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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff

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Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.

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Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.

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Speaker 1: This might be kind of a strange question, but if

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Speaker 1: I forced you to tell me the whole story of

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Speaker 1: Cinderella on command, do you think you could tell me

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Speaker 1: that folk tale? All right, it's not one of my

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Speaker 1: favorite folk tales, but I believe it goes something like this,

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Speaker 1: poor lady puts on a magic shoe and becomes a

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Speaker 1: rich lady. Uh the end you have you have missed

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Speaker 1: some key elements, but I bet you could do it.

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Speaker 1: Come on, you you know the story of Cinderella. Yeah, okay,

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Speaker 1: So there's some magic mice in there that that talk

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Speaker 1: and have engaged in some some comic mischief with a cat. Uh.

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Speaker 1: There's an evil stepmother. Uh, they're evil step sisters. And

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Speaker 1: I believe in the more uh, you know, classic versions

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Speaker 1: of the tale and non Disney versions, there's a little

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Speaker 1: bit of like nasty uh torture revenge at the end. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: there's a lot of foot cutting and stuff like that

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Speaker 1: in the In the classic versions, as told by like

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Speaker 1: the Brothers Grim and Charles Perrault. Uh. These old classic

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Speaker 1: folk tales that were collected hundreds of years ago often

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Speaker 1: had very strong, bloody, uh sadistic elements to them, but

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Speaker 1: they're also intensely memorable. Yeah. But at the same time,

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Speaker 1: it's you know, you get down to its roots. I

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Speaker 1: feel like it's a deeply unpleasant story. And then even

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Speaker 1: in the Disney version, like Nobody Nobody turns into a dragon,

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Speaker 1: there are no monsters. There's you know, a little bit

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Speaker 1: of magic, but it's it has it has a lot

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Speaker 1: to compete with with when it comes to other like

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Speaker 1: major Uh. You know, you know tent poles, fairy tales. Well, Robert,

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Speaker 1: you are a spoil sport for my examples today. Uh,

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Speaker 1: come on, you you know the story of Cinderella. You

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Speaker 1: definitely know the story of Rapunzel. That's got some good

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Speaker 1: to eye gouging and all kinds of weirdness. Uh. But

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Speaker 1: what I bet you don't know is the story of

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Speaker 1: the Donkey Cabbage is a k a. The Donkey Lettuce.

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Speaker 1: This is true. I was not familiar with this tale

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Speaker 1: prior to this recording. Also a story recounted by the

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Speaker 1: brothers Grim. It's a classic folk tale that that has

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Speaker 1: been put into these collections of folk tales, and I

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Speaker 1: think maybe I'm going to do the horrible, horrible act

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Speaker 1: of trying to tell it from memory. Stop me if

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Speaker 1: this is getting unbearable, Okay, donkey cabbages. So you've got

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Speaker 1: a young huntsman. He goes out one day into the

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Speaker 1: forest and he comes across an old crone in the forest,

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Speaker 1: and the old crone is begging for alms. So he

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Speaker 1: takes pity on her and he gives her what he

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Speaker 1: can afford. And she likes this. She's like, Wow, you

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Speaker 1: took pity on me. So I'm gonna give you some advice.

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Speaker 1: Up ahead in the forest, you're gonna come across a

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Speaker 1: tree that has nine birds in it, and those birds

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Speaker 1: are gonna be tearing at a cloak. Now, what you

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Speaker 1: need to do is shoot those birds and then one

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Speaker 1: of them will fall dead, and you need to take

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Speaker 1: it's hard out and eat it. And when you eat

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Speaker 1: the heart, every time, every time you wake up, after

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Speaker 1: you eat that bird's heart, you will have a piece

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Speaker 1: of gold under your pillow. And also hang onto that cloak,

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Speaker 1: because by putting it on, you can wish yourself into

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Speaker 1: any place and magically appear there. So the young huntsman

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Speaker 1: walks a little bit further into the forest. Sure enough,

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Speaker 1: he comes across the birds. He shoots into the flock

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Speaker 1: of birds, one of them falls dead. He takes the

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Speaker 1: cloak from the birds, and he cuts the heart out

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Speaker 1: of the dead bird and he eats it. So then

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Speaker 1: he goes home. He goes to sleep next day. Sure enough,

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Speaker 1: there's gold under his pillow, and so he waits a

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Speaker 1: while accumulating the wealth right, the sleep wealth, until he's

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Speaker 1: got a good collection of gold, and now he thinks

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Speaker 1: time to go explore the world. Right, I'm I'm young,

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Speaker 1: I've got a magic transportation cloak, and I've got gold

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Speaker 1: under my pillow every night, So he goes roman all

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Speaker 1: over the place and eventually ends up at a castle.

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Speaker 1: At the castle, he sees another ugly old crone, but

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Speaker 1: not the original crone. This is a different crone who

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Speaker 1: is in fact a witch. And he sees a beautiful

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Speaker 1: young woman, and so he asks to be let into

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Speaker 1: the castle where there is a witch who knows about

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Speaker 1: his magical items and wants to take them. And so

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Speaker 1: the witch gets her beautiful young daughter to seduce the

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Speaker 1: huntsman so that they can steal his magical items. And so,

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Speaker 1: first of all, the young daughter gets him to drink

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Speaker 1: and poisonous draft that the witch has created, uh that

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Speaker 1: will cause him to vomit up the bird heart that

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Speaker 1: he ate. And so she gets him to drink that

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Speaker 1: he vomits up the bird heart, she takes it and

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Speaker 1: she eats it, so now she can get the Now

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Speaker 1: she can get the gold under the pillow. Second thing,

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Speaker 1: the young the young beautiful daughter takes him up on

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Speaker 1: the mountains one day by saying, oh, I wish you

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Speaker 1: could use that cloak of transportation to take me where

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Speaker 1: we can gather some gyms up in the mountains. So

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Speaker 1: they travel there together with the use of the magic cloak,

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Speaker 1: and then while he is drowsy on the mountain, she

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Speaker 1: steals the cloak from him and leaves him there. He

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Speaker 1: comes across some giants on the mountain, and the giants

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Speaker 1: they discuss whether or not they should kill him, but

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Speaker 1: eventually they decide, now we'll just leave him here because

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Speaker 1: eventually the clouds will carry him away. So the young

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Speaker 1: huntsman gets carried away by the clouds. He ends up

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Speaker 1: getting deposited in a field of cabbage is. He's hungry,

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Speaker 1: and so he eats some of the cabbage. This cabbage

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Speaker 1: transforms him into a donkey. He doesn't really like being

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Speaker 1: transformed into a donkey, but he eats some other cabbage

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Speaker 1: from a nearby field and transforms back into a human.

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Speaker 1: He realizes that each of these fields grows cabbage. One

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Speaker 1: type of cabbage transforms people into donkeys, the other type

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Speaker 1: transforms donkeys into people. So he takes cabbages of both

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Speaker 1: kinds and he goes back to the castle. He goes

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Speaker 1: to the old witch and tricks her into eating some

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Speaker 1: of the bad cabbage that turns you into a donkey.

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Speaker 1: The old witch turns into a donkey. He also accidentally

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Speaker 1: tricks the maid servant and the young daughter who are

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Speaker 1: at the castle also into eating the donkey cabbage, and

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Speaker 1: they turn into donkeys. Then he takes the donkeys to

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Speaker 1: a miller and he tells the miller too, basically tells

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Speaker 1: them to mistreat the old donkey and to be nicer

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Speaker 1: to the young donkeys. The miller comes back to him

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Speaker 1: a little while after that and says, well, your old

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Speaker 1: donkey died, and the other two they're not going to

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Speaker 1: hang on much longer. But then the huntsman he relents

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Speaker 1: from his revenge and he says, you know what, I'll

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Speaker 1: transform those donkeys back into people. So he gives them

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Speaker 1: the good cabbage that transformed back into humans. And then

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Speaker 1: the the the witch's daughter and he get married and

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Speaker 1: they live happily ever after. Well, that is quite a story, Joe.

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Speaker 1: If it were, I would say it was. It would

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Speaker 1: be pretty great if it were. If this was a

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Speaker 1: summary of kind of like a freewheeling like randomly generated

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Speaker 1: like dungeons and dragons in a series of encounters, you know,

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Speaker 1: because it has that kind of vibe to it, like

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Speaker 1: there's just kind of a seeming randomness to it. The

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Speaker 1: magic it feels convoluted, the characters are confusing. The moral

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Speaker 1: message of the piece is uh is equally lost on me. Yeah, um, now,

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Speaker 1: I certainly. Well it's sort of a weird revenge story. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: but it it really takes its time getting there. It's

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Speaker 1: kind of it does kind of feel like a winding

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Speaker 1: goat trail to nowhere. Uh, it's shaggy dog story. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: But but at the same time, it does remind me

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Speaker 1: of some of I mean, I've had this experience with

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Speaker 1: other folk tales before, where you start reading it and

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Speaker 1: it seems to be kind of going in circles and

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Speaker 1: it's making nonsensical choices. But then I often end up

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Speaker 1: reminding myself, well, I'm not encountering this story in its

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Speaker 1: original language. I am not a part of the culture

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Speaker 1: that that it was the intended, uh you know, listener

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Speaker 1: to the to the tale. Like I've had a similar

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Speaker 1: situation watching some of the old Russo Finish fairytale epics. Oh,

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Speaker 1: like Jack Frost, the one they did on Mystery Science

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Speaker 1: Theater three thousand, which is just the best. Yeah, it's

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Speaker 1: one of my favorite episode. It's tremendous in the movie itself,

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Speaker 1: that's father measure. I mean, the movie is beautiful. I

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Speaker 1: mean that if you challenge anyone who has only seen

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Speaker 1: that MST three k episode to to look online and

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Speaker 1: find a more pristine, uh copy of it, because the

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Speaker 1: footage is just beautiful. It's this is a high budget

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Speaker 1: film at the time. But the story, yeah, for for

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Speaker 1: for non Russo finished viewers, I guess it it is

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Speaker 1: confusing and you you kind of lose track of like

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Speaker 1: what magical piece of magic is in play and what's

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Speaker 1: the what's the morality of the character turning in like

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Speaker 1: having his head turned into the head of a bear

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Speaker 1: and then he he loses the head of a bear

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Speaker 1: just for promising to be good to the outsider. That

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Speaker 1: story just feels like the hell you go to if

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Speaker 1: you get killed in the tiger by a gnome. But

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Speaker 1: it reminds me a bit of Donkey Cabbages. Well, yeah,

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Speaker 1: so I guess that the big question that we're we've

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Speaker 1: we've led ourselves to at this point is like, what

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Speaker 1: is what is ultimately the difference? What what makes one

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Speaker 1: story Cinderella and one story a donkey Cabbages? And why

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Speaker 1: to Cinderella stick with us? Whereas donkey Cabbages is just

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Speaker 1: it's just leaking through your fingers almost immediately upon grasping it. Yeah, exactly.

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Speaker 1: I mean, one thing is that Cinderella is not just

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Speaker 1: the the sort of European tradition grim fairy tale Cinderella.

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Speaker 1: They're Cinderella type stories all over the world. This is

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Speaker 1: almost one of those those or stories you know that

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Speaker 1: seems to have an ancient prototype that filters into cultures

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Speaker 1: all around the world or maybe has parallel development because

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Speaker 1: it's themes are so basic. Um, Cinderella is a widely known,

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Speaker 1: widely distributed, ineradicable myth. Meanwhile, donkey cabbages is it feels

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Speaker 1: like donkey cabbages could disappear from the earth and we

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Speaker 1: would all be poorer for having lost donkey cabbages because

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Speaker 1: I kind of love donkey cabbages, but nobody not that

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Speaker 1: many people would notice it was missing, right, Um, it

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Speaker 1: has not penetrated the culture in the same way that

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Speaker 1: the Cinderella archetype near rative has. And so the question

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Speaker 1: is why are some narratives more successful than others? Like

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Speaker 1: you're saying, what makes one story, uh, the the the

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Speaker 1: narrative equivalent of a highly successful insect species, and the

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Speaker 1: other one and endangered species? Why is donkey cabbage is

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Speaker 1: endangered while Cinderella is thriving. It would be a shame

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Speaker 1: if we lost donkey cabbages forever, But it seems like

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Speaker 1: that's much more plausible of an outcome than losing Cinderella. Right, Okay,

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Speaker 1: Well we'll come back to this question in just a minute. First,

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Speaker 1: let's explore a related question and see how these two

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Speaker 1: subjects come together. This question is why do religions emerge

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Speaker 1: and what makes one religion more successful than another in

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Speaker 1: the same way that one narrative can be more successful

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Speaker 1: than another. You know, we've talked before on the show

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Speaker 1: about all of the various psychological and biological explanations that

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Speaker 1: people think may exist for the emergence of religions. I

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Speaker 1: think I think it's safe to say this is not

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Speaker 1: a subject where there is a settled, known answer, But

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Speaker 1: there are some answers that seem more plausible than others, right,

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Speaker 1: And I mean, you have some answers, are certainly models

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Speaker 1: for how it could occur, and I am often inclined

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Speaker 1: to think, well, it's probably multiple different models at once.

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Speaker 1: Of course, it's it's hard to just say that, like,

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Speaker 1: this is the equation for religion in human culture. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: there's probably not one cause of the emergence of religion.

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Speaker 1: But what are the dominant physical, biological, psychological factors that

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Speaker 1: make a religion a thing that exists? Why did how

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Speaker 1: did we get this way? Now some of you might

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Speaker 1: be wondering what you were talking about fairy tales, now

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Speaker 1: you're talking about about religion. You know, what is the

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Speaker 1: connection between Cinderella and the great religions of the modern world,

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Speaker 1: of the ancient world or the ancient world. I mean,

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Speaker 1: obviously one of the big ones is that there is

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Speaker 1: any religion you look at, there is going to be

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Speaker 1: some sort of narrative or narratives that they're at the

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Speaker 1: heart of its sacred narratives upon which it is based. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: there are almost no successful religions that don't have at

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Speaker 1: least some strong narrative component in them. And uh, and

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Speaker 1: so obviously narrative might might be the common thread between

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Speaker 1: the success of folklore and the success of a religion. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: religions tend to have heroes. They didn't have villains. They

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Speaker 1: they they are stories that have just taken on a

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Speaker 1: grander cultural and personal meaning. So as far as the

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Speaker 1: emergence of religion explanation goes that, there are a lot

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Speaker 1: of ideas that have been put forward by scholars over

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Speaker 1: the years. I know, actually recently, Robert, you talked a

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Speaker 1: little bit to Barbara J. King about this at the

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Speaker 1: World Science Festival, like what psychological drives and biological drives

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Speaker 1: play into the emergence of religion? And I know part

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Speaker 1: of her answer had to do with with social cohesion

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Speaker 1: and stuff, right, Yeah, And in grieving and bereavement and

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Speaker 1: sort of the the precursors to grieving and bereavement that

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Speaker 1: they can arguably be identified in uh in certain animals,

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Speaker 1: such as some of our closer primate relatives exactly. Another

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Speaker 1: very common explanation from evolutionary psychology is the idea of

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Speaker 1: the hyperactive agency detection. And we've talked about this on

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Speaker 1: the show before, but the basic idea here is that

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Speaker 1: there's going to be an evolutionary selection pressure in favor

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Speaker 1: of people who are over sensitive about the possibility of

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Speaker 1: detecting agents, meaning beings with intentions like animals or other

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Speaker 1: people from ambiguous data. So the classic example, as you

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Speaker 1: imagine two different scenarios. One is you hear a twig

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Speaker 1: breaking in the forest at night and you think it's

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Speaker 1: a tiger or you know it's my nemesis, Jeffrey and

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Speaker 1: he's come for his revenge, and then you raise your

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Speaker 1: guard and try to get yourself out of the situation safely.

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Speaker 1: The other scenario is you hear a twig breaking in

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Speaker 1: the forest at night and you think it's probably nothing.

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Speaker 1: You just keep collecting firewood and then I don't know,

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Speaker 1: maybe break some other horror movie sins. You split up,

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Speaker 1: You drink some beer, you do all the bad stuff.

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Speaker 1: Those are the very people who either are either eaten

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Speaker 1: by tigers are killed by Jeffrey. Right. So the people

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Speaker 1: in the latter scenario are probably going to be correct

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Speaker 1: more often right. More often. It's probably nothing, but there's

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Speaker 1: a relatively small benefit to being correct. The person in

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Speaker 1: the first situation who's afraid hyper aware of what might

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Speaker 1: be an animal or a person, some kind of intentional agent.

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Speaker 1: They might waste some time and energy being overly cautious,

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Speaker 1: but they're less likely to get killed in the off

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Speaker 1: chance that they're correct about detecting an agent. And so,

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Speaker 1: because this person survives more often the genes that put

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Speaker 1: them on the hyperactive lookout for people or for animals,

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Speaker 1: these intentional agents, those genes proliferate in the gene pool,

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Speaker 1: and this causes us to read intentions into our environment

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Speaker 1: at an unusual rate just to be safe. And this

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Speaker 1: reading of intentions into all kinds of random phenomena lead

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Speaker 1: us to the belief that there actually our minds controlling

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Speaker 1: events that we don't understand, in essence to the idea

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Speaker 1: of God's So that's one interesting possible explanation. There's also

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Speaker 1: like the meme obedience duality, which basically says there's a

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Speaker 1: selection advantage for children with brains that tend to tell

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Speaker 1: them to believe what adults tell them. You know, if

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Speaker 1: you are warned that it's dangerous to leave the campfire

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Speaker 1: at night, more children who believe that warning and accepted

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Speaker 1: are going to survive to adulthood. And then pigging backing

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Speaker 1: on this, you'd eventually have adults spreading religious memes by

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Speaker 1: telling myths, stories, folk tales, and the beneficial belief in

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Speaker 1: obedience mechanism that causes children to survive after a warning

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Speaker 1: not to leave the firelight also causes them to take

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Speaker 1: these stories very seriously to believe them to pay heed

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Speaker 1: to their values. But whatever the actual biological and psychological

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Speaker 1: reasons for the emergence of religion, it leads to this

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Speaker 1: question that we asked a minute ago of why some

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Speaker 1: religions are more successful than others. I mean, there are

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Speaker 1: tons of religions throughout human history that have been invented

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Speaker 1: and now they're extinct, and very few people ever followed them. Right,

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Speaker 1: So they wanted that the ancient Egyptian religion, why is it?

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Speaker 1: Why is it not survived in a in a real

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Speaker 1: tangible sense in the modern age. Why did it not

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Speaker 1: even travel well beyond Egypt in its own day? But

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Speaker 1: even it was relatively successful at last time. I mean,

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Speaker 1: think about all the variations on it, or all of

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Speaker 1: the other types of mythologies that got started but never

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Speaker 1: really went anywhere. I think of all the cults that

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Speaker 1: emerge that we know relatively little about. I think of

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Speaker 1: all the heresies that were that were squashed out before

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Speaker 1: they could be really take on a name beyond heresy exactly.

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Speaker 1: I think because you think about how we refer to them,

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Speaker 1: we don't even refer to them as religions. They were

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Speaker 1: just upstarts that were destroyed by the more popular and

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Speaker 1: powerful models of belief exactly. So the question we want

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Speaker 1: to look at today is could the variable success of

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Speaker 1: new religions have anything to do with the question we

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Speaker 1: were asking a minute ago why some folk tales and

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Speaker 1: legends are more successful than others, Because Robert, as you

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Speaker 1: mentioned a minute ago, what religions and and folklore have

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Speaker 1: in common is narrative. Almost all of the world's religions

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Speaker 1: past and present have major narrative elements. They're based on stories.

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Speaker 1: Um So even though there are other components to religions.

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Speaker 1: We know there's metaphysical incentives, a sense of meaning, social inclusion,

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Speaker 1: and all that stuff. Since the narrative element is so common,

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Speaker 1: wouldn't it be reasonable to guess that part of what

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Speaker 1: makes a successful religion is containing successful stories, Right, the

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Speaker 1: right kind of stories that you know, made me feel

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Speaker 1: a little bit good and also makes me feel a

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Speaker 1: little bit bad and just the right way. Right, a

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Speaker 1: good religious narrative, it hurts so good. Uh So this

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Speaker 1: this could be wrong. I mean, maybe narrative is not

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Speaker 1: actually a major element, but I think it's a very

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Speaker 1: reasonable starting assumption. And if this is the case that

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Speaker 1: the success of a narrative plays into the success of

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Speaker 1: a religion, what makes a story that leads to a

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Speaker 1: successful faith? Maybe we should take a quick break and

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Speaker 1: then explore more when we come back. Thank alright, we're back.

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Speaker 1: So we've asked the question what sort of narrative of

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Speaker 1: what kind of story is going to make a religion successful?

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Speaker 1: Or just make a story of a fairy tale successful?

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Speaker 1: In general? Like, what what are the elements that are

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Speaker 1: going to get guaranteed that it resonates and remains in

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Speaker 1: human culture? Yeah, I guess maybe it makes sense to

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Speaker 1: start with narratives and then see how this applies to religions. Um,

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Speaker 1: so it's time to explore. Basically, I would say, the

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Speaker 1: key idea of this episode the idea of what's come

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Speaker 1: to be known as minimally counterintuitive elements of belief. Now,

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Speaker 1: we can't know for sure what makes one religion or

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Speaker 1: one story more successful than another, and it's probably due

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Speaker 1: to multiple factors rather than just one. But this minimally

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Speaker 1: counterintuitive elements paradigm, I think, is a really clever answer,

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Speaker 1: offering what I guess is an important part of the

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Speaker 1: picture of the comparative success of stories, narratives, and belief structures.

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Speaker 1: There have been a ton of papers investigating this over

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Speaker 1: the years, a lot of studies, but I thought we

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Speaker 1: should examine the issue through one one important study from

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Speaker 1: the two thousand six and that's a paper published in

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Speaker 1: Cognitive Science by Aura norn Zion's got A Tran, Jason Faulkner,

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Speaker 1: and Mark Schaller called Memory and Mystery the Cultural selection

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Speaker 1: of minimally counterintuitive Narratives. So I want to read a

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Speaker 1: quote from their introduction starts to set the scene for

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Speaker 1: why memory would be a relevant issue here the author's

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Speaker 1: right quote. Of the many ecological and psychological factors that

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Speaker 1: influence the extent to which any such narrative achieves cultural success,

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Speaker 1: mnemonic resilience maybe one of the most important. Memorability places

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Speaker 1: necessary constraints on the cultural transmission of narratives and ideas

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Speaker 1: in oral traditions that characterize most of human cultures throughout history.

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Speaker 1: A narrative cannot be transmitted and achieve cultural success unless

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Speaker 1: it stands the test of memory. So, in other words,

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Speaker 1: in the telephone game of belief, you've got to have

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Speaker 1: a core story that is going to remain more or

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Speaker 1: less intact with each retelling and each embellishment. Yeah, and

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Speaker 1: I mean part of the problem is that most of

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Speaker 1: human history, most people have not had access to any

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Speaker 1: recording method for narratives. Most people throughout the history of

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Speaker 1: the world have been illiterate and have transmitted stories orally

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Speaker 1: by hearing them told and then retelling them to others.

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Speaker 1: So if a story cannot be accurately remembered, that story

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Speaker 1: doesn't really have much of a chance of survival, right right,

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Speaker 1: I mean, I'm reminded, I want to one of our

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Speaker 1: recent episodes that dealt with writing. I want to say

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Speaker 1: there was one description that UH discussed writing as an

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Speaker 1: ability to like freeze thought or too in some way

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Speaker 1: you have to to to to freeze thought in time,

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Speaker 1: And that's exactly what it's doing when otherwise have these

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Speaker 1: stories would be perpetually changing. Yeah, and of course I

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Speaker 1: think there there is plenty of evidence that stories do

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Speaker 1: change through transmission in in oral cultures, right, I mean

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Speaker 1: this happens all the time. Every time you tell the story,

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Speaker 1: you make little changes to it, and over time those

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Speaker 1: changes accumulate. But how does a story become resilient? How

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Speaker 1: do its key elements become set well enough that it

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Speaker 1: can survive the sort of changing landscape, of of forcing,

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Speaker 1: of of being stored in human minds alone and being

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Speaker 1: transmitted through human retelling alone. Well, there's the old quote, right,

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Speaker 1: it don't mean a thing of it if it ain't

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Speaker 1: got that swing, right, if this is what you know,

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Speaker 1: there's gotta be this that, there's gotta be that element

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Speaker 1: that just really stands out right, it makes it stick. Um.

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Speaker 1: And I think that probably seems like a no brainer

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Speaker 1: on the surface, right, Memorable stories are going to resonate

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Speaker 1: and survive. I can't help but think of the modern

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Speaker 1: elevator pitch idea and all of this. You know, like

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Speaker 1: you you're in the elevator, You've got you got two

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Speaker 1: sentences sell me on your script. You gotta you gotta

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Speaker 1: phrase it in a memorable way. Yeah, so what do

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Speaker 1: you say? Say jaws with pause? And they're like, that's brilliant.

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Speaker 1: What does that mean? It's like kujo, I guess you

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Speaker 1: know about you took this saying that I was familiar with.

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Speaker 1: It's just become mundane in my my world of cinema.

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Speaker 1: But you put a twist on it. You put this

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Speaker 1: there's there's this new idea and that's what's standing out

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Speaker 1: in my mind. Plus it rhymes well. I would certainly

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Speaker 1: not discount the power of rhyming. Rhyming poetry might be

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Speaker 1: selected not just because it sounds good, but because it's

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Speaker 1: a memory ating device, right, And this can certainly be

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Speaker 1: a factor. You know we're talking about sometimes the fairy

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Speaker 1: tale loses something in translation. Sometimes it just loses the rhyme,

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Speaker 1: like these are the connections between words that make a

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Speaker 1: fanciful story makes sense? But anyway, that the broader point

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Speaker 1: here is that the contents of our narratives, our folk tales,

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Speaker 1: and our religions are influenced by the underlying capabilities and

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Speaker 1: biases of our brains. So just one crazy example of this,

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Speaker 1: all other things being equal, you probably would not expect

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Speaker 1: a religion that offered a reward in the afterlife for

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Speaker 1: good behavior of being thrown into a notion of spiders.

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Speaker 1: And there's a reason for that. People have enough of

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Speaker 1: a natural dislike of spiders that this type of religion

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Speaker 1: would not be successful. The human brain is not fertile

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Speaker 1: soil in which to grow that myth, right, It just

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Speaker 1: naturally grows some types of content better than others based

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Speaker 1: on natural predispositions, capabilities, and biases of the brain. So

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Speaker 1: the authors are pushing a hypothesis in this paper about

429
00:23:23,400 --> 00:23:27,639
Speaker 1: one possible relationship between memory cognition and the success of

430
00:23:27,800 --> 00:23:32,560
Speaker 1: narratives like religious myths. They write, quote, we hypothesize that

431
00:23:32,760 --> 00:23:38,920
Speaker 1: narratives combining mostly intuitive concepts with a minority of counterintuitive

432
00:23:38,920 --> 00:23:43,240
Speaker 1: ones enjoy a memory advantage and as a result, achieve

433
00:23:43,359 --> 00:23:47,000
Speaker 1: cultural success. Such a m c I template. An m

434
00:23:47,080 --> 00:23:51,280
Speaker 1: c I stands for minimally counterintuitive, a little bit counterintuitive,

435
00:23:51,440 --> 00:23:56,880
Speaker 1: not totally counterintuitive. Such an MCI template. Maybe no accident. Indeed,

436
00:23:56,920 --> 00:23:59,600
Speaker 1: we propose that it may be a recipe for cultural

437
00:23:59,600 --> 00:24:03,680
Speaker 1: success us compared to narratives that fit other templates, for example,

438
00:24:04,040 --> 00:24:09,320
Speaker 1: no counterintuitive concepts at all, or many counterintuitive concepts, those

439
00:24:09,359 --> 00:24:14,160
Speaker 1: that are minimally counterintuitive, maybe especially memorable, and therefore more

440
00:24:14,240 --> 00:24:17,720
Speaker 1: likely to achieve cultural stability. Alright, So it's not a

441
00:24:17,760 --> 00:24:20,000
Speaker 1: situation where it's like going to the movie, right, the

442
00:24:20,040 --> 00:24:23,600
Speaker 1: movie is not just an accurate depiction of real life

443
00:24:23,920 --> 00:24:26,359
Speaker 1: that would be so boring, right, But it's also not

444
00:24:26,480 --> 00:24:31,840
Speaker 1: just so bonkers that it's just complete surrealism, which granted

445
00:24:31,880 --> 00:24:34,200
Speaker 1: can be great, give but but but it's that middle

446
00:24:34,200 --> 00:24:37,280
Speaker 1: ground that's where you're gonna find the really successful films. Right.

447
00:24:37,480 --> 00:24:40,440
Speaker 1: It's where every most everything is pretty mundane, but there's

448
00:24:40,520 --> 00:24:42,960
Speaker 1: there's some element that's out of out of whack. There's

449
00:24:42,960 --> 00:24:45,760
Speaker 1: a mysterious stranger that's not what they seem, you know.

450
00:24:46,000 --> 00:24:49,680
Speaker 1: I often think about how there are there are versions

451
00:24:49,720 --> 00:24:52,200
Speaker 1: of this that work at various levels of narrative that

452
00:24:52,280 --> 00:24:55,760
Speaker 1: contribute to their how aesthetically pleasing they are. One thing

453
00:24:55,800 --> 00:25:00,760
Speaker 1: I think about is the realism of dialogue character. Sometimes

454
00:25:00,840 --> 00:25:03,400
Speaker 1: people say I love the way that characters in this

455
00:25:03,440 --> 00:25:06,480
Speaker 1: movie talk how people really talk. The characters in that

456
00:25:06,520 --> 00:25:09,080
Speaker 1: movie did not talk how people really talk. If they

457
00:25:09,119 --> 00:25:11,840
Speaker 1: actually talked how people really talked, you would be so

458
00:25:11,960 --> 00:25:15,600
Speaker 1: bored you would think the movie was terrible. People do

459
00:25:15,680 --> 00:25:19,600
Speaker 1: not talk in deliverable dialogue that drives a plot. What

460
00:25:19,680 --> 00:25:23,240
Speaker 1: you probably mean is they talked in an unnatural way

461
00:25:23,280 --> 00:25:27,439
Speaker 1: that was just barely unnatural enough to be interesting, but

462
00:25:27,600 --> 00:25:30,760
Speaker 1: not so unnatural that it felt false, the way bad

463
00:25:30,840 --> 00:25:33,600
Speaker 1: dialogue in a movie often does. And of course it's

464
00:25:33,640 --> 00:25:35,800
Speaker 1: easy to to just to to go to examples that

465
00:25:35,880 --> 00:25:38,119
Speaker 1: have like a speculative element that's thrown in like everything

466
00:25:38,200 --> 00:25:40,719
Speaker 1: is normal except one character's magic. But but it can

467
00:25:40,720 --> 00:25:43,479
Speaker 1: also work in other ways to right where there's an

468
00:25:43,480 --> 00:25:48,199
Speaker 1: inversion of of character, like the you know, the village

469
00:25:48,240 --> 00:25:52,600
Speaker 1: priest is actually evil as opposed to good, and you know,

470
00:25:52,680 --> 00:25:55,240
Speaker 1: whatever the expectation might be like that the character that

471
00:25:55,320 --> 00:25:58,960
Speaker 1: is that is expected to behave in one way morally

472
00:25:59,160 --> 00:26:04,639
Speaker 1: behaves another way. Yeah, get aesthetically pleasing narratives are surprising enough,

473
00:26:04,880 --> 00:26:08,800
Speaker 1: but they can't be too surprising otherwise you just stop

474
00:26:08,880 --> 00:26:12,320
Speaker 1: being able to appreciate them as narratives. You want to

475
00:26:12,400 --> 00:26:14,840
Speaker 1: keep with It's like they say, you want to keep

476
00:26:14,880 --> 00:26:16,560
Speaker 1: one foot on the ground, right, you don't want to

477
00:26:16,600 --> 00:26:18,440
Speaker 1: keep both feet on the ground. And likewise you don't

478
00:26:18,440 --> 00:26:23,000
Speaker 1: want both feet just floating free. So but in this uh,

479
00:26:23,320 --> 00:26:25,879
Speaker 1: we've been using the idea loosely here for a moment.

480
00:26:26,000 --> 00:26:30,800
Speaker 1: What in the literature itself makes a concept intuitive or counterintuitive?

481
00:26:31,359 --> 00:26:33,960
Speaker 1: And so the author's right quote. As several psychologists and

482
00:26:34,000 --> 00:26:37,399
Speaker 1: anthropologists have noted, the key is whether the concept is

483
00:26:37,440 --> 00:26:43,159
Speaker 1: consistent with or violates ontological assumptions about the properties of

484
00:26:43,320 --> 00:26:47,040
Speaker 1: ordinary objects. So they're going with this idea of ontologies,

485
00:26:47,119 --> 00:26:51,440
Speaker 1: and all that means is how things normally work, right. Um.

486
00:26:52,080 --> 00:26:55,080
Speaker 1: The one trope I'm instantly reminded of is just the

487
00:26:55,080 --> 00:26:57,400
Speaker 1: the with a heart of gold trope, you know, because

488
00:26:57,440 --> 00:27:00,840
Speaker 1: there's she's a prostitute with a of gold, he's a

489
00:27:00,840 --> 00:27:04,440
Speaker 1: prostitute with a heart of gold. Their assassins with hearts

490
00:27:04,480 --> 00:27:07,399
Speaker 1: of gold. Uh, you know that's the you see that

491
00:27:07,440 --> 00:27:10,879
Speaker 1: spend time and time again, right um? Or one of

492
00:27:10,960 --> 00:27:13,160
Speaker 1: my favorite recent ones, even though I never actually watched

493
00:27:13,200 --> 00:27:15,560
Speaker 1: the show. I just really love the trailers. He's not

494
00:27:15,600 --> 00:27:18,639
Speaker 1: just a pope, he's a young pope. Popes aren't supposed

495
00:27:18,640 --> 00:27:20,440
Speaker 1: to be young. I know, and I want to find

496
00:27:20,440 --> 00:27:24,159
Speaker 1: out just how young is this pope. He's a baby,

497
00:27:24,480 --> 00:27:27,560
Speaker 1: baby Pope. I'd watch baby Pope. Actually that's not a

498
00:27:27,600 --> 00:27:31,200
Speaker 1: bad idea. They had Boss Baby. Um what does boss Baby?

499
00:27:31,320 --> 00:27:33,159
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know. I just know it exists. Um,

500
00:27:34,000 --> 00:27:36,880
Speaker 1: you have that movie where the horse played professional football.

501
00:27:37,000 --> 00:27:38,879
Speaker 1: I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, yeah, like

502
00:27:39,240 --> 00:27:42,639
Speaker 1: was it like Airbud he was? Yeah, basically the Airbud trope,

503
00:27:43,280 --> 00:27:45,320
Speaker 1: but this was a horse that was, due to some

504
00:27:45,359 --> 00:27:47,200
Speaker 1: sort of loophole and the rules, was able to play

505
00:27:47,280 --> 00:27:50,159
Speaker 1: professional football, and maybe was college football. So this is

506
00:27:50,200 --> 00:27:54,360
Speaker 1: not exactly what the author there talking about, but it's

507
00:27:54,359 --> 00:27:58,000
Speaker 1: pretty close. So they're basically a few different types of

508
00:27:58,000 --> 00:28:01,560
Speaker 1: intuitive ontologies that govern our basic understanding of the world

509
00:28:01,640 --> 00:28:04,800
Speaker 1: at several levels, and the author's list for example, our

510
00:28:04,840 --> 00:28:08,520
Speaker 1: intuitive theory of physics. This is the ontology of our

511
00:28:08,560 --> 00:28:12,639
Speaker 1: basic understanding of how objects and energy work. Uh, this

512
00:28:12,720 --> 00:28:15,040
Speaker 1: is the intuitive theory you used to conclude that a

513
00:28:15,119 --> 00:28:18,000
Speaker 1: brick will sink in water and not float, or to

514
00:28:18,080 --> 00:28:21,600
Speaker 1: conclude that a falling snowflake won't land with enough forced

515
00:28:21,640 --> 00:28:24,240
Speaker 1: to pierce a hole in your skull. Right, then you've

516
00:28:24,280 --> 00:28:27,280
Speaker 1: got the intuitive theory of biology, and this is our

517
00:28:27,280 --> 00:28:31,280
Speaker 1: basic understanding of life forms. This one will intuitively tell

518
00:28:31,320 --> 00:28:34,760
Speaker 1: you that trees do not speak French, and sharks can't

519
00:28:34,880 --> 00:28:37,320
Speaker 1: walk up onto the beach and bite you off your towel,

520
00:28:37,640 --> 00:28:40,520
Speaker 1: and snails don't live to be thirty seven million years old.

521
00:28:41,160 --> 00:28:43,360
Speaker 1: And then you've got your theory of mind. And this

522
00:28:43,480 --> 00:28:47,000
Speaker 1: ontology tells you that, for example, other people can have

523
00:28:47,080 --> 00:28:50,160
Speaker 1: both true and false beliefs, and they can't read your mind,

524
00:28:50,360 --> 00:28:52,800
Speaker 1: but they can see where you're looking with your eyes,

525
00:28:52,920 --> 00:28:56,040
Speaker 1: and they can imagine what you're thinking based on external clues.

526
00:28:56,480 --> 00:28:58,360
Speaker 1: And if you write any of these theories, you you

527
00:28:58,480 --> 00:29:02,280
Speaker 1: instantly find yourself when dealing with narrative elements right now, Yeah,

528
00:29:02,360 --> 00:29:04,720
Speaker 1: you break physics, theory of physics, and then you have superpowers,

529
00:29:04,760 --> 00:29:07,480
Speaker 1: you have miracles. You you you break the theory of

530
00:29:07,480 --> 00:29:10,880
Speaker 1: biology and you get magical creatures and immortal bodies, and

531
00:29:11,120 --> 00:29:13,920
Speaker 1: you break theory of mind and you get things like psychics. Yeah,

532
00:29:13,960 --> 00:29:17,240
Speaker 1: it's almost it's kind of telling, isn't it That anytime

533
00:29:17,280 --> 00:29:18,920
Speaker 1: you come up with an idea of breaking one of

534
00:29:18,960 --> 00:29:22,680
Speaker 1: these intuitive ontologies, you instantly have what sounds like a

535
00:29:22,760 --> 00:29:26,120
Speaker 1: concept for a story. Isn't that odd? Now? The author

536
00:29:26,200 --> 00:29:28,440
Speaker 1: is right that there are some minor cultural differences in

537
00:29:28,440 --> 00:29:32,200
Speaker 1: how these ontologies work, like different cultures sometimes have slightly

538
00:29:32,200 --> 00:29:35,800
Speaker 1: different beliefs about theory of mind or biology. But then again,

539
00:29:35,880 --> 00:29:39,000
Speaker 1: some bottom level elements of these theories appears so early

540
00:29:39,000 --> 00:29:42,000
Speaker 1: in development and are found in so many different cultures

541
00:29:42,000 --> 00:29:43,640
Speaker 1: that it looks like they might be more sort of

542
00:29:43,720 --> 00:29:47,240
Speaker 1: hard coded instincts from primitive parts of the brain, more

543
00:29:47,280 --> 00:29:50,680
Speaker 1: so than culturally conditioned belief And the examples that the

544
00:29:50,680 --> 00:29:53,680
Speaker 1: authors give or studies that have found evidence that babies

545
00:29:53,760 --> 00:29:57,520
Speaker 1: as young as four months old already show expectations based

546
00:29:57,560 --> 00:30:00,959
Speaker 1: on some core aspects of our theory of physics. For example,

547
00:30:01,000 --> 00:30:03,600
Speaker 1: they've got the idea of a solid object, and they

548
00:30:04,040 --> 00:30:07,160
Speaker 1: clearly do not expect one solid object to be able

549
00:30:07,160 --> 00:30:10,400
Speaker 1: to pass through another solid object, and they also do

550
00:30:10,480 --> 00:30:13,000
Speaker 1: not expect that a solid object can be in more

551
00:30:13,000 --> 00:30:15,760
Speaker 1: than one place at a time. Yeah, I mean children

552
00:30:15,800 --> 00:30:19,000
Speaker 1: have an innate number, since each one is a natural

553
00:30:19,040 --> 00:30:22,640
Speaker 1: Euclidean born to navigate a three dimensional world of fixed

554
00:30:22,640 --> 00:30:26,040
Speaker 1: and movable objects. In other words, we start utilizing geometry

555
00:30:26,080 --> 00:30:29,320
Speaker 1: before we can even name things. We don't understand wall

556
00:30:29,440 --> 00:30:31,880
Speaker 1: or cat, but we already can think in geometric terms.

557
00:30:32,680 --> 00:30:36,640
Speaker 1: For instance, kids will use geometric clues to navigate through rooms,

558
00:30:37,200 --> 00:30:39,560
Speaker 1: uh and uh. And given all the means of navigating

559
00:30:39,600 --> 00:30:42,440
Speaker 1: their environment, they're most likely to use lengths of walls

560
00:30:42,920 --> 00:30:45,160
Speaker 1: in a room to remember where a toy is hidden,

561
00:30:45,280 --> 00:30:48,800
Speaker 1: rather than color or decoration. We're also born within anate

562
00:30:48,840 --> 00:30:53,040
Speaker 1: understanding of basic physical laws. Only adults believe in magic. Well,

563
00:30:53,520 --> 00:30:56,840
Speaker 1: toddler will see right through all of the supernatural. There

564
00:30:56,880 --> 00:30:58,840
Speaker 1: was actually an m T study that even found out

565
00:30:58,840 --> 00:31:02,840
Speaker 1: that young children understand it teleportation is not feasible. Yeah,

566
00:31:02,960 --> 00:31:05,200
Speaker 1: I mean it makes you wonder how much of our

567
00:31:05,320 --> 00:31:09,240
Speaker 1: understanding about the world, like our coded our coded knowledge

568
00:31:09,280 --> 00:31:12,840
Speaker 1: about how things work is actually instinctual, like a kid

569
00:31:12,840 --> 00:31:16,320
Speaker 1: would know it without ever having to observe anything. Yeah,

570
00:31:16,680 --> 00:31:18,920
Speaker 1: like just sort of the basics of gravity, you know,

571
00:31:18,960 --> 00:31:21,600
Speaker 1: I mean, that is the environment that we have evolved

572
00:31:21,600 --> 00:31:24,200
Speaker 1: to thrive it. Yeah, that's going to be an interesting

573
00:31:24,240 --> 00:31:26,960
Speaker 1: study when for the first time, when children are brought

574
00:31:27,040 --> 00:31:30,600
Speaker 1: up in space in microgravity environments. Though actually that might

575
00:31:30,640 --> 00:31:32,880
Speaker 1: be a really bad idea because that could disrupt development

576
00:31:32,880 --> 00:31:34,880
Speaker 1: and everything like that. But just assuming it were to

577
00:31:35,000 --> 00:31:38,080
Speaker 1: happen somehow, you'd wonder would those kids have an intuitive

578
00:31:38,160 --> 00:31:40,720
Speaker 1: understanding of how gravity worked back on Earth? Would it

579
00:31:40,760 --> 00:31:44,240
Speaker 1: be that built in? Also, the authors of this paper

580
00:31:44,320 --> 00:31:47,720
Speaker 1: right that preschool aged kids in most cultures already have

581
00:31:47,880 --> 00:31:51,400
Speaker 1: a common set of biological intuitions. For example, they know

582
00:31:51,440 --> 00:31:55,480
Speaker 1: that making superficial alterations to an animal doesn't alter what

583
00:31:55,600 --> 00:31:58,200
Speaker 1: kind of species it is, So they know that you

584
00:31:58,240 --> 00:32:00,440
Speaker 1: can't just like put a put a care it on

585
00:32:00,440 --> 00:32:02,760
Speaker 1: a horse's head and make it a unicorn. It's still

586
00:32:02,800 --> 00:32:06,400
Speaker 1: a horse. Also, children from preschool age typically have a

587
00:32:06,440 --> 00:32:09,680
Speaker 1: basic theory of mind. The classic example is understanding that

588
00:32:09,720 --> 00:32:13,320
Speaker 1: other people can have false beliefs. Kind of a profound

589
00:32:13,320 --> 00:32:16,920
Speaker 1: thing to realize. Do you remember realizing that, Robert? I

590
00:32:16,960 --> 00:32:19,880
Speaker 1: mean it might have come from having younger siblings, you know.

591
00:32:20,400 --> 00:32:23,080
Speaker 1: I feel like that that might be the area where

592
00:32:23,080 --> 00:32:25,560
Speaker 1: those those kind of ideas are initially introduced, you know,

593
00:32:26,680 --> 00:32:29,280
Speaker 1: where you're you're told you're younger sibling does not know

594
00:32:29,560 --> 00:32:31,880
Speaker 1: not to touch this hot surface, you know, and then

595
00:32:31,920 --> 00:32:35,200
Speaker 1: therefore there might be some false belief baked into their

596
00:32:35,560 --> 00:32:40,080
Speaker 1: understanding of their immediate surroundings. Yeah, I wonder, well, anyway,

597
00:32:40,120 --> 00:32:43,960
Speaker 1: so the authors observed that despite how universal or near

598
00:32:44,160 --> 00:32:47,600
Speaker 1: universal these beliefs are, our folk tales and religious mythologies

599
00:32:47,640 --> 00:32:50,720
Speaker 1: are full of stories and images that violate these ontologies.

600
00:32:50,760 --> 00:32:53,840
Speaker 1: We were just talking about this. Anytime you you just

601
00:32:54,360 --> 00:32:57,960
Speaker 1: say something that violates the ontology, immediately it sounds like

602
00:32:58,000 --> 00:33:00,280
Speaker 1: a story and not just like a concept. But you

603
00:33:00,320 --> 00:33:03,360
Speaker 1: want to tell a story about it. Frogs that can talk,

604
00:33:03,760 --> 00:33:07,000
Speaker 1: people that can pass through walls like ghosts, or people

605
00:33:07,000 --> 00:33:09,520
Speaker 1: who can read minds or otherwise have knowledge of that

606
00:33:09,600 --> 00:33:13,000
Speaker 1: they couldn't access. Uh, nasty old Richmond who are capable

607
00:33:13,000 --> 00:33:15,960
Speaker 1: of change from Christmas, I can't. I kept thinking of

608
00:33:16,000 --> 00:33:18,200
Speaker 1: that one in the research. You know, Christmas Carol and

609
00:33:18,280 --> 00:33:22,160
Speaker 1: Scrooge Oh I'm kind of a Christmas Carol lover. Actually, Oh,

610
00:33:22,200 --> 00:33:24,520
Speaker 1: I mean, you can't help but love it. But I

611
00:33:24,800 --> 00:33:27,040
Speaker 1: did kep keep thinking of it. You know, It's like, ultimately,

612
00:33:27,200 --> 00:33:30,600
Speaker 1: is is it just this story where the the the

613
00:33:30,640 --> 00:33:33,959
Speaker 1: one area of inversion, the one area that is um

614
00:33:34,160 --> 00:33:37,240
Speaker 1: that's counterintuitive is that Scrooge was capable of turning his

615
00:33:37,320 --> 00:33:41,080
Speaker 1: life around and changing, whereas I in many cases, reality

616
00:33:41,080 --> 00:33:44,120
Speaker 1: would seem to indicate that it's the opposite. With old,

617
00:33:44,200 --> 00:33:48,120
Speaker 1: nasty rich people I'm just throwing that out there. I'll

618
00:33:48,120 --> 00:33:51,000
Speaker 1: probably come back to that idea again. Well, let's let's

619
00:33:51,000 --> 00:33:53,760
Speaker 1: get there. I mean, so, the question is, why do

620
00:33:53,880 --> 00:33:57,440
Speaker 1: so many popular narratives like mythology, folk tales and so forth,

621
00:33:57,760 --> 00:34:00,440
Speaker 1: why do they always violate our on tall jeez? Why

622
00:34:00,520 --> 00:34:03,200
Speaker 1: is that just intuitive to us at this point that oh,

623
00:34:03,280 --> 00:34:05,560
Speaker 1: if you say a frog that can talk, that's a story.

624
00:34:06,560 --> 00:34:09,880
Speaker 1: And why do almost all of our most popular stories

625
00:34:09,920 --> 00:34:13,800
Speaker 1: do stuff like that? The idea of realistic narratives is

626
00:34:13,840 --> 00:34:17,080
Speaker 1: actually kind of an unusual thing. And in the history

627
00:34:17,120 --> 00:34:20,200
Speaker 1: of successful folk tales and narratives, yeah, I mean I

628
00:34:20,239 --> 00:34:23,239
Speaker 1: remember in uh, in creative writing classes where the you know,

629
00:34:23,280 --> 00:34:25,360
Speaker 1: they would drive home just because it really happened doesn't

630
00:34:25,360 --> 00:34:29,319
Speaker 1: mean it's interesting, right, which which is is true. But

631
00:34:29,480 --> 00:34:31,839
Speaker 1: I think one of the most obvious answers would be novelty, right.

632
00:34:32,120 --> 00:34:35,160
Speaker 1: I mean, we we we we create the idea of

633
00:34:35,200 --> 00:34:37,600
Speaker 1: the black swan even before we know what it acts,

634
00:34:37,600 --> 00:34:41,759
Speaker 1: that it actually exists, um and and and mentioning that

635
00:34:41,760 --> 00:34:47,200
Speaker 1: I'm touching on NASA Nicholas Taleb's black Swan theory, um,

636
00:34:47,320 --> 00:34:51,320
Speaker 1: the idea that major black Swan events are the norm.

637
00:34:51,680 --> 00:34:54,240
Speaker 1: Uh and uh and and also the problem of induction

638
00:34:54,280 --> 00:34:57,439
Speaker 1: induction here, So I wonder if we're drawn to these

639
00:34:57,520 --> 00:35:00,640
Speaker 1: novel ideas because human existence kind of demands that we

640
00:35:00,680 --> 00:35:03,440
Speaker 1: both move forward with expectations based on the known world,

641
00:35:03,440 --> 00:35:06,239
Speaker 1: but with an openness to the possible inversions that shake

642
00:35:06,320 --> 00:35:09,120
Speaker 1: everything up. So, you know, it basically comes back to

643
00:35:09,120 --> 00:35:12,120
Speaker 1: the tiger in the grass and the high grass and

644
00:35:12,200 --> 00:35:14,960
Speaker 1: when and how we're going to judge the sound of

645
00:35:15,000 --> 00:35:17,319
Speaker 1: a snapping twig. Oh, I didn't expect us to come

646
00:35:17,320 --> 00:35:21,000
Speaker 1: back and make a connection between minimally counterintuitive ideas and

647
00:35:21,160 --> 00:35:24,799
Speaker 1: UH and the hyperactive agency detection. But I can see

648
00:35:24,800 --> 00:35:27,200
Speaker 1: a through line there, and I also can't you know,

649
00:35:27,239 --> 00:35:29,160
Speaker 1: I can't help it, but think about the the idea

650
00:35:29,280 --> 00:35:33,920
Speaker 1: that inversions end up highlighting the reality. Right, So by

651
00:35:34,000 --> 00:35:36,719
Speaker 1: having a story in which Scrooge is able to turn

652
00:35:36,719 --> 00:35:39,200
Speaker 1: his life around, it just kind of also drives home

653
00:35:39,239 --> 00:35:42,520
Speaker 1: that most people don't, you know, by having somebody that

654
00:35:42,560 --> 00:35:46,560
Speaker 1: acts heroically, like truly heroically, it's kind of reminded that, well,

655
00:35:46,600 --> 00:35:48,839
Speaker 1: most people are not heroes and would not do this.

656
00:35:49,160 --> 00:35:51,880
Speaker 1: It's not how you see how things could be otherwise

657
00:35:51,920 --> 00:35:54,360
Speaker 1: that you recognize how things are. Yeah, but you have

658
00:35:54,400 --> 00:35:57,200
Speaker 1: another possible answer here. Oh well, yeah, So the authors

659
00:35:57,640 --> 00:36:00,000
Speaker 1: here are drawing on a bunch of research over the years.

660
00:36:00,040 --> 00:36:03,560
Speaker 1: It's indicated a couple of things. First of all, there

661
00:36:03,760 --> 00:36:08,480
Speaker 1: is the indications that sometimes it appears that people are

662
00:36:08,560 --> 00:36:14,400
Speaker 1: better able to remember counterintuitive ideas than intuitive ideas. So

663
00:36:14,560 --> 00:36:18,520
Speaker 1: you tell somebody a frog that talks, they'll remember that

664
00:36:18,600 --> 00:36:23,200
Speaker 1: item better than you saying a frog that jumps, right.

665
00:36:23,239 --> 00:36:27,320
Speaker 1: A frog that jumps is not memorable. Right. But then again,

666
00:36:27,480 --> 00:36:30,120
Speaker 1: in recent years before the study, other research has made

667
00:36:30,120 --> 00:36:32,279
Speaker 1: it clear that there there's some pressure coming from the

668
00:36:32,320 --> 00:36:36,719
Speaker 1: other side that while some counterintuitive content makes ideas and

669
00:36:36,840 --> 00:36:40,319
Speaker 1: narratives more transmissible and easier to remember, there's also a

670
00:36:40,360 --> 00:36:44,440
Speaker 1: limit to this benefit. So some examples of this balance,

671
00:36:44,520 --> 00:36:47,640
Speaker 1: like ghosts and spirits are one of the most popular

672
00:36:47,719 --> 00:36:51,919
Speaker 1: narrative subjects in history, but they've basically got the properties

673
00:36:52,000 --> 00:36:56,200
Speaker 1: of a person except somewhat counterintuitive, like ghosts have the

674
00:36:56,239 --> 00:36:59,800
Speaker 1: powers that humans do not have, like moving through wall,

675
00:37:00,160 --> 00:37:04,479
Speaker 1: but otherwise they behave is quote, ordinary intentional agents. Well,

676
00:37:04,520 --> 00:37:07,240
Speaker 1: with ghosts, you guys, you can make the argument that uh,

677
00:37:07,280 --> 00:37:10,080
Speaker 1: any of like the ghostly details like that's all just fluff.

678
00:37:10,600 --> 00:37:13,520
Speaker 1: The basic mechanics are just it is a person without

679
00:37:13,719 --> 00:37:17,920
Speaker 1: physical substance. Yeah, exactly. Another example the author's site of

680
00:37:17,960 --> 00:37:22,160
Speaker 1: how people tend to limit the counterintuitive features of of

681
00:37:22,400 --> 00:37:25,200
Speaker 1: things they believe in is that research by Barrett and

682
00:37:25,280 --> 00:37:31,759
Speaker 1: Kyle in nineteen found quote people spontaneously anthropomorphize God in

683
00:37:31,800 --> 00:37:37,560
Speaker 1: their reasoning, even if doing so contradicts their stated theological beliefs.

684
00:37:37,600 --> 00:37:40,080
Speaker 1: So while they don't, you know, they don't think that

685
00:37:40,160 --> 00:37:43,520
Speaker 1: God is like a normal person. When they don't remember

686
00:37:43,560 --> 00:37:46,120
Speaker 1: to limit themselves from doing so, they tend to think

687
00:37:46,160 --> 00:37:48,919
Speaker 1: of God as a normal person, but just with great

688
00:37:48,960 --> 00:37:52,960
Speaker 1: supernatural powers. And these types of limits on the wildness

689
00:37:52,960 --> 00:37:56,279
Speaker 1: of supernatural elements also seem to be present in existing

690
00:37:56,320 --> 00:38:00,239
Speaker 1: cultural narratives. Just one example, an existing study of its

691
00:38:00,320 --> 00:38:04,000
Speaker 1: metamorphosis from Kelly and Kyle in nineteen eighty five found

692
00:38:04,000 --> 00:38:06,520
Speaker 1: that even though there were a lot of magic transformations

693
00:38:06,520 --> 00:38:09,200
Speaker 1: of people and things, it was much more common to

694
00:38:09,360 --> 00:38:12,960
Speaker 1: transform a person into, say, an animal, than it was

695
00:38:13,000 --> 00:38:16,160
Speaker 1: to transform them into an an inanimate object. That was

696
00:38:16,200 --> 00:38:19,520
Speaker 1: sort of less of a violation of their ontology. But

697
00:38:19,640 --> 00:38:21,799
Speaker 1: this reminds me of the children's books Sylvester and the

698
00:38:21,800 --> 00:38:24,040
Speaker 1: Magic Pebble. I wish I may have mentioned on the

699
00:38:24,040 --> 00:38:27,560
Speaker 1: show before. Um, it's an award winning children's book about

700
00:38:27,560 --> 00:38:30,800
Speaker 1: a donkey who obtains the magic pebble, and the magic

701
00:38:30,800 --> 00:38:34,920
Speaker 1: pebble allows you to grants your wishes essentially, and the

702
00:38:35,160 --> 00:38:37,759
Speaker 1: donkey ends up being turned into a stone, and then

703
00:38:37,760 --> 00:38:40,000
Speaker 1: the pebble falls and rolls away from him and he

704
00:38:40,080 --> 00:38:44,040
Speaker 1: stuck as the stone. Oh yeah, it's and it's it's

705
00:38:44,120 --> 00:38:47,680
Speaker 1: kind of a traumatic story to read. It's really good,

706
00:38:47,960 --> 00:38:50,719
Speaker 1: but I remember reading it to my son when he

707
00:38:50,760 --> 00:38:53,680
Speaker 1: was he was really young, and I feel like it

708
00:38:53,760 --> 00:38:56,760
Speaker 1: was difficult to get across this idea that a donkey

709
00:38:56,800 --> 00:38:59,400
Speaker 1: turned into rock, not not a rock that looks like

710
00:38:59,440 --> 00:39:01,520
Speaker 1: a donkey, just a rock that looks like a rock.

711
00:39:02,160 --> 00:39:06,839
Speaker 1: Whereas stories of people turning into animals, donkey cabbages. Yeah, yeah,

712
00:39:07,120 --> 00:39:10,600
Speaker 1: those make I feel like those were more easily transferred

713
00:39:10,600 --> 00:39:12,439
Speaker 1: to him, you know, like he was able to buy

714
00:39:12,480 --> 00:39:14,719
Speaker 1: into those stories a lot easier. Where this idea of

715
00:39:14,760 --> 00:39:18,799
Speaker 1: the pebble turning the donkey into just a rock and

716
00:39:18,800 --> 00:39:21,279
Speaker 1: then somehow the rock was still conscious of everything it

717
00:39:21,400 --> 00:39:23,879
Speaker 1: was it was kind of a confusing magic to try

718
00:39:23,920 --> 00:39:26,279
Speaker 1: and relate to him. Yeah, I mean, I'm there with you,

719
00:39:26,400 --> 00:39:28,719
Speaker 1: like turning into a donkey that makes sense, turning into

720
00:39:28,760 --> 00:39:32,879
Speaker 1: a rock, I don't know. Uh. So the authors write

721
00:39:32,880 --> 00:39:35,719
Speaker 1: how Barrett and Niehoff in two thousand one tested how

722
00:39:35,800 --> 00:39:39,040
Speaker 1: well people could remember and retell stories, and these stories

723
00:39:39,040 --> 00:39:42,200
Speaker 1: were broken down by how much they contained objects or

724
00:39:42,200 --> 00:39:46,320
Speaker 1: ideas in three different categories. So you've got intuitive, normal stuff,

725
00:39:46,640 --> 00:39:50,560
Speaker 1: intuitive but bizarre, this is weird stuff that doesn't violate ontologies,

726
00:39:50,560 --> 00:39:54,359
Speaker 1: and then counterintuitive stuff that does violate ontologies. And they

727
00:39:54,360 --> 00:39:58,319
Speaker 1: found that after retelling the story through three generations of transmission,

728
00:39:58,600 --> 00:40:02,640
Speaker 1: people remembered and passed on counterintuitive ideas better than simple

729
00:40:02,680 --> 00:40:06,560
Speaker 1: intuitive ones. And after three months, participants could still recall

730
00:40:06,719 --> 00:40:11,280
Speaker 1: minimally counterintuitive elements better than other elements. And this delay

731
00:40:11,480 --> 00:40:14,240
Speaker 1: is an important part because how do stories get passed

732
00:40:14,280 --> 00:40:17,520
Speaker 1: on in the wild. Right when you retell a story

733
00:40:17,600 --> 00:40:20,279
Speaker 1: to somebody, you don't usually tell it right after you

734
00:40:20,360 --> 00:40:23,839
Speaker 1: heard it. Right, You've had some time to ruminate on

735
00:40:23,880 --> 00:40:27,200
Speaker 1: it and embellish it, both intentionally but also just through

736
00:40:27,360 --> 00:40:30,960
Speaker 1: the the flaws of our memory systems. Yeah, memory mechanisms.

737
00:40:31,000 --> 00:40:33,680
Speaker 1: I mean, we've talked recently in uh for example, the

738
00:40:33,680 --> 00:40:36,680
Speaker 1: Illusory Truth episodes about the ways that we edit our

739
00:40:36,719 --> 00:40:39,880
Speaker 1: memories just by remembering them, right, and these are memories

740
00:40:39,880 --> 00:40:42,759
Speaker 1: of things that actually happened as opposed to stories. I'm

741
00:40:42,800 --> 00:40:48,640
Speaker 1: reminded of Carl Sagan writing about how how quickly an

742
00:40:48,719 --> 00:40:52,920
Speaker 1: historical account became a tale of ancient high magic, like

743
00:40:53,040 --> 00:40:57,200
Speaker 1: while the actual historic individuals were still alive. Oh yeah, yeah,

744
00:40:57,239 --> 00:40:59,759
Speaker 1: that came up in the story. I don't remember it was.

745
00:41:00,080 --> 00:41:04,680
Speaker 1: I think it was a European uh account, I don't remember.

746
00:41:05,239 --> 00:41:08,160
Speaker 1: We went into this in I think Our Ancient Aliens episodes.

747
00:41:08,960 --> 00:41:12,399
Speaker 1: But he was talking about just how unreliable of many

748
00:41:12,400 --> 00:41:15,520
Speaker 1: of these folk tales or fairy tales and legends could

749
00:41:15,520 --> 00:41:18,799
Speaker 1: be in trying to find some nugget of the fantastic,

750
00:41:18,840 --> 00:41:22,399
Speaker 1: because they could very well just be completely embellished from

751
00:41:22,400 --> 00:41:25,560
Speaker 1: a very mundane incident just in the course of a

752
00:41:25,640 --> 00:41:28,880
Speaker 1: decade or or thereabouts. Right, So, given what seemed to

753
00:41:28,920 --> 00:41:31,120
Speaker 1: be the case from the existing literature, where people are

754
00:41:31,160 --> 00:41:35,440
Speaker 1: more likely to remember things that are somewhat counterintuitive than

755
00:41:35,480 --> 00:41:38,440
Speaker 1: they are to remember just totally mundane intuitive things, and

756
00:41:38,480 --> 00:41:42,080
Speaker 1: at the same time are seem less likely to retell

757
00:41:42,160 --> 00:41:45,480
Speaker 1: stories that are just full of counterintuitive stuff, you know,

758
00:41:45,560 --> 00:41:48,279
Speaker 1: crammed to the gills with it. Is it the case

759
00:41:48,360 --> 00:41:52,520
Speaker 1: that there's a cognitive selection pressure in favor of m

760
00:41:52,560 --> 00:41:56,759
Speaker 1: C I are minimally counterintuitive elements and stories? Are we

761
00:41:56,800 --> 00:42:00,160
Speaker 1: more likely to remember and transmit ideas that violate our

762
00:42:00,200 --> 00:42:03,879
Speaker 1: intologies a little bit but don't violate them too much?

763
00:42:04,760 --> 00:42:07,600
Speaker 1: Is there a sweet spot for the kind of narrative

764
00:42:07,920 --> 00:42:10,640
Speaker 1: that makes it through our brains to the next generation

765
00:42:10,640 --> 00:42:14,000
Speaker 1: of retelling and gets retold. Now, one thing that the

766
00:42:14,000 --> 00:42:16,040
Speaker 1: author's wonder about, and you've got to wonder about, is

767
00:42:16,120 --> 00:42:19,200
Speaker 1: if the hypothesis is correct that people are more likely

768
00:42:19,239 --> 00:42:24,680
Speaker 1: to remember minimally counterintuitive things. Why don't minimally counterintuitive elements

769
00:42:24,760 --> 00:42:28,680
Speaker 1: just dominate successful cultural narratives even more than they do,

770
00:42:28,880 --> 00:42:34,200
Speaker 1: Like many popular myths, legends, and folk tales contain these elements,

771
00:42:34,239 --> 00:42:38,319
Speaker 1: but they're outnumbered by mundane intuitive concepts. I mean, think about,

772
00:42:39,000 --> 00:42:41,680
Speaker 1: for example, stories in the Bible. Stories in the Bible

773
00:42:41,680 --> 00:42:45,080
Speaker 1: are actually mostly mundane if you read them, they're they're

774
00:42:45,080 --> 00:42:51,000
Speaker 1: you know, long mundane narratives with occasional punctuations of counterintuitive

775
00:42:51,040 --> 00:42:53,960
Speaker 1: elements and magic and stuff like that. Now, of course,

776
00:42:54,000 --> 00:42:56,120
Speaker 1: there are a few books and passages in the Bible

777
00:42:56,200 --> 00:43:00,080
Speaker 1: such as you know, revelations. Apocalypse is various prophetic visions

778
00:43:00,320 --> 00:43:03,640
Speaker 1: that are sort of crammed with bizarre and counterintuitive imagery

779
00:43:03,680 --> 00:43:07,000
Speaker 1: and stuff, but most of the time the basic stories

780
00:43:07,040 --> 00:43:11,400
Speaker 1: are mostly mundane. Yeah. Though, though even with something like

781
00:43:11,440 --> 00:43:13,480
Speaker 1: the Book of Revelation, we we do have to stop

782
00:43:13,480 --> 00:43:17,800
Speaker 1: and you know, pause and wondered, like, just how counterintuitive

783
00:43:18,600 --> 00:43:20,759
Speaker 1: is it really? Because certain on face value, yeah, I

784
00:43:20,760 --> 00:43:23,560
Speaker 1: mean on face value for the the average modern day

785
00:43:23,560 --> 00:43:25,760
Speaker 1: individual picking up Book of Revelation, Yeah, it just seems

786
00:43:25,760 --> 00:43:27,919
Speaker 1: like crazy town, right, But we do have to remember

787
00:43:27,960 --> 00:43:30,680
Speaker 1: the Book of Revelation is a symbolic work from the

788
00:43:30,719 --> 00:43:33,920
Speaker 1: first century CE, and it's a work of apocalyptic literature.

789
00:43:34,000 --> 00:43:38,920
Speaker 1: So uh, it would have followed particular conventions of this style,

790
00:43:39,320 --> 00:43:42,359
Speaker 1: conventions that would have been better known and understood by

791
00:43:42,360 --> 00:43:45,320
Speaker 1: the intended reader, and the intended reader in this situation

792
00:43:45,480 --> 00:43:48,360
Speaker 1: would have been very much an insider as opposed to

793
00:43:48,480 --> 00:43:51,520
Speaker 1: just your average Joe Christian. And we touched on this

794
00:43:51,920 --> 00:43:55,520
Speaker 1: the same situation with the highly symbolic work of Hieronymous

795
00:43:55,520 --> 00:43:58,239
Speaker 1: Bosh Before. You know, if you look at it and

796
00:43:58,239 --> 00:44:00,320
Speaker 1: you think, well, this is just bizarre, this is crazy.

797
00:44:00,400 --> 00:44:03,760
Speaker 1: Clearly this artist was just on drugs. But the closer

798
00:44:03,880 --> 00:44:06,799
Speaker 1: you look, you realize, well, okay, maybe some of that

799
00:44:06,960 --> 00:44:09,680
Speaker 1: is true, but but on the other hand, you do

800
00:44:09,760 --> 00:44:12,520
Speaker 1: have a lot of of symbols that are speaking to

801
00:44:13,000 --> 00:44:17,240
Speaker 1: a different viewer, and you were not the intended audience totally.

802
00:44:17,280 --> 00:44:19,480
Speaker 1: So even in some of these cases, it might be

803
00:44:19,560 --> 00:44:22,080
Speaker 1: that if you could, if you could sort of decode

804
00:44:22,200 --> 00:44:25,840
Speaker 1: the meaning of of all of these revelations, that it

805
00:44:25,960 --> 00:44:29,520
Speaker 1: might actually sort of key out to a more mundane

806
00:44:29,600 --> 00:44:33,680
Speaker 1: kind of message that has some minimally counterintuitive suggestions in it,

807
00:44:34,080 --> 00:44:37,320
Speaker 1: even though the face value imagery is pretty off the wall.

808
00:44:37,680 --> 00:44:40,040
Speaker 1: But of course, another example would be standard folk tales,

809
00:44:40,080 --> 00:44:42,319
Speaker 1: like the stories of the brothers Graham. A little red

810
00:44:42,400 --> 00:44:45,640
Speaker 1: riding Hood is actually a mostly mundane narrative. There are

811
00:44:45,680 --> 00:44:49,120
Speaker 1: only two really counterinto developments. You've got a talking wolf

812
00:44:49,520 --> 00:44:51,879
Speaker 1: and then you've got a person who can survive being

813
00:44:51,880 --> 00:44:54,000
Speaker 1: eaten alive by a wolf and come out of the

814
00:44:54,000 --> 00:44:56,879
Speaker 1: stomach alive. Those are the two magic parts. The rest

815
00:44:56,920 --> 00:45:00,319
Speaker 1: of it is a normal story with intuitive elements, and

816
00:45:00,360 --> 00:45:02,600
Speaker 1: so the authors of the study think that maybe we

817
00:45:02,640 --> 00:45:05,560
Speaker 1: should think of each narrative as something like a single

818
00:45:05,719 --> 00:45:10,160
Speaker 1: unit of transmission, rather than looking at individual elements within

819
00:45:10,200 --> 00:45:13,360
Speaker 1: the story to see how many counter i counterintuitive ideas

820
00:45:13,440 --> 00:45:17,319
Speaker 1: the story elements contain. You think about how many does

821
00:45:17,440 --> 00:45:20,440
Speaker 1: the story as a whole contain. Because you don't usually

822
00:45:20,520 --> 00:45:23,799
Speaker 1: tell part of a story. Maybe the point of a

823
00:45:23,920 --> 00:45:27,239
Speaker 1: story is to get transmitted as a whole, and so

824
00:45:27,320 --> 00:45:31,120
Speaker 1: the optimal level of counterintuitiveness might function at the level

825
00:45:31,160 --> 00:45:34,239
Speaker 1: of the whole narrative rather than individual ideas within it.

826
00:45:34,280 --> 00:45:36,719
Speaker 1: So it's possible that the narrative itself as a whole

827
00:45:36,920 --> 00:45:40,359
Speaker 1: might need to be minimally counterintuitive, not just stuff within

828
00:45:40,440 --> 00:45:44,759
Speaker 1: it being minimally counterintuitive. It needs to violate our ontologies

829
00:45:44,840 --> 00:45:47,480
Speaker 1: a little bit. But it can't contain too many of

830
00:45:47,520 --> 00:45:51,120
Speaker 1: these things, or maybe then it becomes the donkey cabbages.

831
00:45:51,520 --> 00:45:53,400
Speaker 1: And you know, once you start piling up all the

832
00:45:53,440 --> 00:45:56,560
Speaker 1: donkey cabbages stuff, I mean, who gives a dang like it?

833
00:45:57,040 --> 00:46:00,640
Speaker 1: Just it's sort of makes you stop caring, right, Right,

834
00:46:00,640 --> 00:46:02,719
Speaker 1: it just become too many fantastic elements and there's nothing

835
00:46:02,760 --> 00:46:05,360
Speaker 1: I can relate to, Right, So how do you test

836
00:46:05,400 --> 00:46:07,640
Speaker 1: to see whether this is true? Well, the authors put

837
00:46:07,680 --> 00:46:10,560
Speaker 1: together a couple of studies. The first study was to

838
00:46:10,640 --> 00:46:15,440
Speaker 1: look at lists of minimally counterintuitive ideas compared with intuitive

839
00:46:15,719 --> 00:46:18,440
Speaker 1: ideas and to see how those lists fared in recall,

840
00:46:18,520 --> 00:46:20,920
Speaker 1: and then the second one. The second study was to

841
00:46:21,080 --> 00:46:23,839
Speaker 1: look at existing folk tales and to see how well

842
00:46:23,960 --> 00:46:28,399
Speaker 1: comparatively minimally counterintuitive folk tales did. So, the researchers put

843
00:46:28,440 --> 00:46:31,759
Speaker 1: together lists of two word ideas, some of which were intuitive,

844
00:46:31,840 --> 00:46:37,360
Speaker 1: some of which were minimally counterintuitive. Here's an example, closing door.

845
00:46:37,400 --> 00:46:41,120
Speaker 1: How do you like that? That's pretty normal, right, thirsty cat,

846
00:46:42,360 --> 00:46:46,520
Speaker 1: four legged table, confused student. These are all you know,

847
00:46:46,640 --> 00:46:49,760
Speaker 1: this is the right world, right, everything's okay. How about

848
00:46:49,840 --> 00:46:53,760
Speaker 1: thirsty door. Oh now it's getting a little poetic, confused table,

849
00:46:55,080 --> 00:47:03,640
Speaker 1: mischievous coat, impatient fist, contrived dog. Yes, these are minimally

850
00:47:03,719 --> 00:47:07,399
Speaker 1: counterintuitive for sure. And so the researchers tested how well

851
00:47:07,920 --> 00:47:10,879
Speaker 1: group of ninety four students could remember stories like this,

852
00:47:11,160 --> 00:47:14,440
Speaker 1: uh in immediate recall three minutes after studying a list,

853
00:47:14,960 --> 00:47:18,400
Speaker 1: and then also in um and then also in a

854
00:47:18,480 --> 00:47:21,239
Speaker 1: later test after a week, and the results were that

855
00:47:21,320 --> 00:47:24,360
Speaker 1: in immediate recall three minutes after studying, the lists of

856
00:47:24,719 --> 00:47:29,040
Speaker 1: entirely intuitive items were actually remembered best just kind of strange,

857
00:47:29,120 --> 00:47:31,879
Speaker 1: like the ones that were just all normal concepts were

858
00:47:31,920 --> 00:47:34,799
Speaker 1: remembered the best of all, but delayed recall was a

859
00:47:34,800 --> 00:47:38,600
Speaker 1: different story. After a week, there was massive overall degradation

860
00:47:38,640 --> 00:47:41,840
Speaker 1: of memory, but the lists that people could recall the

861
00:47:41,880 --> 00:47:45,319
Speaker 1: best were the ones that had a minimal number of

862
00:47:45,400 --> 00:47:49,120
Speaker 1: minimally counterintuitive elements in them. So after a week, if

863
00:47:49,120 --> 00:47:52,320
Speaker 1: the list was all intuitive ideas, people remembered it less.

864
00:47:52,360 --> 00:47:56,440
Speaker 1: If the list contained equal numbers of intuitive and counterintuitive ideas,

865
00:47:56,560 --> 00:48:00,200
Speaker 1: or contained all counterintuitive ideas, people remembered it less. Us

866
00:48:00,400 --> 00:48:03,400
Speaker 1: what people remembered best after one week where lists that

867
00:48:03,440 --> 00:48:06,840
Speaker 1: had a minority of weird monster concepts in them but

868
00:48:06,960 --> 00:48:10,480
Speaker 1: were otherwise unremarkable. And note that this is for lists,

869
00:48:10,640 --> 00:48:14,560
Speaker 1: not individual concepts. And this seems to partially back up

870
00:48:14,600 --> 00:48:17,120
Speaker 1: the idea that this works at the function of a

871
00:48:17,280 --> 00:48:20,200
Speaker 1: of a narrative as a whole instead of just individual

872
00:48:20,360 --> 00:48:23,440
Speaker 1: ideas that you would remember as a single concept or

873
00:48:23,520 --> 00:48:26,919
Speaker 1: object or word phrase. And then in the second study,

874
00:48:27,000 --> 00:48:29,800
Speaker 1: they tested a survey of folk tales from the collections

875
00:48:29,800 --> 00:48:33,680
Speaker 1: of the brothers Grimm, and they counted numbers of counterintuitive

876
00:48:33,719 --> 00:48:36,839
Speaker 1: elements that they contained and compared that to how successful

877
00:48:37,160 --> 00:48:39,239
Speaker 1: and well known these folk tales were. So like if

878
00:48:39,239 --> 00:48:42,000
Speaker 1: you count all the stuff in the Donkey Cabbages, you'll

879
00:48:42,000 --> 00:48:44,680
Speaker 1: get a pretty big number, Versus if you count all

880
00:48:44,680 --> 00:48:47,600
Speaker 1: the stuff in Cinderella, you'll get a smaller number. And

881
00:48:47,680 --> 00:48:50,880
Speaker 1: so they made a chart basically of all these stories

882
00:48:51,000 --> 00:48:54,920
Speaker 1: and compared how successful the story was as measured by

883
00:48:54,960 --> 00:48:58,520
Speaker 1: how familiar test subjects were with them and how many

884
00:48:58,600 --> 00:49:01,879
Speaker 1: Internet hits they got about the stories versus how many

885
00:49:01,960 --> 00:49:05,040
Speaker 1: counterintuitive elements were in the stories, and they got the

886
00:49:05,080 --> 00:49:07,200
Speaker 1: same kind of result. They found that for the less

887
00:49:07,200 --> 00:49:11,360
Speaker 1: memorable folk tales, as measured by familiarity and the Internet results,

888
00:49:11,520 --> 00:49:14,920
Speaker 1: there was a pretty flat distribution. Uh, there were MCI

889
00:49:15,080 --> 00:49:18,040
Speaker 1: tales tales that were highly intuitive, tales that were as

890
00:49:18,080 --> 00:49:21,400
Speaker 1: bonkers as the Donkey Cabbages or worse. But for the

891
00:49:21,520 --> 00:49:24,600
Speaker 1: more memorable tales, the really successful ones, there was a

892
00:49:24,680 --> 00:49:30,400
Speaker 1: clustering around a small number of counterintuitive elements. And that

893
00:49:30,440 --> 00:49:34,000
Speaker 1: means that the m c I narrative template seems somewhat validated.

894
00:49:34,040 --> 00:49:37,440
Speaker 1: Those that had penetrated the culture more deeply on average

895
00:49:37,680 --> 00:49:41,360
Speaker 1: were the ones that had a small number of counterintuitive elements,

896
00:49:41,840 --> 00:49:44,279
Speaker 1: And in their discussion, the authors proposed that mc I

897
00:49:44,440 --> 00:49:48,239
Speaker 1: narratives are more successful partially because they're easier to remember

898
00:49:48,360 --> 00:49:53,320
Speaker 1: as a whole, and they write quote these deviations involve evocative,

899
00:49:53,440 --> 00:49:58,920
Speaker 1: minimal counterintuitions that are quote relevant mysteries. They are closely

900
00:49:58,960 --> 00:50:01,880
Speaker 1: connected to back around knowledge, but do not admit to

901
00:50:01,920 --> 00:50:06,279
Speaker 1: a final interpretation. As a result, they are attention arresting

902
00:50:06,400 --> 00:50:11,080
Speaker 1: and inferentially rich, and therefore encourage further cognitive processing and

903
00:50:11,200 --> 00:50:17,040
Speaker 1: multiple interpretations over time that facilitate the cognitive stabilization of narratives.

904
00:50:17,680 --> 00:50:19,400
Speaker 1: And I thought that was interesting because it made me

905
00:50:19,440 --> 00:50:21,400
Speaker 1: think of a discussion we were having in the episode

906
00:50:21,400 --> 00:50:25,000
Speaker 1: about finite and infinite games and the religious scholarly work

907
00:50:25,040 --> 00:50:28,759
Speaker 1: by James P. Cars about the idea of of mythology

908
00:50:28,880 --> 00:50:32,719
Speaker 1: and um whether a mythology can survive if it is

909
00:50:32,760 --> 00:50:36,520
Speaker 1: made finite, or if a mythology is is only kept

910
00:50:36,560 --> 00:50:40,840
Speaker 1: alive by sort of like the the unending tendency to

911
00:50:41,000 --> 00:50:43,239
Speaker 1: change it and and keep working on it, to keep

912
00:50:43,280 --> 00:50:46,400
Speaker 1: asking questions. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, I think that is

913
00:50:46,400 --> 00:50:50,080
Speaker 1: how that is how the stories stay relevant without having

914
00:50:50,080 --> 00:50:53,640
Speaker 1: to just like bend and break your interpretation of them.

915
00:50:53,680 --> 00:50:56,080
Speaker 1: I mean it. I think they may be onto something

916
00:50:56,120 --> 00:51:00,320
Speaker 1: here with the idea that stories are can only be

917
00:51:01,080 --> 00:51:04,759
Speaker 1: properly mysterious and arresting to us and keep prodding our

918
00:51:04,800 --> 00:51:08,920
Speaker 1: brains if they have the right balance of mundane content

919
00:51:09,080 --> 00:51:12,720
Speaker 1: and confusing content, right, I mean, like, if if something

920
00:51:13,040 --> 00:51:17,839
Speaker 1: is just totally unfamiliar and unrelatable, then you you don't

921
00:51:17,840 --> 00:51:20,440
Speaker 1: even have a context in which to frame questions or

922
00:51:20,440 --> 00:51:23,960
Speaker 1: which in questions can feel like they mean something. But

923
00:51:24,000 --> 00:51:26,279
Speaker 1: if a story is totally mundane, you don't end up

924
00:51:26,320 --> 00:51:28,840
Speaker 1: asking questions. All right, don't not know. We're going to

925
00:51:28,920 --> 00:51:31,920
Speaker 1: take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Thank you,

926
00:51:32,160 --> 00:51:35,600
Speaker 1: thank you. All right, we're back. So, if the authors

927
00:51:35,640 --> 00:51:38,239
Speaker 1: of the study we just looked at are correct that

928
00:51:38,480 --> 00:51:43,640
Speaker 1: minimally counterintuitive narratives narratives that have some weird, counterintuitive content,

929
00:51:43,719 --> 00:51:46,200
Speaker 1: but not too much. If those types of narratives are

930
00:51:46,280 --> 00:51:49,440
Speaker 1: key to the success of folk tales and mythology that

931
00:51:49,520 --> 00:51:53,680
Speaker 1: spread throughout oral cultures that have to be remembered and transmitted,

932
00:51:54,400 --> 00:51:58,160
Speaker 1: is it also true that modern literate societies, or even

933
00:51:58,239 --> 00:52:01,960
Speaker 1: ancient literate society societies in which stories can be written

934
00:52:02,040 --> 00:52:06,319
Speaker 1: down before they're transmitted, that those societies make room for

935
00:52:06,440 --> 00:52:12,360
Speaker 1: more highly counterintuitive narratives or for more mundane totally intuitive narratives.

936
00:52:12,560 --> 00:52:14,919
Speaker 1: Does that make sense what I'm asking like, if if

937
00:52:14,960 --> 00:52:18,800
Speaker 1: that's the sweet spot for oral culture transmission, does writing

938
00:52:18,960 --> 00:52:23,120
Speaker 1: change what type of mythology becomes salient? Well, we come

939
00:52:23,120 --> 00:52:25,919
Speaker 1: back to this idea that writing frees his thought, right,

940
00:52:26,480 --> 00:52:29,880
Speaker 1: and nothing frees his thought. And this goes back to

941
00:52:29,920 --> 00:52:31,960
Speaker 1: some of the ideas of James P. Cars as well.

942
00:52:32,360 --> 00:52:36,360
Speaker 1: Nothing is going to freeze thought like sacred literature. Yeah,

943
00:52:36,360 --> 00:52:38,759
Speaker 1: and I actually found out a wonderful paper on some

944
00:52:38,880 --> 00:52:42,760
Speaker 1: of this UH. It is titled UH An Alternative Account

945
00:52:42,840 --> 00:52:46,120
Speaker 1: of the Minimal Counterintuitives Effect, and it was by by

946
00:52:46,160 --> 00:52:50,759
Speaker 1: cognitive scientist Muhammad Afzala Upal and this was published in

947
00:52:50,760 --> 00:52:54,760
Speaker 1: two thousand ten in Cognitive Systems Research. And he argues

948
00:52:54,800 --> 00:52:58,799
Speaker 1: that that essentially we have WE WE WE. You can

949
00:52:58,840 --> 00:53:01,480
Speaker 1: look at m c I in two different ways. You

950
00:53:01,600 --> 00:53:04,880
Speaker 1: have concept based m c I and that's where just

951
00:53:04,920 --> 00:53:08,520
Speaker 1: the concept itself is resonating, right, because it's it's a

952
00:53:09,040 --> 00:53:12,360
Speaker 1: it's a donkey that talks, etcetera. Right. But then you

953
00:53:12,360 --> 00:53:16,239
Speaker 1: can also look at it as context based. And he

954
00:53:16,320 --> 00:53:19,920
Speaker 1: makes the case that counterintuitive concepts lose their advantages as

955
00:53:19,960 --> 00:53:23,480
Speaker 1: they become widely accepted. In part of the culture. Oh. Interesting,

956
00:53:23,560 --> 00:53:27,759
Speaker 1: So if I introduce to you a new counterintuitive concept,

957
00:53:27,880 --> 00:53:30,120
Speaker 1: you might be more likely to remember that than if

958
00:53:30,160 --> 00:53:33,840
Speaker 1: I just say, like a ghost, which is a counterintuitive concept,

959
00:53:33,880 --> 00:53:36,920
Speaker 1: but you're familiar with it, right, or a vampire. You know,

960
00:53:37,160 --> 00:53:39,520
Speaker 1: it's like, I know that I'm bored with vampires. Give

961
00:53:39,600 --> 00:53:41,680
Speaker 1: me something with a little more jazz to it, right,

962
00:53:41,760 --> 00:53:44,400
Speaker 1: But if I say a turtle that drinks human blood,

963
00:53:44,560 --> 00:53:47,640
Speaker 1: people are probably going to remember that. Yeah. Therefore, he

964
00:53:48,040 --> 00:53:53,319
Speaker 1: argues that ideas with enhanced counterintuitiveness obtain transmission advantages, and

965
00:53:53,360 --> 00:53:58,080
Speaker 1: this results in a ratcheting up of counterintuitiveness that may

966
00:53:58,120 --> 00:54:02,600
Speaker 1: help explain cultural and evayation and dynamism. Interesting, So this

967
00:54:02,640 --> 00:54:04,719
Speaker 1: would be bigger than just religions. This would be for

968
00:54:04,840 --> 00:54:07,799
Speaker 1: ideas in general and narratives in general. Right, though he

969
00:54:07,880 --> 00:54:10,879
Speaker 1: is particularly interested in religion. That's like one of his uh,

970
00:54:10,960 --> 00:54:14,640
Speaker 1: That's one of of Upaul's areas of expertise is cognitive

971
00:54:14,640 --> 00:54:17,719
Speaker 1: science of religion, and he he says that quote it

972
00:54:17,840 --> 00:54:20,600
Speaker 1: also allows us to account for the development and spread

973
00:54:20,600 --> 00:54:26,240
Speaker 1: of complex cultural ideas, such as the overly counterintuitive religious concepts,

974
00:54:26,280 --> 00:54:30,440
Speaker 1: including the Judeo Christian Islamic conceptions of God. Does that

975
00:54:30,440 --> 00:54:35,239
Speaker 1: mean like overly counterintuitive because not anthropomorphic enough? Um? Yeah,

976
00:54:35,320 --> 00:54:37,680
Speaker 1: and just I mean I think part of it also

977
00:54:37,719 --> 00:54:40,560
Speaker 1: comes back to examples like revelation. You know, you have

978
00:54:40,880 --> 00:54:44,120
Speaker 1: just to to a modern readers, just completely counterintuitive. What

979
00:54:44,160 --> 00:54:45,600
Speaker 1: does it mean? Why is it there? What is it

980
00:54:45,640 --> 00:54:48,320
Speaker 1: supposed to be saying to me? Part of the problem

981
00:54:48,360 --> 00:54:51,120
Speaker 1: is that it's sacred, right, it's it's it's it's frozen

982
00:54:51,120 --> 00:54:54,319
Speaker 1: in time. It's no longer speaking to the people. Uh,

983
00:54:54,360 --> 00:54:57,400
Speaker 1: the specific individuals who would have who would have understood

984
00:54:57,400 --> 00:55:01,600
Speaker 1: it without a bunch of you know, the a lotical dissection. Interesting,

985
00:55:02,160 --> 00:55:06,279
Speaker 1: uh So, Paul writes. The context based view posits that

986
00:55:06,360 --> 00:55:10,360
Speaker 1: religious concepts such as God's ghost, angels, and devil have

987
00:55:10,520 --> 00:55:15,240
Speaker 1: become maximally counterintuitive in the Barret and Boyer sense because

988
00:55:15,280 --> 00:55:17,400
Speaker 1: they have had to survive in the minds of an

989
00:55:17,440 --> 00:55:20,759
Speaker 1: adaptive and innovative population of human beings over a long

990
00:55:20,800 --> 00:55:24,160
Speaker 1: period of time. In light of the model we develop here,

991
00:55:24,480 --> 00:55:28,520
Speaker 1: one should not be surprised to see maximally counterintuitive concepts

992
00:55:28,520 --> 00:55:31,880
Speaker 1: to form a significant part of religious beliefs. Indeed, it

993
00:55:31,920 --> 00:55:36,759
Speaker 1: would be surprising if they did not maximally counterintuitive. So

994
00:55:36,800 --> 00:55:41,800
Speaker 1: stuff that um, because it's hard to get your counterintuitive

995
00:55:41,840 --> 00:55:45,200
Speaker 1: juices flowing anymore because you've been so exposed to ideas

996
00:55:45,239 --> 00:55:47,680
Speaker 1: like spirits and ghosts that they want to offer you

997
00:55:49,160 --> 00:55:52,040
Speaker 1: visions that that tell you like, you're not going to

998
00:55:52,120 --> 00:55:54,680
Speaker 1: get a weirder idea than this. Yeah, I mean you

999
00:55:54,719 --> 00:55:57,760
Speaker 1: get into areas uh. And this this is me commenting

1000
00:55:57,760 --> 00:55:59,600
Speaker 1: on his material. He didn't make the specific point, but

1001
00:55:59,719 --> 00:56:02,120
Speaker 1: you know, stuff like the transfiguration of Christ and though

1002
00:56:02,200 --> 00:56:05,600
Speaker 1: the Holy Trinity and these kind of complex ideas of

1003
00:56:05,600 --> 00:56:08,799
Speaker 1: of what what is the nature of God? You know

1004
00:56:09,880 --> 00:56:12,719
Speaker 1: right is it's it's built into it. That's that it's

1005
00:56:12,719 --> 00:56:15,040
Speaker 1: a mystery and you can't understand it right. And then

1006
00:56:15,040 --> 00:56:17,319
Speaker 1: add into that too that you have you know, these

1007
00:56:17,360 --> 00:56:21,880
Speaker 1: ancient religions are I often use this analogy for for Hinduism, Like,

1008
00:56:21,960 --> 00:56:26,120
Speaker 1: Hinduism is not this one product. It is this well

1009
00:56:26,200 --> 00:56:30,200
Speaker 1: of time and culture with all of these varying ideas

1010
00:56:30,200 --> 00:56:32,959
Speaker 1: and different interpretations of God's that are then uh spun

1011
00:56:33,000 --> 00:56:35,120
Speaker 1: around and used in different ways. And you do see

1012
00:56:35,160 --> 00:56:38,800
Speaker 1: that in Christian traditions as well. Hinduism is a world

1013
00:56:38,920 --> 00:56:42,560
Speaker 1: of belief and layer upon layers. It's like an archaeological

1014
00:56:42,600 --> 00:56:44,799
Speaker 1: dig but then of course that raises the question of

1015
00:56:44,880 --> 00:56:48,759
Speaker 1: modern religions, right yeah, And so I would wonder if

1016
00:56:48,800 --> 00:56:52,799
Speaker 1: the m c I hypothesis is correct as an explanation

1017
00:56:52,920 --> 00:56:55,959
Speaker 1: for the success of religious narratives. Shouldn't it be that

1018
00:56:56,120 --> 00:57:01,120
Speaker 1: we see unusual religions emerging in a most literate world

1019
00:57:01,160 --> 00:57:03,960
Speaker 1: where things get written down a lot, and those religions

1020
00:57:04,000 --> 00:57:08,480
Speaker 1: have more permission to be the donkey cabbages of religion. Right? Well,

1021
00:57:08,520 --> 00:57:10,600
Speaker 1: I mean it, if you can write it down, you

1022
00:57:10,640 --> 00:57:13,399
Speaker 1: can make it sacred, and you can say nobody touched this. Uh.

1023
00:57:13,440 --> 00:57:15,480
Speaker 1: And and one of the one of the points that

1024
00:57:15,520 --> 00:57:20,040
Speaker 1: Topa makes about this, he compares it to emergent religions. Uh.

1025
00:57:20,080 --> 00:57:24,240
Speaker 1: And how you have You have new religions that have emerged,

1026
00:57:24,560 --> 00:57:27,560
Speaker 1: and they generally have an uphill battle because they're they're

1027
00:57:27,600 --> 00:57:31,040
Speaker 1: having to go up against the established religions that have

1028
00:57:31,400 --> 00:57:33,880
Speaker 1: in you know, in many cases, centuries upon centuries, thousands

1029
00:57:33,920 --> 00:57:37,200
Speaker 1: of years of history, all these sacred texts. And somebody

1030
00:57:37,240 --> 00:57:39,960
Speaker 1: is saying, you don't alter this. This is the text

1031
00:57:40,320 --> 00:57:43,240
Speaker 1: and uh, and this is the accepted interpretation of it.

1032
00:57:43,280 --> 00:57:46,160
Speaker 1: And if you tweak it in any way, well that's heresy.

1033
00:57:46,240 --> 00:57:49,320
Speaker 1: And we will punish that. Uh, and but then he

1034
00:57:49,360 --> 00:57:51,720
Speaker 1: points out what you end up with with something like say,

1035
00:57:51,760 --> 00:57:55,920
Speaker 1: the Church of Scientology emerging getting enough power, and what

1036
00:57:55,920 --> 00:57:58,240
Speaker 1: what do they turn around and do they kind of

1037
00:57:58,240 --> 00:58:01,200
Speaker 1: they make their own sacred text. They say, you can't

1038
00:58:01,240 --> 00:58:03,000
Speaker 1: mess with this, you can't take these that don't be

1039
00:58:03,000 --> 00:58:05,920
Speaker 1: a squirrel and turn these concepts around and try and

1040
00:58:05,960 --> 00:58:11,040
Speaker 1: market them off into your own heretical religion. Is squirrel

1041
00:58:11,200 --> 00:58:14,280
Speaker 1: part of their whole thing? I I wouldn't aware of squirrels? Yes,

1042
00:58:14,400 --> 00:58:17,720
Speaker 1: uh oop al rites quote. For instance, the founder of Scientology,

1043
00:58:18,240 --> 00:58:21,600
Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard, is reported to have referred to those who

1044
00:58:21,640 --> 00:58:25,360
Speaker 1: modify as techniques as squirrels who should be harassed in

1045
00:58:25,400 --> 00:58:29,480
Speaker 1: any possible way. Weapons used to discourage any change in

1046
00:58:29,560 --> 00:58:34,919
Speaker 1: religious doctrine and practice include ridicule, expulsion, and harassment. Continuity

1047
00:58:34,920 --> 00:58:37,840
Speaker 1: and religious doctrine is explained to the extent that such

1048
00:58:37,920 --> 00:58:41,480
Speaker 1: thought control techniques are successful. So it's kind of a

1049
00:58:41,560 --> 00:58:45,280
Speaker 1: it feels like a struggle between the uh, the the

1050
00:58:45,440 --> 00:58:49,240
Speaker 1: oral stories and the written stories, right, the one that

1051
00:58:49,320 --> 00:58:51,920
Speaker 1: wants to live and change and the other that we're

1052
00:58:51,960 --> 00:58:55,960
Speaker 1: trying to artificially set in stone. Here's a question I have,

1053
00:58:56,040 --> 00:58:58,640
Speaker 1: and I think it is to some degree addressed by

1054
00:58:58,680 --> 00:59:01,000
Speaker 1: this literature, but I not sure if there is a

1055
00:59:01,040 --> 00:59:05,440
Speaker 1: settled answer on it. What is the stronger tendency them

1056
00:59:05,880 --> 00:59:11,440
Speaker 1: the counterintuitive element adding tendency or the subtraction tendency. Do

1057
00:59:11,560 --> 00:59:14,720
Speaker 1: stories over time tend to undergo more adding of Donkey

1058
00:59:14,720 --> 00:59:19,720
Speaker 1: Cabbages style elements or more subtraction of donkey Cabbages style elements? Well,

1059
00:59:19,800 --> 00:59:22,480
Speaker 1: I I like the like Coopo's argument that there's a

1060
00:59:22,520 --> 00:59:25,920
Speaker 1: there's a dynamism in place that you're gonna have You're

1061
00:59:25,920 --> 00:59:28,000
Speaker 1: gonna have it come in waves. To think of it

1062
00:59:28,040 --> 00:59:31,280
Speaker 1: this way, right, you have alien, it's just about a person,

1063
00:59:31,560 --> 00:59:33,920
Speaker 1: you know, a crew on a ship against one alien,

1064
00:59:34,440 --> 00:59:37,520
Speaker 1: and then things get crazy. You get aliens, and you've

1065
00:59:37,560 --> 00:59:40,600
Speaker 1: got multiple aliens, you get new kinds of aliens, and

1066
00:59:40,640 --> 00:59:43,440
Speaker 1: it's a it's a it's a fiesta but aliens. I

1067
00:59:43,440 --> 00:59:46,920
Speaker 1: would say it's minimally counterintuitive. I mean it is a

1068
00:59:47,000 --> 00:59:50,680
Speaker 1: mostly mundane narratives like one thing, which is that there

1069
00:59:50,680 --> 00:59:53,320
Speaker 1: are these horrible monsters. But but there's a ratcheting up.

1070
00:59:53,760 --> 00:59:56,840
Speaker 1: So think of it like one one alien is one

1071
00:59:57,000 --> 00:59:59,880
Speaker 1: m C I and then multiple aliens. That's a bunch

1072
00:59:59,920 --> 01:00:03,800
Speaker 1: of MC eyes and then Alien three comes around or

1073
01:00:04,000 --> 01:00:07,440
Speaker 1: what alien cubed Sometimes it's display does and that when

1074
01:00:07,440 --> 01:00:09,760
Speaker 1: they're like, all right, let's boil it back down. Just

1075
01:00:09,840 --> 01:00:12,960
Speaker 1: one m c I Alien in play and then four

1076
01:00:13,040 --> 01:00:16,200
Speaker 1: things get crazy again and you see this back and forth. Right,

1077
01:00:16,720 --> 01:00:19,720
Speaker 1: um but I feel like that's probably the tendency, right,

1078
01:00:19,800 --> 01:00:22,400
Speaker 1: is that you'll ratchet things up more and more um

1079
01:00:22,640 --> 01:00:24,920
Speaker 1: m CIEs are added, and then it kind of goes

1080
01:00:24,960 --> 01:00:27,080
Speaker 1: in reverse, fewer and fewer, sort of getting back to

1081
01:00:27,120 --> 01:00:30,360
Speaker 1: the it becomes more relatable as it is it is.

1082
01:00:30,760 --> 01:00:33,520
Speaker 1: It is a transferred from user to user. Yeah, this

1083
01:00:33,600 --> 01:00:38,080
Speaker 1: is all real interesting. But now I'm I'm I'm undercutting

1084
01:00:38,120 --> 01:00:41,320
Speaker 1: myself because I'm thinking about the difference, uh, of there

1085
01:00:41,360 --> 01:00:44,080
Speaker 1: being both kinds of narratives going way back. So if

1086
01:00:44,120 --> 01:00:47,680
Speaker 1: you go back six years ago, think about the difference

1087
01:00:47,720 --> 01:00:52,800
Speaker 1: between the basically emergent Catholic Christian story compared to the

1088
01:00:52,880 --> 01:00:56,600
Speaker 1: narratives you find of Gnostic Christian texts. At the same time,

1089
01:00:57,040 --> 01:01:01,320
Speaker 1: the Gnostic Christian texts are wonderful, they are worth reading,

1090
01:01:01,720 --> 01:01:06,200
Speaker 1: and they're so interesting, but they're cosmology narratives or they're

1091
01:01:06,240 --> 01:01:09,800
Speaker 1: they're off the you know, they're outlandish, they're super counterintuitive.

1092
01:01:10,080 --> 01:01:13,320
Speaker 1: They're barely tethered to any kind of understandable or mundane

1093
01:01:13,320 --> 01:01:16,640
Speaker 1: earthly story. You get the Pleroma and y'all, the Oath.

1094
01:01:17,520 --> 01:01:22,080
Speaker 1: It's just not it's not as earthly and tethered and

1095
01:01:22,120 --> 01:01:26,400
Speaker 1: relatable as most mythologies that you're used to. It's yeah,

1096
01:01:26,440 --> 01:01:28,200
Speaker 1: this is where you have like their ideas, like the

1097
01:01:28,440 --> 01:01:32,680
Speaker 1: first creation and the secondary, the dimmi urge, the different

1098
01:01:32,720 --> 01:01:36,280
Speaker 1: levels of creation, the beings of light and all this stuff.

1099
01:01:36,320 --> 01:01:39,160
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not stuff that's easy to picture. It

1100
01:01:39,240 --> 01:01:43,840
Speaker 1: doesn't work like a normal human story. It's very abstract

1101
01:01:43,920 --> 01:01:49,000
Speaker 1: and removed from from grounded reality. It seems too counterintuitive

1102
01:01:49,080 --> 01:01:51,280
Speaker 1: to be successful. But then again, I guess historically it

1103
01:01:51,320 --> 01:01:55,680
Speaker 1: was not successful, true, But maybe it was only it

1104
01:01:55,720 --> 01:01:58,480
Speaker 1: can only be successful in a time and which this uh,

1105
01:01:58,520 --> 01:02:01,120
Speaker 1: and say that the Catholic narrative, it's just so widespread

1106
01:02:01,160 --> 01:02:03,560
Speaker 1: and so dominant that it it kind of took on

1107
01:02:03,600 --> 01:02:07,240
Speaker 1: the trappings of the physical laws of the of life. Yeah,

1108
01:02:07,280 --> 01:02:10,400
Speaker 1: And I guess it also happened within a broader Christian context.

1109
01:02:10,480 --> 01:02:13,520
Speaker 1: So many of the people who practiced Gnostic Christianity would

1110
01:02:13,520 --> 01:02:16,120
Speaker 1: think of it as a sort of like an extra helping.

1111
01:02:16,200 --> 01:02:19,120
Speaker 1: It's like the secret add on mythology that you take

1112
01:02:19,440 --> 01:02:23,120
Speaker 1: in addition to your regular Catholic mythology. So in a sense,

1113
01:02:23,200 --> 01:02:26,680
Speaker 1: Catholicism was roller skates and then uh and then a NaSTA.

1114
01:02:26,960 --> 01:02:30,960
Speaker 1: The gnostic Polie system was was roller blades. Maybe, I

1115
01:02:30,960 --> 01:02:33,480
Speaker 1: mean it'd be like roller skates with an extra rocket

1116
01:02:33,520 --> 01:02:36,720
Speaker 1: booster or something or Robert. This has been fun I

1117
01:02:36,720 --> 01:02:39,480
Speaker 1: feel like this is a really compelling explanation for the

1118
01:02:39,560 --> 01:02:44,160
Speaker 1: dynamics of of narratives and memory and human culture. I

1119
01:02:44,160 --> 01:02:47,040
Speaker 1: I don't think i'd fully tried to put all this

1120
01:02:47,160 --> 01:02:51,240
Speaker 1: together before, but once funny enough, it is very intuitive

1121
01:02:51,280 --> 01:02:54,040
Speaker 1: once you hear it. Yeah, yeah, I agree, it doesn't

1122
01:02:54,160 --> 01:02:57,520
Speaker 1: It makes you rethink everything from your you know, your

1123
01:02:57,520 --> 01:03:02,880
Speaker 1: favorite books and movies to major world religions. Uh, and

1124
01:03:02,920 --> 01:03:05,360
Speaker 1: I do think it is. It is getting at the

1125
01:03:05,560 --> 01:03:07,800
Speaker 1: it's some of the truth of what's going on, but

1126
01:03:07,880 --> 01:03:10,720
Speaker 1: maybe a minimal part of the truth. Well, we shall see.

1127
01:03:10,760 --> 01:03:14,880
Speaker 1: There's always a lot of pizza pie left over all. Right, Well,

1128
01:03:15,200 --> 01:03:16,600
Speaker 1: there you go. If you want to check out more

1129
01:03:16,640 --> 01:03:18,240
Speaker 1: episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head on over

1130
01:03:18,280 --> 01:03:20,360
Speaker 1: to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is

1131
01:03:20,400 --> 01:03:23,520
Speaker 1: where you will find all the episodes, including the various

1132
01:03:23,520 --> 01:03:27,720
Speaker 1: episodes we've done on religious and narrative topics over the years.

1133
01:03:28,240 --> 01:03:30,960
Speaker 1: UH and if you want to support the show really,

1134
01:03:31,280 --> 01:03:34,280
Speaker 1: as I've said before, rate and review us wherever you

1135
01:03:34,320 --> 01:03:36,120
Speaker 1: have the ability to do so. That helps us out

1136
01:03:36,200 --> 01:03:40,800
Speaker 1: immensely big thanks as always for wonderful audio producers Alex

1137
01:03:40,840 --> 01:03:43,360
Speaker 1: Williams and Torry Harrison. If you would like to get

1138
01:03:43,400 --> 01:03:46,080
Speaker 1: in touch with us directly with feedback about this episode

1139
01:03:46,160 --> 01:03:48,880
Speaker 1: or any other UH to let us know where you

1140
01:03:48,960 --> 01:03:51,080
Speaker 1: listen to the show from, how you found out about it,

1141
01:03:51,160 --> 01:03:54,080
Speaker 1: or suggest a topic for a future episode, you can

1142
01:03:54,240 --> 01:03:56,960
Speaker 1: email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works

1143
01:03:57,080 --> 01:04:08,960
Speaker 1: dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.

1144
01:04:09,200 --> 01:04:22,600
Speaker 1: Is it how stuff works dot com. Believe Man,