Invention, feel free to send
Speaker 1: it in. If it all possible, we'll use it on
Speaker 1: like a future Listener mail episode. You know it's the
Speaker 1: landing page art. Yeah, we can't, We can't pay you,
Speaker 1: but you'll get all the credit in the Listener Mail episode. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, let's venture once more into the vault.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.
Speaker 1: This might be kind of a strange question, but if
Speaker 1: I forced you to tell me the whole story Cinderella
Speaker 1: on Command, do you think you could tell me that
Speaker 1: folk tale? All right, it's not one of my favorite
Speaker 1: folk tales, but I believe it goes something like this,
Speaker 1: poor lady puts on a magic shoe and becomes a
Speaker 1: rich lady. Uh, the end you have? You have missed
Speaker 1: some key elements, but I bet you could do it.
Speaker 1: Come on you you know the story of Cinderella. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so there's some magic mice in there that that talk
Speaker 1: and have engaged in some some comic mischief with a cat. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's an evil stepmother. Uh. They're evil step sisters. And
Speaker 1: I believe in the more uh, you know, classic versions
Speaker 1: of the tale, the non Disney versions, there's a little
Speaker 1: bit of like nasty uh torture revenge at the end. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of foot cutting and stuff like that
Speaker 1: in the in the classic versions, as told by like
Speaker 1: the brothers Grim and Charles Perrault. Uh. These old classic
Speaker 1: folk tales that were collected hundreds of years ago often
Speaker 1: had very strong, bloody, uh sadistic elements to them, but
Speaker 1: they're also intensely memorable. Yeah. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: it's you know, you get down to its roots. I
Speaker 1: feel like it's a deeply unpleasant story. And then even
Speaker 1: in the Disney version, like Nobody Nobody turns into a dragon.
Speaker 1: There are no monsters. There's you know a little bit
Speaker 1: of magic, but it's it has it has a lot
Speaker 1: to compete with with when it comes to other like
Speaker 1: major uh you know, you know tent poles fairy tales. Well, Robert,
Speaker 1: you are a spoil sport for my examples today. Uh,
Speaker 1: come on, you you know the story of Cinderella. You
Speaker 1: definitely know the story of Rapunzel. That's got some good
Speaker 1: eye gouging and all kinds of hard nous h. But
Speaker 1: what I bet you don't know is the story of
Speaker 1: the donkey cabbage is a k a. The Donkey Lettuce.
Speaker 1: This is true. I was not familiar with this tale
Speaker 1: prior to this recording. Also a story recounted by the
Speaker 1: brothers grim. It's a classic folk tale that that has
Speaker 1: been put into these collections of folk tales, and I
Speaker 1: think maybe I'm going to do the horrible, horrible act
Speaker 1: of trying to tell it from memory. Okay, stop me
Speaker 1: if this is getting on horble, Okay, Donkey cabbages. So
Speaker 1: you've got a young huntsman. He goes out one day
Speaker 1: into the forest and he comes across an old crone
Speaker 1: in the forest, and the old crone is begging for alms.
Speaker 1: So he takes pity on her and he gives her
Speaker 1: what he can afford. And she likes this. She's like, Wow,
Speaker 1: you took pity on me. So I'm gonna give you
Speaker 1: some advice. Up ahead in the forest, you're gonna come
Speaker 1: across a tree that has nine birds in it, and
Speaker 1: those birds are gonna be tearing at a cloak. Now,
Speaker 1: what you need to do is shoot those birds, and
Speaker 1: then one of them will fall dead, and you need
Speaker 1: to take its heart out and eat it. And when
Speaker 1: you eat the heart, every time, every time you wake up,
Speaker 1: after you eat that bird's heart, you will have a
Speaker 1: piece of gold under your pillow. And also hang onto
Speaker 1: that cloak, because by putting it on, you can wish
Speaker 1: yourself into any place and magically appear there. So the
Speaker 1: young huntsman walks a little bit further into the forest.
Speaker 1: Sure enough, he comes across the birds. He shoots into
Speaker 1: the flock of birds, one of them falls dead. He
Speaker 1: takes the cloak from the birds, and he cuts the
Speaker 1: heart out of the dead bird and he eats it.
Speaker 1: So then he goes home. He goes to sleep. Next day.
Speaker 1: Sure enough, there's gold under his pillow, and so he
Speaker 1: waits a while accumulating the wealth, right the sleep wealth,
Speaker 1: until he's got a good collection of gold. And now
Speaker 1: he thinks time to go explore the world. Right, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm young, I've got a magic transportation cloak, and I've
Speaker 1: got gold under my pillow every night. So he goes
Speaker 1: roman all over the place and eventually ends up at
Speaker 1: a castle. At the castle, he sees another ugly old Crone,
Speaker 1: but not the original crone. This is a different crone
Speaker 1: who is in fact a witch. And he sees a
Speaker 1: beautiful young woman, and so he asks to be led
Speaker 1: into the castle where there is a witch who knows
Speaker 1: about his magical items and wants to take them. And
Speaker 1: so the witch gets her beautiful young daughter to seduce
Speaker 1: the huntsman so that they can steal his magical items.
Speaker 1: And so, first of all, the young daughter gets him
Speaker 1: to drink and poisonous draft that the witch has created
Speaker 1: that will cause him to vomit up the bird heart
Speaker 1: that he ate. And so she gets him to drink
Speaker 1: that he vomits up the bird heart. She takes it
Speaker 1: and she eats it, so now she can get the
Speaker 1: Now she can get the gold under the pillow. Second thing,
Speaker 1: the young the young beautiful daughter takes him up on
Speaker 1: the mountains one day by saying, oh, I wish you
Speaker 1: could use that cloak of transportation to take me where
Speaker 1: we can gather some gyms up in the mountains, so
Speaker 1: they travel there together with the use of the magic cloak,
Speaker 1: and then while he is drowsy on the mountain, she
Speaker 1: steals the cloak from him and leaves him there. He
Speaker 1: comes across some giants on the mountain, and the giants
Speaker 1: they discussed whether or not they should kill him, but
Speaker 1: eventually they decide, now we'll just leave him here because
Speaker 1: eventually the clouds will carry him away. So the young
Speaker 1: huntsman gets carried away by the clouds. He ends up
Speaker 1: getting deposited in the field of cabbage is. He's hungry
Speaker 1: and so he eats some of the cabbage. This cabbage
Speaker 1: transforms him into a donkey. He doesn't really like being
Speaker 1: transformed into a donkey, but he eats some other cabbin
Speaker 1: from a nearby field and transforms back into a human.
Speaker 1: He realizes that each of these fields grows cabbage. One
Speaker 1: type of cabbage transforms people into donkeys, the other type
Speaker 1: transforms donkeys into people. So he takes cabbages of both
Speaker 1: kinds and he goes back to the castle. He goes
Speaker 1: to the old witch and tricks her into eating some
Speaker 1: of the bad cabbage that turns you into a donkey.
Speaker 1: The old witch turns into a donkey. He also accidentally
Speaker 1: tricks the maid servant and the young daughter who are
Speaker 1: at the castle also into eating the donkey cabbage, and
Speaker 1: they turn into donkeys. Then he takes the donkeys to
Speaker 1: a miller and he tells the miller to basically tells
Speaker 1: them to mistreat the old donkey and to be nicer
Speaker 1: to the young donkeys. The miller comes back to him
Speaker 1: a little while after that and says, well, your old
Speaker 1: donkey died, and the other two they're not going to
Speaker 1: hang on much longer. But then the huntsman he relents
Speaker 1: from his revenge and he says, you know what, I'll
Speaker 1: transform those donkeys back into people. So he gives them
Speaker 1: the good cabbage that transformed back into humans, and then
Speaker 1: the the which his daughter and he get married and
Speaker 1: they live happily ever after. Well that is quite a story, Joe.
Speaker 1: If it were, I would say it was. It would
Speaker 1: be pretty great if it were. If this was a
Speaker 1: summary of kind of like a freewheeling like randomly generated
Speaker 1: like dungeons and dragons in a series of encounters, you know,
Speaker 1: because it has that kind of vibe to it, Like
Speaker 1: there's just kind of a seeming randomness to it. The magic,
Speaker 1: it feels convoluted, the characters are confusing. The moral message
Speaker 1: of the piece is uh is equally lost on me.
Speaker 1: Um now, I certainly. Well it's sort of a weird
Speaker 1: revenge story. Yeah, but it it really takes this time
Speaker 1: getting there. It's kind of it does kind of feel
Speaker 1: like a winding Goat trail to nowhere. Uh, it's shaggy
Speaker 1: dog story. Yeah. But but at the same time, it
Speaker 1: does remind me of some of I mean, I've had
Speaker 1: this experience with other folk tales before, where you start
Speaker 1: reading it and it seems to be kind of going
Speaker 1: in circles and it's making nonsensical choices. But then I
Speaker 1: often end up reminding myself, well, I'm not encountering this
Speaker 1: story in its original language. I am not a part
Speaker 1: of the culture that that it was the intended. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, listener to the to the tale. Like I've
Speaker 1: had a similar situation watching some of the old Russo
Speaker 1: Finish fairytale epics. Oh, like Jack Frost, the one they
Speaker 1: did on Mystery Science Theater three thousand, which is just
Speaker 1: the best. Yeah, it's one of my favorite episode. It's
Speaker 1: tremendous in the movie itself. That's father measure. I mean,
Speaker 1: the movie is beautiful. I mean that if you challenge
Speaker 1: anyone who has only seen that MST three K episode
Speaker 1: to to look online and find a more pristine, uh
Speaker 1: copy of it, because the footage is just beautiful. It's
Speaker 1: this is a high budget film at the time. But
Speaker 1: the story, yeah, for for for non russo finished viewers,
Speaker 1: I guess it it is confusing and you kind of
Speaker 1: lose track of like what magical piece of magic is
Speaker 1: in play and what's the what's the morality of the
Speaker 1: character turning in like having his head turned into the
Speaker 1: head of a bear and then he he loses the
Speaker 1: head of a bear just for promising to be good
Speaker 1: to the outsider. That story just feels like the hell
Speaker 1: you go to if you get killed in the Tiger
Speaker 1: by a gnome. But it reminds me a bit of
Speaker 1: Donkey Cabbages. Well yeah, so, I guess that the big
Speaker 1: question that we're we've we've led ourselves to at this
Speaker 1: point is like what is what is ultimately the difference?
Speaker 1: What what makes one story Cinderella and one story uh
Speaker 1: Donkey Cabbages and why does Cinderella stick with us, whereas
Speaker 1: donkey cabbage is is just it's just leaking through your
Speaker 1: your fingers almost immediately upon grasping it. Yeah, exactly. I mean,
Speaker 1: one thing is that Cinderella is not just the the
Speaker 1: sort of European tradition grim fairy tale Cinderella. They're Cinderella
Speaker 1: type stories all over the world. This is almost one
Speaker 1: of those those horror stories you know that seems to
Speaker 1: have an ancient prototype that filters into cultures all around
Speaker 1: the world or maybe has parallel development because it's themes
Speaker 1: are so basic. Um, Cinderella is a widely known, widely distributed,
Speaker 1: ineradicable myth. Meanwhile, donkey cabbages is it feels like donkey
Speaker 1: cabbages could disappear from the earth and we would all
Speaker 1: be poorer for having lost donkey cabbages because I kind
Speaker 1: of love donkey cabbages, but nobody not that many people
Speaker 1: would notice it was missing, right, Um, it has not
Speaker 1: penetrated the culture in the same way that the Cinderella
Speaker 1: archetype narrative has. And so the question is why are
Speaker 1: some narratives more successful than others, Like you're saying, what
Speaker 1: makes one story? Uh, the the the narrative equivalent of
Speaker 1: a highly successful insect species and the other one and
Speaker 1: endangered species. Why is donkey cabbages endangered while Cinderella is thriving.
Speaker 1: It would be a shame if we lost donkey cabbages forever,
Speaker 1: But it seems like that's much more plausible of an
Speaker 1: outcome than losing Cinderella. Right, Okay, Well, we'll come back
Speaker 1: to this question in just a minute. First, let's explore
Speaker 1: a related question and see how these two subjects come together.
Speaker 1: This question is why do religions emerge and what makes
Speaker 1: one religion more successful than another in the same way
Speaker 1: that one narrative can be more successful than another. You know,
Speaker 1: we've talked before on the show about all of the
Speaker 1: various psychological and biological explanations that people think may exist
Speaker 1: for the emergence of religions. I think I think it's
Speaker 1: safe to say this is not a subject where there
Speaker 1: is a settled, known answer, But there are some answers
Speaker 1: that seem more plausible than others, right, And I mean,
Speaker 1: you have some answers are certainly models for how it
Speaker 1: could occur. And I am often inclined to think, well,
Speaker 1: it's probably multiple different models at once. Of course, it's
Speaker 1: it's hard to just say that, like, this is the
Speaker 1: equation for religion in human culture. Yeah, there's probably not
Speaker 1: one cause of the emergence of religion, But what are
Speaker 1: the dominant physical, biological, psychological factors that make a religion
Speaker 1: a thing that exists? Why did how did we get
Speaker 1: this way? Now some of you might be wondering what
Speaker 1: you were talking about fairy tales, now you're talking about
Speaker 1: about religion. You know, what is the connection between Cinderella
Speaker 1: and the great religions of the modern world or the
Speaker 1: ancient world or the ancient world? I mean, obviously one
Speaker 1: of the big ones is that there is any religion
Speaker 1: you look at, there is going to be some sort
Speaker 1: of narrative or narratives that they're at the heart of
Speaker 1: its sacred narratives upon which it is based. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: are almost no successful religions that don't have at least
Speaker 1: some strong narrative component in them. And uh, and so
Speaker 1: obviously narrative might might be the common thread between the
Speaker 1: success of folklore and the success of a religion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: religions tend to have heroes. They didn't have villains. They
Speaker 1: they they are stories. That have just taken on a
Speaker 1: grander cultural and personal meaning. So as far as the
Speaker 1: emergence of religion explanation goes that, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of ideas that have been put forward by scholars over
Speaker 1: the years. I know, actually recently, Robert, you talked a
Speaker 1: little bit to Barbara J. King about this at the
Speaker 1: World Science Festival, like what psychological drives and biological drives
Speaker 1: play into the emergence of religion? And I know part
Speaker 1: of her answer had to do with with social cohesion
Speaker 1: and stuff, right, yeah, and in grieving and bereavement and
Speaker 1: sort of the the precursors to grieving and bereavement that
Speaker 1: it can arguably be identified in in certain animals, such
Speaker 1: as some of our closer primate relatives exactly. Another very
Speaker 1: common explanation from evolutionary psychology is the idea of the
Speaker 1: hyperactive agency detection. And we've talked about this on the
Speaker 1: show before, but the basic idea here is that there's
Speaker 1: going to be an evolutionary selection pressure in favor of
Speaker 1: people who are over sensitive about the possibility of detecting agents,
Speaker 1: meaning beings with intentions like animals or other people from
Speaker 1: ambiguous data. So the classic example as you imagine two
Speaker 1: different scenarios. One is you hear a twig breaking in
Speaker 1: the forest at night and you think it's a tiger,
Speaker 1: or you know it's my nemesis, Jeffrey and he's come
Speaker 1: for his revenge, and then you raise your guard and
Speaker 1: try to get yourself out of the situation safely. The
Speaker 1: other scenario is you hear a twig breaking in the
Speaker 1: forest at night and you think it's probably nothing. You
Speaker 1: just keep collecting firewood, and then I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: break some other horror movie sins. You split up, you
Speaker 1: drink some beer, you do all the bad stuff. Those
Speaker 1: are the very people who either are either eaten by
Speaker 1: tigers are killed by Jeffrey. Right, So the people in
Speaker 1: the latter scenario are probably going to be correct more
Speaker 1: often right. More often it's probably nothing, But there's a
Speaker 1: relatively small benefit to being correct. The person in the
Speaker 1: first situation who's afraid hyper aware of what might be
Speaker 1: an animal or a person, some kind of intentional agent.
Speaker 1: They might waste some time and energy being overly cautious,
Speaker 1: but they're less likely to get killed in the off
Speaker 1: chance that they're correct about detecting an agent. And so
Speaker 1: because this person survives more often the genes that put
Speaker 1: them on the hyper active lookout for people or for animals.
Speaker 1: These intentional agents, those genes proliferate in the gene pool
Speaker 1: and this causes us to read intentions into our environment
Speaker 1: at an unusual rate just to be safe. And this
Speaker 1: reading of intentions into all kinds of random phenomena lead
Speaker 1: us to the belief that there actually our minds controlling
Speaker 1: events that we don't understand, in essence to the idea
Speaker 1: of God's So that's one interesting possible explanation. There's also
Speaker 1: like the meme obedience duality, which basically says there's a
Speaker 1: selection advantage for children with brains that tend to tell
Speaker 1: them to believe what adults tell them. You know, if
Speaker 1: you are warned that it's dangerous to leave the camp
Speaker 1: fire at night, more children who believe that warning and
Speaker 1: accepted are going to survive to adulthood. And then pigging
Speaker 1: backing on this, you'd eventually have adults spreading religious memes
Speaker 1: by telling myths, stories, folk tales, and the beneficial belief
Speaker 1: in obedience mechanism that causes children to survive after a
Speaker 1: warning not to leave the firelight also causes them to
Speaker 1: take these stories very seriously, to believe them, to pay
Speaker 1: heed to their values. But whatever the actual biological and
Speaker 1: psychological reasons for the emergence of religion, it leads to
Speaker 1: this question that we asked a minute ago of why
Speaker 1: some religions are more successful than others. I mean, there
Speaker 1: are tons of religions throughout human history that have been
Speaker 1: invented and now they're extinct, and very few people ever
Speaker 1: followed them. Right, So they winted that the ancient Egyptian religion,
Speaker 1: why is it? Why has it not survived in a
Speaker 1: in a real tangible sense in the modern age? Why
Speaker 1: did it not even travel well beyond Egypt in its
Speaker 1: own day? But even it was relatively successful last time.
Speaker 1: I mean, think about all the variations on it, or
Speaker 1: all of the other types of mythologies that got started
Speaker 1: but never really went anywhere. I think of all the
Speaker 1: cults that emerge that we know relatively little about. I
Speaker 1: think of all the heresies that were that were squashed
Speaker 1: out before they could be really take a name beyond
Speaker 1: heresy exactly. I think because you think about how we
Speaker 1: refer to them, we don't even refer to them as religions.
Speaker 1: They were just upstarts that were destroyed by the more
Speaker 1: popular and powerful models of belief exactly. So the question
Speaker 1: we want to look at today is could the variable
Speaker 1: success of new religions have anything to do with the
Speaker 1: question we were asking a minute ago why some folk
Speaker 1: tales and legends are more successful than others, Because, Robert,
Speaker 1: as you mentioned a minute ago, what religions and and
Speaker 1: folklore have in common is narrative. Almost all of the
Speaker 1: world's religions past and present have major narrative elements. They're
Speaker 1: based on stories. Um So, even though there are other
Speaker 1: components to religions, we know there's metaphysical incentives, a sense
Speaker 1: of meaning, social inclusion, and all that stuff. Since the
Speaker 1: narrative element is so common, wouldn't it be reasonable to
Speaker 1: guess that part of what makes a successful religion is
Speaker 1: containing successful stories, the right kind of stories that you know,
Speaker 1: made me feel a little bit good and also makes
Speaker 1: me feel a little bit bad and just the right way. Right,
Speaker 1: A good religious narrative, it hurts so good. Uh So
Speaker 1: this this could be wrong. I mean, maybe a narrative
Speaker 1: is not actually a major element, but I think it's
Speaker 1: a very reasonable starting assumption. And if this is the
Speaker 1: case that the success of a narrative plays into the
Speaker 1: success of a religion? What makes a story that leads
Speaker 1: to a successful faith? Maybe we should take a quick
Speaker 1: break and then explore more when we come back. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So we've asked the question what sort of narrative,
Speaker 1: what kind of story is going to make a religion successful?
Speaker 1: Or just make a story of a fairy tale successful?
Speaker 1: In general? Like, what what are the elements that are
Speaker 1: going to get guarantee that it resonates and remains in
Speaker 1: human culture? Yeah, I guess maybe it makes sense to
Speaker 1: start with narratives and then see how this applies to religions. Um,
Speaker 1: so it's time to explore. Basically, I would say the
Speaker 1: key idea of this episode the idea of what's come
Speaker 1: to be known as minimally counterintuitive elements of belief. Now
Speaker 1: we can't know for sure what makes one religion or
Speaker 1: one story more successful than another, and it is probably
Speaker 1: due to multiple factors rather than just one. But this
Speaker 1: minimally counterintuitive elements paradigm, I think is a really clever answer,
Speaker 1: offering what I guess is an important part of the
Speaker 1: picture of the comparative success of stories. Narratives and belief structures.
Speaker 1: There have been a ton of papers investigating this over
Speaker 1: the years, a lot of studies, but I thought we
Speaker 1: should examine the issue through one one important study from
Speaker 1: the year two thousand six, and that's a paper published
Speaker 1: in Cognitive Science by Aura norn Zion's got A tran
Speaker 1: Jason Faulkner, and Mark Schaller called Memory and Mystery the
Speaker 1: cultural selection of minimally counterintuitive narratives. So I want to
Speaker 1: read a quote from their introduction starts to set the
Speaker 1: scene for why memory would be a relevant issue. Here
Speaker 1: the author's right quote. Of the many ecological and psychological
Speaker 1: factors that influence the extent to which any such narrative
Speaker 1: achieves cultural success, Mnemonic resilience maybe one of the most important.
Speaker 1: Memorability places necessary constraints on the cultural transmission of narratives
Speaker 1: and ideas in oral traditions that characterize most of human
Speaker 1: cultures throughout history. A narrative cannot be transmitted and achieve
Speaker 1: cultural success unless it stands the test of memory. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, in the telephone game of belief, you've
Speaker 1: got to have a core story that is going to
Speaker 1: remain more or less intact with each retelling in each embellishment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I mean part of the problem is that most
Speaker 1: of human history, most people have not had access to
Speaker 1: any recording method for narratives. Most people throughout the history
Speaker 1: of the world have been illiterate and have transmitted stories
Speaker 1: orally by hearing them told and then retelling them to others.
Speaker 1: So if a story cannot be accurately remembered, that story
Speaker 1: doesn't really have much of a chance of survival, right, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm reminded. I want to in one of
Speaker 1: our recent episodes that dealt with writing, I want to
Speaker 1: say there was one description that uh discussed writing as
Speaker 1: an ability to like freeze thought or to in some
Speaker 1: way you have to to to to freeze thought in time,
Speaker 1: And that's exactly what it's doing. When otherwise, Yeah, these
Speaker 1: stories would be perpetually changing. Yeah, and of course I
Speaker 1: think there there is plenty of evidence that stories do
Speaker 1: change through transmission in in oral cultures, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: this happens all the time. Every time you tell the story,
Speaker 1: you make little changes to it, and over time those
Speaker 1: changes accumulate. But how does a story become resilient, How
Speaker 1: do its key elements become set well enough that it
Speaker 1: can survive the sort of changing landscape of of forcing,
Speaker 1: of of being stored in human minds alone and being
Speaker 1: transmitted through human retelling alone. Well, there's the old quote, right,
Speaker 1: it don't mean it's sing if it if it ain't
Speaker 1: got that swing right at this what you know, there's
Speaker 1: gotta be this that, there's gotta be that element that
Speaker 1: just really stands out right. It makes it stick. Um,
Speaker 1: And I think that probably seems like a no brainer
Speaker 1: on the surface, right, Memorable stories are going to resonate
Speaker 1: and survive. I can't help but think of the modern
Speaker 1: elevator pitch idea and all of this. You know, like
Speaker 1: you you're in the elevator. You've got you got two
Speaker 1: sentences sell me on your script. You gotta you gotta
Speaker 1: phrase it in a memorable way. Yeah, so what do
Speaker 1: you say? Say Jaws with pause and they're like, that's brilliant.
Speaker 1: What does that mean? It's like ku jo, I guess
Speaker 1: you know, you took this thing that I was familiar with.
Speaker 1: It's just become mundane in my my world of cinema.
Speaker 1: But you put a twist on it. You put this
Speaker 1: there's there's this new idea and that's what's standing out
Speaker 1: in my mind. Plus it rhymes, well, I would certainly
Speaker 1: not discount the power of rhyming. Rhyming poetry might be
Speaker 1: selected not just because it sounds good, but because it's
Speaker 1: a memory ating device, right, And this can certainly be
Speaker 1: a factor, you know we're talking about Sometimes the fairy
Speaker 1: tale loses something in trent relation. Sometimes it just loses
Speaker 1: the rhyme, Like these are the connections between words that
Speaker 1: make a fanciful story makes sense. But anyway, that the
Speaker 1: broader point here is that the contents of our narratives,
Speaker 1: our folk tales, and our religions are influenced by the
Speaker 1: underlying capabilities and biases of our brains. So just one
Speaker 1: crazy example of this, all other things being equal, you
Speaker 1: probably would not expect a religion that offered a reward
Speaker 1: in the afterlife for good behavior of being thrown into
Speaker 1: an ocean of spiders. And there's a reason for that.
Speaker 1: People have enough of a natural dislike of spiders that
Speaker 1: this type of religion would not be successful. The human
Speaker 1: brain is not fertile soil in which to grow that myth, right,
Speaker 1: it just naturally grows some types of content better than others,
Speaker 1: based on natural predispositions, capabilities, and biases of the brain. Right, So,
Speaker 1: the authors are pushing a hypothesis in this paper about
Speaker 1: one possible relationship between memory cognition and the success of
Speaker 1: narratives like religious myths. They write, quote, we hypothesize that
Speaker 1: narratives combining mostly intuitive concepts with a minority of counterintuitive
Speaker 1: ones enjoy a memory advantage and as a result, achieve
Speaker 1: cultural success. Such a m c I template. An MCI
Speaker 1: stands for minimally counterintuitive, a little bit counterintuitive, not totally counterintuitive.
Speaker 1: Such an MCI template maybe no accident. Indeed, we propose
Speaker 1: that it may be a recipe for cultural success compared
Speaker 1: to narratives that fit other templates, for example, no counterintuitive
Speaker 1: concepts at all, or many counterintuitive concepts. Those that are
Speaker 1: minimally counterintuitive maybe especially memorable, and therefore more likely to
Speaker 1: achieve cultural stability. All Right, So it's not a situation
Speaker 1: where it's like going to the movie, right, the movie
Speaker 1: is not just an accurate depiction of real life. That
Speaker 1: would be so boring. Right, But it's also not just
Speaker 1: so bonkers, that is just complete surrealism, which granted can
Speaker 1: be great. Give but but but it's that middle ground
Speaker 1: that's where you're gonna find the really successful films, right,
Speaker 1: It's where every most everything is pretty mundane, but there's
Speaker 1: there's some element that's out of out of whack, there's
Speaker 1: a mysterious stranger that's not what they seem, you know.
Speaker 1: I often think about how there are there are versions
Speaker 1: of this that work at various levels of narrative that
Speaker 1: contribute to their how aesthetically pleasing they are. One thing
Speaker 1: I think about is the realism of dialogue characters. Sometimes
Speaker 1: people say, I love the way that characters in this
Speaker 1: movie talk how people really talk. The characters in that
Speaker 1: movie did not talk how people really talk. If they
Speaker 1: actually talked how people really talked, you would be so bored.
Speaker 1: You would think the movie was terrible. People do not
Speaker 1: talk in deliverable dialogue that drives a plot. What you
Speaker 1: probably mean is they talked in an unnatural way that
Speaker 1: was just bare really unnatural enough to be interesting, but
Speaker 1: not so unnatural that it felt false, the way bad
Speaker 1: dialogue in a movie often does. And of course it's
Speaker 1: easy to to just to to go to examples that
Speaker 1: have like a specuative element that's thrown in, like everything
Speaker 1: is normal, except one character is magic. But but it
Speaker 1: can also work in other ways to right, where there's
Speaker 1: an inversion of of character, like the you know, the
Speaker 1: village priest is actually evil as opposed to good, and
Speaker 1: you know, whatever the expectation might be like that the
Speaker 1: character that is that is expected to behave in one
Speaker 1: way morally behaves another way. Yeah, aesthetically pleasing narratives are
Speaker 1: surprising enough, but they can't be too surprising otherwise you
Speaker 1: just stop being able to appreciate them as narratives. Right,
Speaker 1: you want to keep with it. It's like they say,
Speaker 1: you want to keep one foot on the ground, right,
Speaker 1: you don't want to keep both feet on the ground.
Speaker 1: And likewise you don't want both feet just floating free.
Speaker 1: So but in this uh, we've been using the idea
Speaker 1: loosely here for a moment. What in the literature itself
Speaker 1: makes a concept intuitive or counterintuitive? And so the author's
Speaker 1: right quote. As several psychologists and anthropologists have noted, the
Speaker 1: key is whether the concept is consistent with or violates
Speaker 1: ontological assumptions about the properties of ordinary objects. So they're
Speaker 1: going with this idea of ontologies, and all that means
Speaker 1: is how things normally work, right. Um. The one trope
Speaker 1: I'm instantly reminded of is just the the with a
Speaker 1: heart of gold trope, you know, because there's she's a
Speaker 1: prostitute with a heart of gold. He's a prostitute with
Speaker 1: a heart of gold. Their assassins with hearts of gold. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know that's the you see that spend time and
Speaker 1: time again, right um? Or one of my favorite recent ones,
Speaker 1: even though I never actually watched the show. I just
Speaker 1: really love the trailers. He's not just a pope, he's
Speaker 1: a young pope. Popes aren't supposed to be young, I know,
Speaker 1: and I want to find out just how young is
Speaker 1: this pope. He's a baby, baby pope. I'd watch baby Pope.
Speaker 1: Actually that's not a bad idea for they had Boss Baby.
Speaker 1: Um what does boss Baby? I don't I don't know,
Speaker 1: I just know it exists. Um. You have that movie
Speaker 1: where the horse played professional football. I don't know what
Speaker 1: you're talking about, Like, was it like Airbud? It was, yeah,
Speaker 1: basically the Airbud trope. Okay, but this was a horse
Speaker 1: that was, due to some sort of loophole and the
Speaker 1: rules was able to play a professional football and maybe
Speaker 1: was college football. So This is not exactly what the
Speaker 1: author noted and talking about, but it's pretty close. So
Speaker 1: they're basically a few different types of intuitive ontologies that
Speaker 1: govern our basic understanding of the world at several levels,
Speaker 1: and the author's list for example, our intuitive theory of physics.
Speaker 1: This is the ontology of our basic understanding of how
Speaker 1: objects and energy work. This is the intuitive theory you
Speaker 1: used to conclude that a brick will sink in water
Speaker 1: and not float, or to conclude that a falling snowflake
Speaker 1: won't land with enough force to pierce a hole in
Speaker 1: your skull. Right, then you've got the intuitive theory of biology,
Speaker 1: and this is our basic understanding of life forms. This
Speaker 1: one will intuitively tell you that trees do not speak French,
Speaker 1: and sharks can't walk up onto the beach and bite
Speaker 1: you off your towel, and snails don't live to be
Speaker 1: thirty seven million years old. And then you've got your
Speaker 1: theory of mind. And this ontology tells you that, for example,
Speaker 1: other people can have both true and false beliefs, and
Speaker 1: they can't read your mind, but they can see where
Speaker 1: you're looking with your eyes, and they can imagine what
Speaker 1: you're thinking based on external clues, And if you break
Speaker 1: any of these theories, you instantly find yourself dealing with
Speaker 1: narrative elements right now. Oh yeah, you break physics, theory
Speaker 1: of physics, and then you have superpowers, you have miracles,
Speaker 1: you you you break the theory of biology and you
Speaker 1: get magical creatures and immortal bodies, and you break theory
Speaker 1: of mind and you get things like psychics. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: almost It's kind of telling, isn't it that anytime you
Speaker 1: come up with an idea of breaking one of these
Speaker 1: intuitive ontologies, you instantly have what sounds like a concept
Speaker 1: for a story. Isn't that odd? Now? The author is
Speaker 1: right that there are some minor cultural differences in how
Speaker 1: these ontologies work, like different cultures sometimes have slightly different
Speaker 1: beliefs about theory of mind or biology. But then again,
Speaker 1: some bottom level elements of these theories appears so early
Speaker 1: in development and are found in so many different cultures
Speaker 1: that it looks like they might be more sort of
Speaker 1: hard coded instincts from primitive parts of the brain more
Speaker 1: so than culturally conditioned belief And the examples that the
Speaker 1: authors give or studies that have found evidence that babies
Speaker 1: as young as four months old already show expectations based
Speaker 1: on some core aspects of our theory of physics. For example,
Speaker 1: they've got the idea of a solid object, and they
Speaker 1: clearly do not expect one solid object to be able
Speaker 1: to pass through another solid object. And they also do
Speaker 1: not expect that a solid object can be in more
Speaker 1: than one place at a time. Yeah, I mean children
Speaker 1: have an innate number sense. Each one is a natural Euclidean,
Speaker 1: born to navigate a three dimensional world of fixed and
Speaker 1: movable objects. The words. We start utilizing geometry before we
Speaker 1: can even name things. We don't understand wall or cap,
Speaker 1: but we already can think in geometric terms. For instance,
Speaker 1: kids will use geometric clues to navigate through rooms, uh
Speaker 1: and uh, And given all the means of navigating their environment,
Speaker 1: they're most likely to use lengths of walls in a
Speaker 1: room to remember where a toy is hidden, rather than
Speaker 1: color or decoration. We're also born within anate understanding of
Speaker 1: basic physical laws. Only adults believe in magic. Well, toddler
Speaker 1: will see right through all of the supernatural. There was
Speaker 1: actually any m my T study that even found out
Speaker 1: that young children understand that teleportation is not feasible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it makes you wonder how much of our
Speaker 1: understanding about the world, like our coded, our coded knowledge
Speaker 1: about how things work is actually instinctual, like a kid
Speaker 1: would know it without ever having to observe anything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like just sort of the basics of gravity, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean that is the environment that we have evolved
Speaker 1: to thrive it. Yeah, that's going to be an interesting
Speaker 1: study when for the first time, when children are brought
Speaker 1: up in space in microgravity environments. Though actually that might
Speaker 1: be a really bad idea because that could disrupt development
Speaker 1: and everything like that. But just assuming it were to
Speaker 1: happen somehow, you'd wonder, would those kids have an intuitive
Speaker 1: understanding of how gravity worked back on Earth? Would it
Speaker 1: be that built in? Also, the authors of this paper
Speaker 1: right that preschool aged kids in most cultures already have
Speaker 1: a common set of biological intuitions. For example, they know
Speaker 1: that making superficial alterations to an animal doesn't alter what
Speaker 1: kind of species it is, So they know that you
Speaker 1: can't just like put a put a carrot on a
Speaker 1: horse's head and make it a unicorn. It's still a horse. Also,
Speaker 1: children from preschool age typically have a basic theory of mind.
Speaker 1: The classic example is understanding that other people can have
Speaker 1: false beliefs. Kind of a profound thing to realize. Do
Speaker 1: you remember realizing that, Robert, I mean it might have
Speaker 1: come from having younger siblings, you know. I feel like
Speaker 1: that that that might be the area where those those
Speaker 1: kind of ideas are initially introduced. You know, where you're
Speaker 1: you're told you're younger sibling does not know not to
Speaker 1: touch this hot surface, you know, and then therefore there
Speaker 1: might be some false belief baked into their understanding of
Speaker 1: their immediate surroundings. Yeah, I wonder well. Anyway, so the
Speaker 1: authors observed that despite how universal or near universal these
Speaker 1: beliefs are, our folk tales and religious mythologies are full
Speaker 1: of stories and images that violate these ontologies. We were
Speaker 1: just talking about this. Anytime you you just say something
Speaker 1: that violates the ontology, immediately it sounds like a story
Speaker 1: and not just like a concept. But you want to
Speaker 1: tell a story about it. Frogs that can talk, people
Speaker 1: that can pass through walls like ghosts, or people who
Speaker 1: can read minds or otherwise have knowledge of that they
Speaker 1: couldn't access. Nasty Old Richmond, who are capable of change
Speaker 1: from Christmas, I can't. I kept thinking of that one
Speaker 1: in the research. You know, Christmas Carol and Scrooge. Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of a Christmas Carol lover. Actually, Oh, I mean,
Speaker 1: you can't help but love it. But I did keep
Speaker 1: thinking of it. You know. It's like, ultimately, is is
Speaker 1: it just this story where the the the one area
Speaker 1: of inversion, the one area that is um that's counterintuitive
Speaker 1: is that Scrooge was capable of turning his life around
Speaker 1: and changing, whereas in many cases reality would seem to
Speaker 1: indicate that it's the opposite with old, nasty, rich people.
Speaker 1: I'm just throwing that out there. I'll probably come back
Speaker 1: to that idea again. Well let's let's get there. I mean,
Speaker 1: so the question is, why do so many popular narratives
Speaker 1: like mythology, folk tales and so forth, why do they
Speaker 1: always violate our ontologies? Why is that just intuitive to
Speaker 1: us at this point that oh, if you say a
Speaker 1: frog that can talk, that's a story. And why do
Speaker 1: almost all of our most popular stories do stuff like that?
Speaker 1: The idea of realistic narratives is actually kind of an
Speaker 1: unusual thing. And in the history of successful folk tales
Speaker 1: and narratives, Yeah, I mean I remember in uh, in
Speaker 1: creative writing classes where you know they would drive home.
Speaker 1: Would just because it really happened doesn't mean it's interesting, right,
Speaker 1: which which is is true. But I think one of
Speaker 1: the most obvious answers would be novelty, right. I mean,
Speaker 1: we we we we create the idea of the black
Speaker 1: swan even before we know what it acts, that it
Speaker 1: actually exists, um and and and mentioning that I'm touching
Speaker 1: on NASA Nicholas Talb's black Swan theory, UM, the idea
Speaker 1: that major black Swan events are the norm uh and
Speaker 1: uh and and also the problem of induction induction here.
Speaker 1: So I wonder if we're drawn to these novel ideas
Speaker 1: because human existence kind of demands that we both move
Speaker 1: forward with expectations based on the known world, but with
Speaker 1: an openness to the possible inversions that shake everything up. So,
Speaker 1: you know, it basically comes back to the tiger in
Speaker 1: the grass and the high grass and when and how
Speaker 1: we're going to judge the sound of a snapping twig. Oh.
Speaker 1: I didn't expect us to come back and make a
Speaker 1: connection between minimally counterintuitive ideas and UH and the hyperactive
Speaker 1: agency detection, but I can see a through line there
Speaker 1: and I also can't you know, I can't help it,
Speaker 1: but think about the the idea that inversions end up
Speaker 1: highlighting the reality. Right, So by having a story in
Speaker 1: which Scrooge is able to turn his life around, it
Speaker 1: just kind of also drives home that most people don't,
Speaker 1: you know, by having somebody that acts heroically, like truly heroically,
Speaker 1: it's kind of a reminded that, well, most people are
Speaker 1: not heroes and would not do this. It's not how
Speaker 1: you see how things could be otherwise that you recognize
Speaker 1: how things are. Yeah, but you have another possible answer here,
Speaker 1: Oh well, yeah. So the authors here are drawing on
Speaker 1: a bunch of research over the years that's indicated a
Speaker 1: couple of things. First of all, there is the indications
Speaker 1: that sometimes it appears that people are better able to
Speaker 1: remember counterintuitive ideas than intuitive ideas. So you tell somebody
Speaker 1: a frog that talks, they'll remember that item better than
Speaker 1: you saying a frog that jumps, right. A frog that
Speaker 1: jumps is not memorable. Right. But then again, in recent
Speaker 1: years before the study, other research has made it clear
Speaker 1: that there there's some pressure coming from the other side
Speaker 1: that while some counterintuitive content makes ideas and narratives more
Speaker 1: transmissible and easier to remember. There's also a limit to
Speaker 1: this benefit. Uh So some examples of this balance, like
Speaker 1: ghosts and spirits are one of the most popular narrative
Speaker 1: subjects in history, but they've basically got the properties of
Speaker 1: a person except somewhat counterintuitive, Like ghosts have the powers
Speaker 1: that humans do not have, like moving through walls, but
Speaker 1: otherwise they behave is quote ordinary intentional agents. Well with ghosts,
Speaker 1: you guys, you can make the argument that, uh, any
Speaker 1: of like the ghostly details, like that's all just fluff.
Speaker 1: The basic mechanics are just it is a person without
Speaker 1: physical substance. Yeah, exactly. Another example the author's site of
Speaker 1: how people tend to limit the counterintuitive features of of
Speaker 1: things they believe in is that research by Barrett and
Speaker 1: Kyle in nineteen found quote people spontaneously anthropomorphize God in
Speaker 1: their reasoning, even if doing so contradicts their stated theological beliefs.
Speaker 1: So while they don't, you know, they don't think that
Speaker 1: God is like a normal person, when they don't remember
Speaker 1: to limit themselves from doing so, they tend to think
Speaker 1: of God as a normal person, but just with great
Speaker 1: supernatural powers. And these types of limits on the wildness
Speaker 1: of supernatural elements also seemed to be present in existing
Speaker 1: cultural narratives. Just one example, an existing study of Ovid's
Speaker 1: metamorphosis from Kelly and Kyle in nineteen eighty five found
Speaker 1: that even though there were a lot of magic transformations
Speaker 1: of people and things, it was much more common to
Speaker 1: transform a person into, say, an animal, than it was
Speaker 1: to transform them into an an inanimate object. That was
Speaker 1: sort of less of a violation of their ontology. But
Speaker 1: this reminds me of the children's books Sylvester in the
Speaker 1: Magic Pebble I wish I may have mentioned on the
Speaker 1: show before. Um it's an award winning children's book about
Speaker 1: a donkey who obtains the magic pebble, and the magic
Speaker 1: pebble allows you to grants your wishes essentially, and the
Speaker 1: donkey ends up being turned into a stone, and then
Speaker 1: the pebble falls and rolls away from him and he
Speaker 1: stuck as the stone. Yeah, it's and it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of a traumatic story to read. It's really good, but
Speaker 1: I remember reading it to my son when he was
Speaker 1: he was really young, and I feel like it was
Speaker 1: difficult to get across this idea that a donkey turned
Speaker 1: into rock not not a rock that looks like a donkey,
Speaker 1: but just a rock that looks like a rock. Whereas
Speaker 1: stories of people turning into animals, donkey, cabbages, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: those make I feel like those were more easily transferred
Speaker 1: to him, you know, like he was able to buy
Speaker 1: into those stories a lot easier. Where this idea of
Speaker 1: the pebble turning the donkey into just a rock, and
Speaker 1: then somehow the rock was still conscious of everything it was.
Speaker 1: It was kind of a confusing magic to try and
Speaker 1: relate it to him. Yeah, I mean, I'm there with you.
Speaker 1: Like turning into a donkey that makes sense. Turning into
Speaker 1: a rock, I don't know. Uh So, The authors write
Speaker 1: how Barrett and Niehoff in two thousand one tested how
Speaker 1: well people could remember and retell stories, and these stories
Speaker 1: were broken down by how much they contained objects or
Speaker 1: ideas in three different categories. You've got intuitive, normal stuff,
Speaker 1: intuitive but bizarre this is weird stuff that doesn't violate ontologies,
Speaker 1: and then counterintuitive stuff that does violate ontologies. And they
Speaker 1: found that after retelling the story through three generations of transmission,
Speaker 1: people remembered and passed on counterintuitive ideas better than simple
Speaker 1: intuitive ones, and after three months, participants could still recall
Speaker 1: minimally counterintuitive elements better than other elements. And this delay
Speaker 1: is an important part because how do stories get passed
Speaker 1: on in the wild. Right When you retell a story
Speaker 1: to somebody, you don't usually tell it right after you
Speaker 1: heard it, Right, You've had some time to ruminate on
Speaker 1: it and embellish it, both intentionally but also just through
Speaker 1: the flaws of our memory systems. Yeah, memory mechanisms. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've talked recently in UH, for example, the Illusory Truth episodes,
Speaker 1: about the ways that we edit our memories just by
Speaker 1: remembering them, right, And these are memories of things that
Speaker 1: actually happened as opposed to stories. I'm reminded of Carl
Speaker 1: Sagan writing about how how quickly an historical account became
Speaker 1: a tale of ancient high magic, like while the actual
Speaker 1: historic individuals were still alive. Yeah, that came up in
Speaker 1: the story. I don't remember it was. I think it
Speaker 1: was a European UH account. I don't remember. We went
Speaker 1: into this in I think Our Ancient Aliens episodes. But
Speaker 1: he was talking about just how unreliable of many of
Speaker 1: these folk tales or fairy tales and legends could be
Speaker 1: in trying to find some nugget of the fantastic, because
Speaker 1: they could very well just be completely embellished from a
Speaker 1: very mundane incident just in the course of a decade
Speaker 1: or or thereabouts. Right So, given what seemed to be
Speaker 1: the case from the existing literature, where people are more
Speaker 1: likely to remember things that are somewhat counterintuitive than they
Speaker 1: are to remember just totally mundane intuitive things, and at
Speaker 1: the same time are seem less likely to retell stories
Speaker 1: that are just full of counterintuitive stuff, you know, crammed
Speaker 1: the gills with it. Is it the case that there's
Speaker 1: a cognitive selection pressure in favor of m C I
Speaker 1: are minimally counterintuitive elements and stories? Are we more likely
Speaker 1: to remember and transmit ideas that violate our intologies a
Speaker 1: little bit but don't violate them too much? Is there
Speaker 1: a sweet spot for the kind of narrative that makes
Speaker 1: it through our brains to the next generation of retelling
Speaker 1: and gets retold. Now, one thing that the author's wonder about,
Speaker 1: and you've got to wonder about, is if the hypothesis
Speaker 1: is correct that people are more likely to remember minimally
Speaker 1: counterintuitive things, Why don't minimally counterintuitive elements just dominate successful
Speaker 1: cultural narratives even more than they do. Like many popular myths, legends,
Speaker 1: and folk tales contain these elements, but they're outnumbered by
Speaker 1: mundane intuitive concepts. I mean think about for example, stories
Speaker 1: in the Bible. Stories in the Bible are actually mostly
Speaker 1: mundane if you read them, they're they're you know, long,
Speaker 1: mundane narratives with occasional punctuations of counterintuitive elements and magic
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. Now, of course, there are a
Speaker 1: few books and passages in the Bible, such as you know, Revelations,
Speaker 1: Apocalypse is various prophetic visions that are sort of crammed
Speaker 1: with bizarre and counterintuitive imagery and stuff. But most of
Speaker 1: the time the basic stories are mostly mundane. Yeah. No, no,
Speaker 1: even with something like the Book of Revelation, we we
Speaker 1: do have to stop and you know, pause and wonders like,
Speaker 1: just how counterintuitive is it really? Because at least on
Speaker 1: face value, yeah, I mean face value for the the
Speaker 1: average modern day individual picking up Book of Revelation, yeah,
Speaker 1: it just seems like crazy town, right, But we do
Speaker 1: have to remember the Book of Revelation is a symbolic
Speaker 1: work from the first century CE, and it's a work
Speaker 1: of apocalyptic literature. So uh, it would have followed particular
Speaker 1: conventions of this style, conventions that would have been better
Speaker 1: known and understood by the intended reader, and the intended
Speaker 1: reader in this situation would have been very much an
Speaker 1: insider as opposed to just your average Joe Christian. And
Speaker 1: we touched on this. So the same situation with the
Speaker 1: highly symbolic work of Hieronymous Bosh before. You know, if
Speaker 1: you look at it and you think, well, this is
Speaker 1: just bizarre, this is crazy. Clearly this artist was just
Speaker 1: on drugs. But the closer you look, you realize, well, okay,
Speaker 1: maybe some of that is true. But but on the
Speaker 1: other hand, you do have a lot of of symbols
Speaker 1: that are speaking to a different viewer, and you were
Speaker 1: not the intended audience totally. So even in some of
Speaker 1: these cases, it might be that if you could, if
Speaker 1: you could sort of decode the meaning of all of
Speaker 1: these revelations, that it might actually sort of key out
Speaker 1: to a more mundane kind of message that has some
Speaker 1: minimally counterintuitive suggestions in it, even though the face value
Speaker 1: imagery is pretty off the wall. But of course, another
Speaker 1: example would be standard folk tales like the stories of
Speaker 1: the brothers Graham a Little Red Riding Hood is actually
Speaker 1: a mostly mundane narrative. There are only two really counterintuitive elopments.
Speaker 1: You've got a talking wolf and then you've got a
Speaker 1: person who can survive being eaten alive by a wolf
Speaker 1: and come out of the stomach alive. Those are the
Speaker 1: two magic parts. The rest of it is a normal
Speaker 1: story with intuitive elements, and so the authors of the
Speaker 1: study think that maybe we should think of each narrative
Speaker 1: as something like a single unit of transmission, rather than
Speaker 1: looking at individual elements within the story to see how
Speaker 1: many counteract counterintuitive ideas the story elements contain. You think
Speaker 1: about how many does the story as a whole contain,
Speaker 1: Because you don't usually tell part of a story. Maybe
Speaker 1: the point of a story is to get transmitted as
Speaker 1: a whole, and so the optimal level of counterintuitiveness might
Speaker 1: function at the level of the whole narrative rather than
Speaker 1: individual ideas within it. So it's possible that the narrative
Speaker 1: itself as a whole might need to be minimally counterintuitive,
Speaker 1: not just stuff within it being minimally counterintuitive. It needs
Speaker 1: to violate our ontologies a little bit, but it can't
Speaker 1: contain too many of these things, or maybe then it
Speaker 1: becomes the donkey cabbages. And you know, once you start
Speaker 1: piling up all the donkey cabbages stuff, I mean, who
Speaker 1: gives a dang like it? Just it's sort of makes
Speaker 1: you stop caring, right, Right, it just become too many
Speaker 1: fantastic elements and there's nothing I can relate to, right,
Speaker 1: So how do you test to see whether this is true? Well?
Speaker 1: The authors put together a couple of studies. The first
Speaker 1: study was to look at lists of minimally counterintuitive ideas
Speaker 1: compared with intuitive ideas and to see how those lists
Speaker 1: fared in recall, and then the second one. The second
Speaker 1: study was to look at existing folk tales and to
Speaker 1: see how well compared narratively minimally counterintuitive folk tales did. So,
Speaker 1: the researchers put together lists of two word ideas, some
Speaker 1: of which were intuitive, some of which were minimally counterintuitive.
Speaker 1: Here's an example, closing door. How do you like that?
Speaker 1: That's pretty normal? Right, thirsty cat, four legged table, confused student?
Speaker 1: These are all you know? This is the right world, right,
Speaker 1: Everything's okay? How about thirsty door? Oh now it's getting
Speaker 1: a little poetic. Confused table, mischievous coat, impatient fist, contrived dog. Yes,
Speaker 1: these are minimally counterintuitive for sure, And so the researchers
Speaker 1: tested how well group of ninety four students could remember
Speaker 1: stories like this uh in immediate recall three minutes after
Speaker 1: studying a list, and then also in um and then
Speaker 1: also in a later test after a week, and the
Speaker 1: results were that in immediate recall three minutes after studying
Speaker 1: the list of entirely intuitive items were actually remembered best,
Speaker 1: just kind of strange like the ones that were just
Speaker 1: all normal concepts were remembered the best of all. But
Speaker 1: delayed recall was a different story. After a week, there
Speaker 1: was massive overall degradation of memory, but the lists that
Speaker 1: people could recall the best were the ones that had
Speaker 1: a minimal number of minimally counterintuitive elements in them. So
Speaker 1: after a week, if the list was all intuitive ideas,
Speaker 1: people remembered it less. If the list contained equal numbers
Speaker 1: of intuitive and counterintuitive ideas, or contained all counterintuitive ideas,
Speaker 1: people remembered it less. What people remembered best after one
Speaker 1: week where lists that had a minority of weird monster
Speaker 1: concepts in them but were otherwise unremarkable. And note that
Speaker 1: this is for lists, not individual concepts. And this seems
Speaker 1: to partially back up the idea that this works at
Speaker 1: the function of a of a narrative as a whole
Speaker 1: instead of just individual ideas that you would remember as
Speaker 1: a single concept or object or word phrase. And then
Speaker 1: in the second study, they tested a survey of folk
Speaker 1: tales from the collections of the brothers grim and they
Speaker 1: counted numbers of counterintuitive elements that they contained and compared
Speaker 1: that to how successful and well known these folk tales were.
Speaker 1: So like, if you count all the stuff in the
Speaker 1: Donkey Cabbages, you'll get a pretty big number, versus if
Speaker 1: you count all the stuff in Cinderella, you'll get a
Speaker 1: smaller number. And so they made a chart basically of
Speaker 1: all these stories and compared how successful the story was
Speaker 1: as measured by how familiar test subjects were with them
Speaker 1: and how many Internet hits they got about these stories
Speaker 1: versus how many counterintuitive elements were in the stories, and
Speaker 1: they got the same kind of result. They found that
Speaker 1: for the less memorable folk tales, as measured by familiarity
Speaker 1: and the Internet results, there was a pretty flat distribution.
Speaker 1: Uh there were mci tales, tales that were highly intuitive,
Speaker 1: tales that were as bonkers as the donkey cabbages or worse.
Speaker 1: But for the more memorable tales, the really successful ones,
Speaker 1: there was a clustering around a small number of counterintuitive elements,
Speaker 1: and that means that the m CI narrative template seems
Speaker 1: somewhat validated. Those that had penetrated the culture more deeply,
Speaker 1: on average were the ones that had a small number
Speaker 1: of counterintuitive elements. And in their discussion, the authors proposed
Speaker 1: that mc I narratives are more successful partially because they're
Speaker 1: easier to remember as a whole, and they write, quote,
Speaker 1: these deviations involve evocative, minimal counterintuitions that are quote relevant mysteries.
Speaker 1: They are closely connected to background knowledge, but do not
Speaker 1: admit to a final interpretation. As a result, they are
Speaker 1: attention arresting and inferentially rich, and therefore encourage further cognitive
Speaker 1: processing and multiple interpretations over time that facilitate the cognitive
Speaker 1: stabilization of narratives. And I thought that was interesting because
Speaker 1: it made me think of a discussion we were having
Speaker 1: in the episode about finite and infinite games and the
Speaker 1: religious scholarly work by James P. Carse about the idea
Speaker 1: of of mythology and um, whether a mythology can survive
Speaker 1: if it is made finite, or if a mythology is
Speaker 1: is only kept alive by sort of like the the
Speaker 1: unending tendency to change it and and keep working on it,
Speaker 1: to keep asking questions. Yeah, I mean, ultimately I think
Speaker 1: that is how that is how the stories stay relevant
Speaker 1: without having to just like bend and break your interpretation
Speaker 1: of them. I mean, I think they may be onto
Speaker 1: something here with the idea that stories are can only
Speaker 1: be properly mysterious and arresting to us and keep prodding
Speaker 1: our brains if they have the right balance of mundane
Speaker 1: content and confusing content, right, I mean, like, if if
Speaker 1: something is just totally unfamiliar and unrelatable, then you you
Speaker 1: don't even have a context in which to frame questions
Speaker 1: or which in questions can feel like they mean something.
Speaker 1: But if a story is totally mundane, you don't end
Speaker 1: up asking questions. All right, don't not know. We're going
Speaker 1: to take a quick break, but we'll be right back.
Speaker 1: Thank thank you, thank you. All right, we're back. So,
Speaker 1: if the authors of the study we just looked at
Speaker 1: are correct, that minimally counterintuitive narratives, narratives that have some
Speaker 1: weird counterintuitive content but not too much. If those types
Speaker 1: of narratives are key to the success of folk tales
Speaker 1: and mythology that spread throughout oral cultures that have to
Speaker 1: be remembered and transmitted, is it also true that modern
Speaker 1: literate societies, or even ancient literate society, societies in which
Speaker 1: stories can be written down before they're transmitted, that those
Speaker 1: societies make room for more highly counterintuitive narratives or for
Speaker 1: more mundane, totally intuitive narratives. Does that make sense what
Speaker 1: I'm asking like, if if that's the sweet spot for
Speaker 1: oral culture transmission, does writing change what type of mythology
Speaker 1: becomes salient? Well, we come back to this idea that
Speaker 1: writing freezes thought right, and nothing frees his thought, And
Speaker 1: this goes back to some of the ideas of James P.
Speaker 1: Cars as well. Nothing is going to freeze thought like
Speaker 1: sacred literature. Yeah, And I actually found out a wonderful
Speaker 1: paper on some of this um It is titled uh
Speaker 1: An Alternative Account of the Minimal Counterintuitives Effect, and it
Speaker 1: was by by cognitive scientist Muhammad afzal Opal And this
Speaker 1: was published in two thousand ten in cognitive systems Research,
Speaker 1: and he argues that that essentially we have WE WE WE.
Speaker 1: You can look at m c I in two different ways.
Speaker 1: You have concept based m c I, and that's where
Speaker 1: just the concept itself is resonating, right, because it's it's
Speaker 1: a it's a donkey that talks, etcetera. Right. But then
Speaker 1: you can also look at it as context based, and
Speaker 1: he makes the case that counterintuitive concepts lose their advantages
Speaker 1: as they become widely accepted in part of the culture.
Speaker 1: Oh interesting, So if I introduce to you a new
Speaker 1: counterintuitive concept, you might be more likely to remember that
Speaker 1: than if I just say, like a ghost, which is
Speaker 1: a counterintuitive concept, but you're familiar with it, right, Or
Speaker 1: a vampire. You know, it's like, I know that I'm
Speaker 1: bored with vampires. Give me something with a little more
Speaker 1: jazz to it, right, But if I say a turtle
Speaker 1: that drinks human blood, people are probably going to remember that. Yeah. Therefore,
Speaker 1: he argues that ideas with enhanced counterintuitiveness obtain transmission advantages,
Speaker 1: and this results in a ratcheting up of counterintuitiveness that
Speaker 1: may help explain cultural innovation and dynamism. Interesting, So this
Speaker 1: would be bigger than just religions. This would be for
Speaker 1: ideas in general and narratives in general. Right, though he
Speaker 1: is particularly interested in religion. That's like one of his Uh,
Speaker 1: that's one of of Upaul's areas of expertise is cognitive
Speaker 1: science of religion. And he he says that quote it
Speaker 1: also allows us to account for the development and spread
Speaker 1: of complex cultural ideas, such as the overly counter intuitive
Speaker 1: religious concepts, including the Judeo Christian Islamic conceptions of God.
Speaker 1: Does that mean like overly counterintuitive because not anthropomorphic enough? Um? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And just I mean I think part of it also
Speaker 1: comes back to examples like revelation. You know, you have
Speaker 1: just to to a modern readers, just completely counterintuitive. What
Speaker 1: does it mean? Why is it there? What is it
Speaker 1: supposed to be saying to me? Part of the problem
Speaker 1: is that it's sacred, right, it's it's it's it's frozen
Speaker 1: in time. It's no longer speaking to the people. Uh,
Speaker 1: the specific individuals who would have who would have understood
Speaker 1: it without a bunch of you know, theological dissection. Interesting. Uh. So,
Speaker 1: Paul writes the context based view posits that religious concepts
Speaker 1: such as God's ghost, angels, and devil have become maximally
Speaker 1: counterintuitive in the barn and Boyer sense because they have
Speaker 1: had to survive in the minds of an adaptive and
Speaker 1: innovative population of human beings over a long period of time.
Speaker 1: In light of the model we develop here, one should
Speaker 1: not be surprised to see maximally counterintuitive concepts to form
Speaker 1: a significant part of religious beliefs. Indeed, it would be
Speaker 1: surprising if they did not maximally counterintuitive. So stuff that, um,
Speaker 1: because it's hard to get your counterintuitive juice is flowing
Speaker 1: anymore because you've been so exposed to ideas like spirits
Speaker 1: and ghosts that they want to offer you visions that
Speaker 1: that tell you, like, you're not going to get a
Speaker 1: weirder idea than this. Yeah, I mean you get into areas.
Speaker 1: Uh and this this is me commenting on his material.
Speaker 1: He didn't make the specific point, but you know, stuff
Speaker 1: like the transfiguration of Christ and the Holy Trinity and
Speaker 1: these kind of complex ideas of of what what is
Speaker 1: the nature of God? You know, right is it's it's
Speaker 1: built into it. That's that it's a mystery and you
Speaker 1: can't understand it, right, and then added to that too
Speaker 1: that you have you know, these ancient religions are I
Speaker 1: often use this analogy for for Hinduism, Like, Hinduism is
Speaker 1: not this one product. It is this well of time
Speaker 1: and culture with all of these varying ideas and different
Speaker 1: interpretations of gods that are then uh, spun around and
Speaker 1: used in different ways. And you do see that in
Speaker 1: Christian traditions as well. Hinduism is a world of belief
Speaker 1: and layer upon layers. It's like an archaeological dig Yeah.
Speaker 1: But then of course that raises the question of modern religions,
Speaker 1: right yeah, And so I would wonder if the m
Speaker 1: c I hypothesis is correct as an explanation for the
Speaker 1: success of religious narratives. Shouldn't it be that we see
Speaker 1: unusual religions emerging in a mostly literate world where things
Speaker 1: get written down a lot, and those religions have more
Speaker 1: permission to be the donkey cabbages of religion, Right? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean it, if you can write it down, you
Speaker 1: can make it sacred, and you can say nobody touched this. Uh.
Speaker 1: And one of the one of the points that to
Speaker 1: Paul makes about this, he compares it to emergent religions,
Speaker 1: and how you have you have new religions that have emerged,
Speaker 1: and they generally have an uphill battle because they're they're
Speaker 1: having to go up against the established religions that have
Speaker 1: in you know, in many cases centuries upon centuries, thousands
Speaker 1: of years of history, all these sacred texts, and somebody saying,
Speaker 1: you don't alter this. This is the text and uh,
Speaker 1: and this is the accepted interpretation of it. And if
Speaker 1: you tweak it in any way, well that's heresy and
Speaker 1: we will punish that. Uh. And but then he points
Speaker 1: out what you end up with with something like say,
Speaker 1: the Church of Scientology emerging, getting enough power, and what
Speaker 1: what do they turn around and do they kind of
Speaker 1: they make their own sacred text and they say, you
Speaker 1: can't mess with this, you can't take these don't be
Speaker 1: a squirrel and turn these concepts around and try and
Speaker 1: market them off into your own heretical religion? Is squirrel
Speaker 1: part of their whole thing? I I wasn't aware of squirrels? Yes,
Speaker 1: uh oop, al rightes quote. For instance, the founder of Scientology,
Speaker 1: or On Hubbard, is reported to have referred to those
Speaker 1: who modify as techniques as squirrels who should be harassed
Speaker 1: asked in any possible way. Weapons used to discourage any
Speaker 1: change in religious doctrine in practice include ridicule, expulsion, and harassment.
Speaker 1: Continuity and religious doctrine is explained to the extent that
Speaker 1: such thought control techniques are successful. So it's kind of
Speaker 1: a it feels like a struggle between the uh, the
Speaker 1: the oral stories and the written stories, right, the one
Speaker 1: that wants to live and change, and the other that
Speaker 1: we're trying to artificially set in stone. Here's a question
Speaker 1: I have, and I think it is to some degree
Speaker 1: addressed by this literature, but I'm not sure if there
Speaker 1: is a settled answer on it. What is the stronger tendency,
Speaker 1: the the counterintuitive element adding tendency or the subtraction tendency?
Speaker 1: Do stories over time tend to undergo more adding of
Speaker 1: donkey cabbages style elements are more subtraction of donkey cabbages
Speaker 1: style elements? Well, I I like the like Coopa's argument
Speaker 1: that there's a there's a dynamism in place that going
Speaker 1: to have You're gonna have it come in waves. To
Speaker 1: think of it this way, right, you have alien it's
Speaker 1: just about a person you know, a crew on a
Speaker 1: ship against one alien, and then things get crazy. You
Speaker 1: get aliens, and you've got multiple aliens, You've got new
Speaker 1: kinds of aliens, and it's a it's a it's a
Speaker 1: fiesta but aliens. I would say it's minimally counterintuitive. I mean,
Speaker 1: it is a mostly mundane narratives, like one thing, which
Speaker 1: is that there are these horrible monsters. But but there's
Speaker 1: a ratcheting up. So think of it like one one
Speaker 1: alien is one m c I and then multiple aliens.
Speaker 1: That's a bunch of m ciyes, and then Alien three
Speaker 1: comes around or what alien cubed sometimes it's display does
Speaker 1: and that when they're like, all right, let's boil it
Speaker 1: back down. Just one m c I alien in play
Speaker 1: and then four things get crazy again and you see
Speaker 1: this back and forth. Right, um but I feel like
Speaker 1: that's probably the tendency, right, is that you'll ratchet things
Speaker 1: up more and more um M CIEs are added, and
Speaker 1: then in it kind of goes in reverse, fewer and fewer,
Speaker 1: sort of getting back to the it becomes more relatable
Speaker 1: as it is it is. It is a transferred from
Speaker 1: user to user. Yeah, this is all real interesting, but
Speaker 1: now I'm I'm I'm undercutting myself because I'm thinking about
Speaker 1: the difference, uh, of there being both kinds of narratives
Speaker 1: going way back. So if you go back sixteen years ago, uh,
Speaker 1: think about the difference between the basically emergent Catholic Christian
Speaker 1: story compared to the narratives you find of Gnostic Christian texts.
Speaker 1: At the same time, the Gnostic Christian texts are wonderful.
Speaker 1: They they are worth reading, and they're so interesting, But
Speaker 1: they're cosmology narratives are they're they're off the you know,
Speaker 1: they're outlandish, they're super counterintuitive. They're barely tethered to any
Speaker 1: kind of understandable or munday and earthly story. You've got
Speaker 1: the Pleroma and YadA both. Uh, it's just not it's
Speaker 1: not as earthly and tethered and relatable as most mythologies
Speaker 1: that you're used to. It's, yeah, this is where you
Speaker 1: have like the ideas like the first creation and the secondary,
Speaker 1: the dimmi urge, the different levels of creation, the beings
Speaker 1: of light and all this stuff. I mean, it's not
Speaker 1: stuff that's easy to picture. It doesn't work like a
Speaker 1: normal human story. It's very abstract and removed from from
Speaker 1: grounded reality. It seems too counterintuitive to be successful. But
Speaker 1: then again, I guess historically it was not successful, true,
Speaker 1: but maybe it was only it can only be successful
Speaker 1: in a time in which this uh, and say that
Speaker 1: the Catholic narrative was just so widespread and so dominant
Speaker 1: that it it kind of took on the trappings of
Speaker 1: the physical laws of the of of life. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I guess it also happened within a broader Christian context,
Speaker 1: so many of the people who practiced Gnostic Christianity would
Speaker 1: think of it as a sort of like an extra
Speaker 1: helping It's like the secret add on mythology that you
Speaker 1: take in addition to your regular Catholic mythology. So in
Speaker 1: a sense, Catholicism was roller skates and then uh and
Speaker 1: then a NaSTA. The Gnostic Bulley system was was roller blades. Maybe,
Speaker 1: I mean it'd be like roller skates with an extra
Speaker 1: rocket booster or something or Robert. This has been fun
Speaker 1: I feel like this is a really compelling explanation for
Speaker 1: the dynamics of of narratives and memory and human culture.
Speaker 1: I I don't think I'd fully tried to put all
Speaker 1: this together before, but once funny enough, it is very
Speaker 1: intuitive once you hear it. Yeah, yeah, I agree, it doesn't.
Speaker 1: It makes you rethink everything from your you know, your
Speaker 1: favorite books and movies to major world religions. Uh. And
Speaker 1: I do think it is it is getting at the
Speaker 1: at some of the truth of what's going on, but
Speaker 1: maybe a minimal part of the truth. Well, we shall see.
Speaker 1: There's always a lot of pizza pie left over all. Right, Well,
Speaker 1: there you go. If you want to check out more
Speaker 1: episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head on over
Speaker 1: to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is
Speaker 1: where you will find all the episodes, including the various
Speaker 1: episodes we've done on religious and narrative topics over the years. Uh.
Speaker 1: And if you want to support the show, really, as
Speaker 1: I've said before, rate and review us wherever you have
Speaker 1: the ability to do so. That helps us out immensely
Speaker 1: big thanks as always for our wonderful audio producers Alex
Speaker 1: Williams and Torry Harrison. If you would like to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us directly with feedback about this episode
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