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