Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
Speaker 1: and we're back with part two of our discussion of
Speaker 1: whether stories are bad for us. If you haven't heard
Speaker 1: the first episode, you should probably go back and listen
Speaker 1: to that. It's where we first discussed what got us
Speaker 1: interested in this topic and general thoughts about ways that
Speaker 1: though Robert, you and I we both love narratives, love stories,
Speaker 1: love fiction, that stories might not always be great for
Speaker 1: human civilization. Yeah, it's it's a it's a weird thing
Speaker 1: to think about. But but then again, like part of
Speaker 1: it is because I look back, especially on certain times
Speaker 1: in my life where like a prize narrative above anything
Speaker 1: that was happening in real life. You know, like a
Speaker 1: great book was an escape. A fictional book, Yeah, great,
Speaker 1: great fictional book was an escape. They were great. Unfiction
Speaker 1: book can also be a tremendous escape too, But I
Speaker 1: specifically remember escaping into into various novels, and it was
Speaker 1: there was something so comforting about that. But then there's
Speaker 1: a similar there's there's something similar occurring when we have
Speaker 1: these negative examples of people escaping into narrative, though it
Speaker 1: might not be the pure alternate narrative of say, life
Speaker 1: on another planet or in an imagined age, but just
Speaker 1: a a different version of reality in which things are
Speaker 1: simplified and made more story shaped, with more key with
Speaker 1: with with clearer villains and heroes, and some sort of
Speaker 1: of eventual come upance and uh and redemption. So we
Speaker 1: should brief recap. In the last episode, we talked about
Speaker 1: this idea that maybe stories aren't so great for us.
Speaker 1: That we were inspired to talk about this because I
Speaker 1: read a read an interview with a Duke University professor
Speaker 1: and philosopher of science named Alex Rosenberg, who has written
Speaker 1: a book about How How Well Number One, about how
Speaker 1: we're wired to prefer stories over other types of receiving information,
Speaker 1: and then also about how stories cloud our our views
Speaker 1: of history and that a lot of times we don't
Speaker 1: appreciate what actually happened in the past because we read
Speaker 1: a sort of personal narrative about history that has characters
Speaker 1: with motivations, and we think we identify with those characters,
Speaker 1: and we you know, we engage in theory of mind.
Speaker 1: We put our brain inside their brain, and we think
Speaker 1: we understand history in this way, but in fact it
Speaker 1: just leads to a lot of misunderstanding and false certainty
Speaker 1: about why things happened in the past, right, and then
Speaker 1: sometimes about what's happening in the present and in the future.
Speaker 1: Because he specifically points to the science of global warming
Speaker 1: and how there's a tendency to to for for the
Speaker 1: science of global warming to to lose out to the
Speaker 1: narrative of global warming. And this wouldn't be an issue
Speaker 1: if the narratives were closely aligned with the science, but
Speaker 1: as we see can sadly continue to see, the problem
Speaker 1: is that some of the narratives about global warming run
Speaker 1: counter to what the science is telling us and have
Speaker 1: a have a different agenda. Right. I mean, of course,
Speaker 1: the clear scientific consensus is global warm warming is absolutely real.
Speaker 1: It's going on right now. It's it is primarily driven
Speaker 1: by human behavior, and that behavior is primarily the emission
Speaker 1: of greenhouse gasses, and that if we want to do
Speaker 1: something to stop it, we should stop the emission of
Speaker 1: greenhouse gasses and maybe even at this point try to
Speaker 1: find a way to remove them from the atmosphere, if
Speaker 1: that's even possible. But you know, there there are lots
Speaker 1: of very fun narratives that tell you something else, that
Speaker 1: tell you it's a Chinese hoax, or that tell you,
Speaker 1: you know, there's some evil cabal of globalists who want
Speaker 1: to do X, Y and Z, and they're using this
Speaker 1: scam to you know, I don't you know, keep up
Speaker 1: with all what all that stuff is. But you know
Speaker 1: where you can go to find it YouTube predominantly, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, but part of it. But a lot of
Speaker 1: this is it's out, Rosenberg describes. You know, a lot
Speaker 1: of it comes down to the fact that we're we're
Speaker 1: using old tricks. Uh. These are basically sort of shortcuts
Speaker 1: in our perception of reality and that all of you know,
Speaker 1: the reality that we have is not like pure objective
Speaker 1: reality like of course, you know, one of the like
Speaker 1: fun little I'll go and go ahead and even call
Speaker 1: it a mind blower that he drops in that ideas
Speaker 1: with Paul Kennedy episode was that you know that that
Speaker 1: we live in a world that doesn't actually have odors
Speaker 1: or colors. That's just our sense world, that's our way,
Speaker 1: that's the way that our our bodies in our minds, uh,
Speaker 1: interpret the stimula. Yeah, there is actually light, and there
Speaker 1: are actually volatile molecules, but the idea of color is
Speaker 1: something that happens only in the brain. Right. We constantly
Speaker 1: air in this perception of the world because it's adaptive. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's certainly not maladaptive, but you can see how
Speaker 1: it stands in the way of a proper understanding of
Speaker 1: objective reality. If it mattered, like if I don't know,
Speaker 1: if some fantastic scenario presented itself, say there was an
Speaker 1: alien invasion, that's generally a good one to go for,
Speaker 1: and the key to defeating the aliens was a perception
Speaker 1: of reality that did not, uh, did not rely on
Speaker 1: an understanding of reality in which odors and colors exist.
Speaker 1: You know, we're doomed. Yeah, we would. We would be
Speaker 1: doomed because we have this this built in handicap that
Speaker 1: has never been maladaptive up until now. And so one
Speaker 1: of the things he's arguing is that is that storytelling
Speaker 1: was adaptive early on, but then is perhaps increasingly maladaptive
Speaker 1: as we as as civilization becomes more complicated. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is one of the clear things that
Speaker 1: we've discovered through you know, the recent decades of psychology
Speaker 1: and neuroscience focusing on bias and misperception. You know that
Speaker 1: that's been been a key to to what we've learned
Speaker 1: about the brain in the past few decades, is that
Speaker 1: we we have just all kinds of ways of getting
Speaker 1: reality wrong, and a lot of this is based on heuristics,
Speaker 1: you know, simple, quick, fast, dirty rules that the mind
Speaker 1: uses to try to come up with an answer without
Speaker 1: doing too much work. And in fact, you can more
Speaker 1: often get a more accurate answer by using a slow,
Speaker 1: laborious mechanical process of figuring out what's true. But usually
Speaker 1: it doesn't make sense to do that in real life
Speaker 1: because you just don't have the time and the energy.
Speaker 1: So we use heuristics and we get maybe sometimes roughly
Speaker 1: right answers, maybe sometimes really wrong answers, but in most
Speaker 1: scenarios it doesn't matter enough for us to actually change
Speaker 1: our behavior. And story based thinking about reality, I think,
Speaker 1: is one of these heuristics. Yeah, you know, one one
Speaker 1: thing that came to my mind was how like some
Speaker 1: of my earliest memories, some of them are definitely memories,
Speaker 1: but other things are not so much memories, but me
Speaker 1: remembering stories about something that happened when I was very young.
Speaker 1: And those become a sort of memory. They become a
Speaker 1: kind of false memory of something that that happened. But
Speaker 1: to what degree it happened, like the story, I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: because we do this all the time right where we
Speaker 1: take we oftentimes will take an external story or just
Speaker 1: like the general shape of a story, use that to
Speaker 1: interpret something that happened to us, and then that becomes
Speaker 1: the memory. We are remembering the story that we came
Speaker 1: up with about the thing that happened, as opposed to
Speaker 1: any anything like a purely objective understanding of what occurred. Right,
Speaker 1: And so a classic example of this that I was
Speaker 1: just thinking about is when you sort events into a
Speaker 1: structure of rising tension. You know, it's how like you
Speaker 1: could you could, like take a number of events that
Speaker 1: happened over a course of different days or even different weeks,
Speaker 1: and we're really not all that related. But you're telling
Speaker 1: a story maybe about how you started, you know, why
Speaker 1: you're feeling down right now, and you you introduce like
Speaker 1: one thing that went wrong and then another thing that
Speaker 1: went wrong at a different time, and you you escale
Speaker 1: the tension on the story like you would if you're
Speaker 1: showing the increasingly dangerous obstacles that a hero almost face
Speaker 1: in their journey. Right, Sometimes the things that we pick
Speaker 1: out to put into that story to be like the
Speaker 1: set pieces of the story might not be the real
Speaker 1: causes and effects of what we're trying to explain with
Speaker 1: the story. Why you're actually feeling down now, You don't
Speaker 1: necessarily know why you're feeling down now. Yeah, there are
Speaker 1: a number of reasons we've discussed in the show that
Speaker 1: that are not related to um so much to something
Speaker 1: going on in the mind, that's something going on and
Speaker 1: say with your gut, bacteria, etcetera. And of course we've
Speaker 1: also discussed on the show how even an outright lie
Speaker 1: can impact how we think about something. Um uh, you know,
Speaker 1: and something that's not even presented as a possible truth,
Speaker 1: if we hear it enough times, it can become part
Speaker 1: of our understanding of reality. Yeah, the illusory truth effect.
Speaker 1: You hear something enough, you start to kind of think
Speaker 1: it's true, even if you should know better. And so
Speaker 1: like that situation as well, is just this sort of
Speaker 1: holding our life up to other examples, be it little
Speaker 1: biographies or myths or motion pictures that we've seen. Um.
Speaker 1: It reminds me a bit of something that's discussed in
Speaker 1: Mercelles Eliades The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos
Speaker 1: in History, the book I've I've talked about on the
Speaker 1: show before. It's kind of a you know, an important
Speaker 1: text in religious studies, and in this the author discusses
Speaker 1: how humans uh would have situated themselves within cyclical time. Uh.
Speaker 1: The idea here being that that ancient people thought of
Speaker 1: time is more as cyclical as opposed to linear, not
Speaker 1: something that has a beginning and an end that ultimately
Speaker 1: follows sort of the the ups and downs of a
Speaker 1: narrative plot, but is more of just a continual cycle.
Speaker 1: I guess more like a sitcom in that respect, right, Uh,
Speaker 1: as a as sitcom rather than blockbuster. And so the
Speaker 1: idea here is that ancient people would have viewed time
Speaker 1: as cyclical and that all important acts in life were
Speaker 1: ultimately things that were revealed by the gods, and that
Speaker 1: all humans did was engaged in acts and rituals of repetition. So,
Speaker 1: I don't know, there's something that might define you in life,
Speaker 1: like say, something that is associated with with being a parent,
Speaker 1: or being a warrior, or being a uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a craftsman and artisan. What have you like these things
Speaker 1: are only important because a god did them or some
Speaker 1: sort of divine figure did them, and then you were
Speaker 1: just repeating those things. Um a quote from the book
Speaker 1: An object or act becomes real only in so far
Speaker 1: as it imitates or repeats an archetype. But then again,
Speaker 1: the move to linear time or one way time allows
Speaker 1: for a different sort of narrative structure to emerge um
Speaker 1: and to take root in life, myth and religion, tales
Speaker 1: of fall and ultimately redemption and ultimate justice. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: this is, in in Lad's estimation, negative in that it
Speaker 1: allows for the terror of history, the realization that we
Speaker 1: keep falling and failing and suffering not because of divine
Speaker 1: acts or something set in motion by the gods for repetition,
Speaker 1: but because of our own failings. So we've abandoned mythical thought,
Speaker 1: he argues, and are confronted with this modern terror, these
Speaker 1: modern anxieties because of this way that we view time
Speaker 1: and and ultimately kind of place it in a narrative
Speaker 1: structure in our understanding of what has come before does
Speaker 1: color what comes comes comes later. I mean, the whole
Speaker 1: go back to the idea of you know, those who
Speaker 1: who who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Um
Speaker 1: also reminds me of quote from soreign h Crcy Guard
Speaker 1: from repetition, and I actually I encountered this quote for
Speaker 1: the first time in the intro to uh Alan robe
Speaker 1: Gerlay's novel Repetition. But it goes like this, repetition and
Speaker 1: recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions. For
Speaker 1: what is recollected has been it is repeated backwards, whereas repetition,
Speaker 1: properly so called, is recollected forward. Well, that does tend
Speaker 1: to suggest, I mean, another way of thinking about the
Speaker 1: possible effects of narrative on our lives is that if
Speaker 1: you tell a certain kind of story about yourself, do
Speaker 1: you make it more likely that you do a similar
Speaker 1: kind of story in the future. Right? Is it a
Speaker 1: story about what I was or who I am or
Speaker 1: who I will be? And I didn't think that can
Speaker 1: be instructive to a certain extent, Right, Like I am
Speaker 1: a good person, I am a moral person, and therefore
Speaker 1: I have acted morally and I will act morally. That
Speaker 1: sort of thing. But another thing that I think is
Speaker 1: really important about the psychology of storytelling is just the
Speaker 1: power that stories now when you're not even talking about
Speaker 1: self narrative. You're just talking about narrative, external narratives, fictional stories,
Speaker 1: narratives like we were talking about with global warming. Uh,
Speaker 1: somebody wants to tell a story about an evil conspiracy
Speaker 1: to push this hoax on people. That kind of story
Speaker 1: can be incredibly persuasive and powerful. Stories have the power
Speaker 1: to persuade for good and evil, And this can be
Speaker 1: a really frightening power because they often seem so much
Speaker 1: more persuasive than good evidence. Like if you're a lawyer,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a truism among lawyers, right that if
Speaker 1: you if you're doing a court case and the evidence
Speaker 1: is against you, if you tell a good enough story,
Speaker 1: you still might win the jury over that. Often, like
Speaker 1: presenting a case to a jury is about telling a
Speaker 1: believable story, and how believable the story is might not
Speaker 1: always correlate to how good the evidence is. And so
Speaker 1: there's plenty of evidence that stories have persuasive power that
Speaker 1: you know that they A lot of this is applied
Speaker 1: like within the business world. You know, you've probably seen
Speaker 1: people doing business presentations or giving ted talks or something
Speaker 1: like that, and they go up and the first thing
Speaker 1: they do is they tell a story. I want to
Speaker 1: tell you a story about a young man who had
Speaker 1: a dream, and that man was me. And you know,
Speaker 1: but they tell you a story and it's got a
Speaker 1: narrative arc, it's got obstacles that the character must face.
Speaker 1: They've got desires, they've got emotions. You you seek to
Speaker 1: have emotional engagement between the audience and the character, and
Speaker 1: that supposedly helps people pay more attention to what you're
Speaker 1: talking about. It helps people retain more information from what
Speaker 1: you said, and it helps you persuade people to your
Speaker 1: point of view, which I guess is all contingent on,
Speaker 1: you know, whether the ultimate point of what you're saying
Speaker 1: is good or not. I mean, you can use this
Speaker 1: for good and you can use it for quite evil purposes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: For instance, on the idea of narrative for good, we
Speaker 1: we've touched on some of the positives of telling stories already,
Speaker 1: but you know, it's worth noting that narrative is sometimes
Speaker 1: part of, you know, of an actual like clinical healing practice,
Speaker 1: such as narrative expressive writing. For instance of May two
Speaker 1: thousand seventeen study in Psychosomatic Medicine, Journal of Bio Behavioral
Speaker 1: Medicine found that the writing about their emotions and creating
Speaker 1: a meaningful narrative of their experience UH may reduce the
Speaker 1: harmful cardiovascular effects of stress related to marital separation and patients. UM.
Speaker 1: But you know, more specifically, like just the idea that
Speaker 1: engaging and narrative can be used in but they're they're
Speaker 1: apew process UM. I also ran across some notes on
Speaker 1: the pros and cons of storytelling from Ethics of Storytelling, Narrative, Hermoneutics,
Speaker 1: History and the Possible by Hannah Maritosa, Professor of Comparative
Speaker 1: Literature at the University of Turku in Finland, and she
Speaker 1: points out that the narrative gives us a sense of
Speaker 1: what is possible within a culture and what could be possible,
Speaker 1: and this is all good. You know, we see empowering
Speaker 1: stories and we think that could be me, or you know,
Speaker 1: I can do something like that. You know, I'm maybe
Speaker 1: I'm not going to go and engage in a boxing match,
Speaker 1: but this boxing movie has shown me that if I
Speaker 1: have the eye of the tiger, then nothing can UM.
Speaker 1: And then also it shapes what we think a good
Speaker 1: life is, what gender norms are, what success is, and
Speaker 1: this can be positive or negative. I mean, it really
Speaker 1: can run run run the gamut here. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: we tend to. Some research shows that we tend to
Speaker 1: identify with characters in narrow It is much the same
Speaker 1: way we would end up identifying with people in the world.
Speaker 1: And you know, when you see people in the world
Speaker 1: acting a certain way, their values can be contagious, their
Speaker 1: cultural values, their moral values. And I think the same
Speaker 1: can be true and narrative absolutely. She She also points
Speaker 1: to the Nazi regime is giving us a good example
Speaker 1: of what can happen when a strong narrative is developed
Speaker 1: to embolden one people but at the expense of others.
Speaker 1: Nazism was a story. It was a storytelling exercise, you know.
Speaker 1: It was telling a story about a great people, you know,
Speaker 1: who who had once been great and who were now
Speaker 1: being attacked by a conspiracy and parasitized by people who
Speaker 1: were unworthy, and that they would rise from this and
Speaker 1: become great once again. It was, in a way, it
Speaker 1: was kind of like a catastrophic reboot project of a culture.
Speaker 1: Yeah you know, um, yeah sou but also attempting to
Speaker 1: achieve what they this story, they this mythology they had
Speaker 1: about past greatness exactly. Yeah, But speaking of the Nazis,
Speaker 1: she also points out that we have to be careful
Speaker 1: not to demonize evil doers too much in our narrative
Speaker 1: understanding of past horrors in order to quote properly engage
Speaker 1: with the conditions that made the atrocities possible. Well, this
Speaker 1: is getting back to Alex Rosenberg, right, I mean like that,
Speaker 1: often thinking of history as a narrative and seeing you know,
Speaker 1: villains and heroes and stuff in history causes us to
Speaker 1: fail to appreciate some material conditions that brought brought about events.
Speaker 1: You know, when you think about history as stories of
Speaker 1: characters who succeed against all odds, all that and all that,
Speaker 1: and you and you get into that, you you engage
Speaker 1: in theory of mind and you think about what they
Speaker 1: were thinking. You stop thinking about what the price of
Speaker 1: bread was this week and how that influenced what was
Speaker 1: possible within a polity. Absolutely, and you know, with with
Speaker 1: the Nazis particularly, you know, it's interesting to look at
Speaker 1: your cinema, right and and certainly we have we have
Speaker 1: so many examples, even very entertaining examples of just like
Speaker 1: pure storybook Nazis, the rates of the Lost Ark is
Speaker 1: a great example of this, Like the Nazis are just
Speaker 1: straight up cardboard villains, and within the context of Raiders
Speaker 1: the Lost Art, it's arguably okay. But then how do
Speaker 1: you treat characters like this in other works, because you
Speaker 1: you know, to to her point here, you want to
Speaker 1: make sure that there is that human element there, that
Speaker 1: people are realizing that these are not demons, these are
Speaker 1: people and therefore their errors are our potential errors. Yes,
Speaker 1: I think that's very important to see them as people
Speaker 1: so you can realize, like this could happen again, other
Speaker 1: people could become like this, Right, So, like, say you
Speaker 1: look at a character, say like Joseph Mangela, and you
Speaker 1: want to be able to say he was not a monster.
Speaker 1: He you know, not an inhuman monster. He was a
Speaker 1: human who did monstrous things. And let's look at how
Speaker 1: that came to be. Um, you know, how as not
Speaker 1: to create more of them? Right? But then but then
Speaker 1: also I guess you do kind of run the risk
Speaker 1: of like making the characters like this to relate, Like
Speaker 1: you don't want to make them too sympathetic either, right, well, right,
Speaker 1: I mean you don't want to make it'm like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, wouldn't be so bad to be like, you
Speaker 1: don't want to lose the object lessons the experience. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's just one example of how how complicated
Speaker 1: choosing the form of narrative to place over history or individuals,
Speaker 1: how how problematic it can be, even with something that
Speaker 1: is relatively straightforward, by making sure that mass murderers and
Speaker 1: uh and you know, xenophobic individuals are are properly vilified,
Speaker 1: but vilified to the appropriate degree and in specifically the
Speaker 1: appropriate way. I mean, yes, uh yeah. Coming up with
Speaker 1: stories is it's a it's a task on which you
Speaker 1: have great responsibility on your shoulders, and people take it
Speaker 1: so lightly. I mean, you notice the almost it's almost
Speaker 1: like the level of responsibility goes exactly backwards. I tend
Speaker 1: to notice when people are talking about history in terms
Speaker 1: of uh, you know, minute fact matter about history, the
Speaker 1: you know, the weekly price of bread and a place
Speaker 1: throughout history, that they tend to exercise a lot more
Speaker 1: caution than people who are talking about history in a
Speaker 1: way that tells a narrative story. I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: you're always going to have people doing both, but it
Speaker 1: seems like the person who's putting together a narrative that
Speaker 1: reads like a story with characters. They should be exercising
Speaker 1: ten times as much caution as the person just collecting,
Speaker 1: you know, factual minutia about history. We've got it exactly backwards.
Speaker 1: The way people sling narratives about history is sometimes just breathtaking. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like one example, not not not to discuss this film
Speaker 1: in too much detail, but uh, the the adaptation of
Speaker 1: three hundred Oh yeah, well, I mean I was thinking
Speaker 1: more about just like you know, the dude shooting his
Speaker 1: mouth off about what the Nazis were really about, you know.
Speaker 1: But but but what you're saying is correct to like
Speaker 1: that's a film that is I don't know, there's like
Speaker 1: three different ways of looking at it. I guess like
Speaker 1: like one is that like this is clearly a case
Speaker 1: where you took a you took an historical, uh military engagement,
Speaker 1: and then you just made one side like the opra
Speaker 1: ultra masculine heroes, and the other side you made into
Speaker 1: like actual mutated debas demons, and then and then said
Speaker 1: that they were the Persians, you know, an entire culture
Speaker 1: and entire people, and that there is a that that's
Speaker 1: inherently reckless to do that, and then it's I've seen
Speaker 1: it defended by saying, well, the whole story is as
Speaker 1: told by this individual, and therefore it's supposed to be
Speaker 1: because it's ultimately about the distortions of storytelling. I don't
Speaker 1: know to what extent that truly holds up. I mean,
Speaker 1: I can see the role for that kind of story
Speaker 1: that's told by an unreliable narrator, but I don't remember
Speaker 1: that really coming through. I don't think I don't remember
Speaker 1: that either. I remember at the time initially kind of
Speaker 1: like naively experiencing it. I think the same way that
Speaker 1: it was perhaps intended, like here's just a crazy story
Speaker 1: where we made history more like Lord of the Rings,
Speaker 1: you know, and a goblins and demons and oh that's
Speaker 1: that and muscles and and and muscle abs for miles.
Speaker 1: I significantly doubt that I would have that same experience today.
Speaker 1: I think I would feel very conflicted about it. I mean,
Speaker 1: in a way, it's I feel it's going to be
Speaker 1: hard to go through life not spinning occasionally, at least
Speaker 1: spinning tidy, bold narratives about history that you have not
Speaker 1: really properly thought through the implications of, because that's that's
Speaker 1: just how we tend to think about past events, and
Speaker 1: we get caught up in story, We get caught up
Speaker 1: in the power of narrative. I was just thinking, I've
Speaker 1: probably sort of even though I've been trying to be careful,
Speaker 1: I've probably sort of done that today already. I mean, so,
Speaker 1: I try not to create heroes and villains unnecessarily. But
Speaker 1: one of the problems with creating heroes and villains in
Speaker 1: h in history is especially like when you go try
Speaker 1: to create a hero in history, is you almost inevitably
Speaker 1: find out stuff that like complicates your your idea of
Speaker 1: them as a hero, like, oh, this was the good
Speaker 1: guy at some point in his story, and then you
Speaker 1: read into their biography and it's like, oh, yeah, I
Speaker 1: did some stuff that you wouldn't you wouldn't write a
Speaker 1: hero doing. And your standard uncomplicated adventure movie right or
Speaker 1: just in the like looking up the personal getting to
Speaker 1: too acquainted with the personal history of say contemporary heroes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're like, oh, I really like this particular artist or
Speaker 1: actor or a musician. You're doomed. Don't look it up
Speaker 1: like you're you're ultimately it seems like you're sometimes it
Speaker 1: seems like often your best hope is that they just
Speaker 1: don't have a lot out there about their all right,
Speaker 1: well let's take a break. When we come back, we
Speaker 1: will dive deeper into the world of narrative. Thank thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you. All Right, we're back. So I wanted to
Speaker 1: look at a bit at the idea of narrative and neuroscience.
Speaker 1: There's all kinds of evidence that the brain is fundamentally
Speaker 1: oriented towards producing stories, consuming stories, seeing the world in
Speaker 1: terms of stories. Stories appear to have a kind of
Speaker 1: special purchase on our neurological architect Sure, So I just
Speaker 1: wanted to mention a few weird findings about how narratives
Speaker 1: work in the human brain. And so one thing I
Speaker 1: came across is the work of the Princeton University psychologist
Speaker 1: and neuroscientist Uri Hassan. And so Hassan has carried out
Speaker 1: brain imaging research to see exactly what happens in the
Speaker 1: human brain when we're engaged in various forms of communication.
Speaker 1: So he studies communication broadly, but one of those types
Speaker 1: of communications that he's studied is what happens when we're
Speaker 1: being told a story, like a personal narrative, or even
Speaker 1: like a like a fictional story like an episode of
Speaker 1: a TV show. So repeatedly, Hassan has found through f
Speaker 1: m R I that when people engage in successful verbal
Speaker 1: communication with one another, their brain activity tends to be
Speaker 1: to become physically aligned or coupled, meaning records of the
Speaker 1: physical activity of their brains show similarities or complementarity across
Speaker 1: space and time. So, like your brain image to people
Speaker 1: who are having a conversation, and you will see this
Speaker 1: interesting kind of brain activity ping pong where their their
Speaker 1: brains are almost sort of locked in sync and reacting
Speaker 1: and kind interesting, revealing that the relationship between storyteller and
Speaker 1: the listener is more of a like a melding of
Speaker 1: minds in the same way to say, like people singing
Speaker 1: together engaging in a ritual, they're also kind of like
Speaker 1: melding their their mental states. Yeah. Absolutely, So Hassen has
Speaker 1: argued that communication in general is quote a single act
Speaker 1: performed by two brains. I like that, but yeah, what
Speaker 1: so what happens when that communication takes the form of
Speaker 1: a story? Uh? And so I was reading an article
Speaker 1: where where Hassan himself writes about his research on this. Uh.
Speaker 1: So he wrote, quote, in one experiment, we brought people
Speaker 1: to the f m r I scanner and scanned their
Speaker 1: brains while they were either telling or listening to real
Speaker 1: life stories. We started by comparing the similarity of neural
Speaker 1: responses across different steners in their auditory cortices, the part
Speaker 1: of the brain that processes the sounds coming from the ear.
Speaker 1: When we looked at the responses before the experiment started,
Speaker 1: while our five listeners were at rest waiting for the
Speaker 1: storyteller to begin, we saw the responses were very different
Speaker 1: from each other and not in sync. And Robert, I've
Speaker 1: attached some images for you to see here. Uh, he continues. However,
Speaker 1: immediately as the story started, we saw something amazing happen.
Speaker 1: Suddenly we saw the neural responses in all of the
Speaker 1: subjects begin to lock together and go up and down
Speaker 1: in a similar way. So you're seeing this synchronization of
Speaker 1: physical records of brain activity as the story starts. Now,
Speaker 1: when people's different brain responses become synchronized or locked in
Speaker 1: response to speech like I was talking about, that, this
Speaker 1: is known as neural entrainment. In what Hassen's research found
Speaker 1: is that you could in train some parts of the
Speaker 1: brain without a coherent story So if you just play
Speaker 1: the audio of the story backwards and they did that
Speaker 1: to try to produce many of the same sounds as
Speaker 1: the story, but without any of the meaning, it entrains
Speaker 1: the auditory cortices, but nothing else. So that's just you know,
Speaker 1: the part for detecting sound. I'm just listening to noise.
Speaker 1: And then when you play whole words but scramble them
Speaker 1: out of order, this entrains the auditory cortices and the
Speaker 1: quote early language areas, but nothing else. Then when you
Speaker 1: play whole sentences that makes sense individually but don't form
Speaker 1: a coherent narrative, you get entrainment in the previous areas
Speaker 1: plus areas associated with processing language and grammar, but nothing else.
Speaker 1: But then finally, when you actually play a story that
Speaker 1: has narrative coherence, that has an arc, where you're actually
Speaker 1: telling a coherent story, you get similarities and alignments across
Speaker 1: listeners in areas of higher brain function like the frontal
Speaker 1: cortex and the parietal cortex. And as much as like Robert,
Speaker 1: you and I often talk about the particular powers of
Speaker 1: languages and how things can be lost in translation, it
Speaker 1: turns out that some important neurologically salient features of stories
Speaker 1: are generally not lost in translation. So Hassan has also
Speaker 1: been involved in research that shows that if you take
Speaker 1: a real life story originally from a Russian speaker and
Speaker 1: you translate it into English and the authors specified quote
Speaker 1: we tried to preserve the content of the narrative while
Speaker 1: reducing the structural similarities across languages unquote uh. They found
Speaker 1: that Russian speakers and English speakers also show aligned patterns
Speaker 1: of brain activation when listening to the story quote, beginning
Speaker 1: just outside early auditory areas and extending through temporal, parietal,
Speaker 1: and frontal cerebral cortices. So this means that it doesn't
Speaker 1: have anything to do with people sitting in a room
Speaker 1: listening to English. You take a story in one language,
Speaker 1: translate it to a different language, and play it to
Speaker 1: people in those different languages, and you will still see
Speaker 1: this strange brain imaging alignment. So it's like we can
Speaker 1: pick up on the shape of story even if the
Speaker 1: the the the actual language is the one we don't
Speaker 1: we don't understand, yes, and so this research gets even weirder.
Speaker 1: So Hassan and colleagues have done if F M R
Speaker 1: I scanning on people watching TV shows like the BBC's Sherlock.
Speaker 1: Did you watch someone, Robert, I've watched a few episodes. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so uh you know it's it can be pretty engrossing.
Speaker 1: So they had people watched Sherlock while getting brain scan,
Speaker 1: and they later scanned subjects in a dark room retelling
Speaker 1: the story of what they had watched out loud. Then
Speaker 1: later they played back a recording of one of those
Speaker 1: subjects describing the story from the Sherlock episode to someone
Speaker 1: who hadn't seen the shows. And this was pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: People in all three scenarios showed some alignment of higher
Speaker 1: order brain function that played out in similar ways seen
Speaker 1: by scene. Despite the fact that these three different that
Speaker 1: they were doing these three totally different sensory tasks. Watching
Speaker 1: a TV show, remin remembering a show you've already watched,
Speaker 1: and then listening to somebody described the plot of a
Speaker 1: TV show to you, you'd still get, like when somebody
Speaker 1: describes a particular scene in the show, you'd get some
Speaker 1: alignment of brain activity that's similar to what happens when
Speaker 1: people watch that scene. And I think this cross media
Speaker 1: alignment suggests that brain activity can be aligned by the
Speaker 1: content of the story itself, that it doesn't necessarily depend
Speaker 1: on whether you're watching with your eyes or listening or remembering.
Speaker 1: The brain seems to be, at least at some level
Speaker 1: responding strongly to stories as stories. And this makes me
Speaker 1: think back to the idea of the story of narrative
Speaker 1: is being like just a basic survival adaptation, like the
Speaker 1: ability to to convene with other members of say your tribe,
Speaker 1: and and get info, get intel about what is happening
Speaker 1: in the immediate surroundings or in what may happen. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems like stories they like they suddenly they justness
Speaker 1: our attention and we lock into them. And it's almost
Speaker 1: as if the brain has sort of built in story
Speaker 1: recognition functions that work different than just receiving verbal information
Speaker 1: of any other kind or watching somebody do something. If
Speaker 1: there's a character I to identify with and they're facing
Speaker 1: a plot, then something happens. All right, we're gonna take
Speaker 1: a quick break, but we'll be right back. Thank alright,
Speaker 1: We're back all right now. When thinking about neurochemistry and
Speaker 1: and how stories work in the brain, one of the
Speaker 1: things that comes up the most on Internet searches about
Speaker 1: this is we're coming out of the lab of the
Speaker 1: neuroeconomist Paul J. Zach about narrative experience, attention, empathy, and UH,
Speaker 1: specifically the hormone oxytocin. Now, oxytocin, unfortunately is one of
Speaker 1: those uh, one of those things. I think I mentioned
Speaker 1: this in the last episode where sometimes a story about
Speaker 1: neuroscience or a story about neurochemistry can become radically over
Speaker 1: simplified and misrepresented, especially in the popular press. You may
Speaker 1: have seen articles using the you know, the dreaded nicknames,
Speaker 1: the love drug, the cuttle chemical, the moral molecule. It
Speaker 1: turns out the truth about this, uh, this hormone is
Speaker 1: is much more complicated. There's still so much about it
Speaker 1: we don't even know yet. It's a complicated story of
Speaker 1: what it's doing in our brains and in our bodies.
Speaker 1: But it did want to at least take a look
Speaker 1: at this angle since there's a lot of stuff out
Speaker 1: about it, a lot of stuff out there about it
Speaker 1: in in in science media. So what do we know
Speaker 1: about oxytocin from existing research? First of all, it's a
Speaker 1: molecule that's synthesized in the hypothalamus and mammal brains that
Speaker 1: has both physiological and psychological effects. Oxytocin levels can be
Speaker 1: sampled in the blood. It does it's produced in the brain,
Speaker 1: but it does get into the bloodstream or by matt
Speaker 1: measuring patterns of stimulation in the vagus nerve. Classically, it's
Speaker 1: associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing, contributing to physiological coal
Speaker 1: effects such as uterine contractions before birth and the milk
Speaker 1: ejection reflects during nursing. It's also highly associated with mother
Speaker 1: infant bonding. But the effects do appear to go beyond this,
Speaker 1: and this is where we get into some of the
Speaker 1: the more difficult territory. It does appear to play a
Speaker 1: vast and complicated role in human social behavior. Uh. Some
Speaker 1: of the earliest research on its social effects where that
Speaker 1: oxytocin is important in establishing trust and cooperation between humans.
Speaker 1: We appear to experience elevated levels of oxytocin when someone
Speaker 1: shows us that they trust us, or when somebody does
Speaker 1: something kind for us. And these findings really shaped a
Speaker 1: lot of what people thought about oxytocin in the past
Speaker 1: twenty years. Yeah, but kind of it kind of big
Speaker 1: takes on this roll of like this kind of magical
Speaker 1: elixir wine that your body kind of squirts out when
Speaker 1: it's doing things that are aligned properly with sort of
Speaker 1: you know, reproductive child rearing or social health. Yeah, exactly
Speaker 1: got this reputation of being you know, quote the moral
Speaker 1: molecule or something that or something that even could be
Speaker 1: given to people in doses that would make them more
Speaker 1: moral or something like that. And it turns out the
Speaker 1: truth is much much more complicated than that. Right. But
Speaker 1: but of course we see why that narrative is is
Speaker 1: so appealing, right, I mean, Lord's got a hero, a hero,
Speaker 1: and we love a good narrative that involves, you know,
Speaker 1: a pill based solution to something, or in this case,
Speaker 1: I think it would be a nasal injection spray solution.
Speaker 1: This is even better than a pill. I do love
Speaker 1: a good nasal nasal injection solution in a narrative. Though.
Speaker 1: I think actually the last thing I read about that
Speaker 1: was that there's actually some question about the extent to
Speaker 1: which nasal spray dosings of oxytocin really even take effect
Speaker 1: within the body, but they're used in a lot of studies.
Speaker 1: So uh. But anyway, this guy who's been behind a
Speaker 1: lot of the love drug moral molecule vision of oxytocin.
Speaker 1: Is this neuroeconomist Paul Zach who's who's written on this
Speaker 1: subject a lot, and so his name pops up a
Speaker 1: lot when you read about story to helling and the
Speaker 1: brain and neurochemistry, and he has done some research on this,
Speaker 1: like he's been involved in or at least him and
Speaker 1: his colleagues and his lab have been involved in research
Speaker 1: about UH, say, subjecting people to narratives and testing blood
Speaker 1: oxytocin levels before and after they've they've experienced these narratives.
Speaker 1: And what they claim to find is that when you
Speaker 1: watch a story that's got a narrative arc, classic example
Speaker 1: is like a story of a father talking about his
Speaker 1: son who's dying of cancer and and how to relate
Speaker 1: to his son, and it like it has building tension
Speaker 1: and gets to a climax and then he overcomes his problems.
Speaker 1: Narratives like this increase our blood oxytocin levels, and this
Speaker 1: indicates that narratives cause oxytocin synthesis within the brain. And
Speaker 1: then he links this to all these ideas showing UH
Speaker 1: that oxytocin leads to cooperation, causes people to donate more
Speaker 1: money to charities, and and all these things like that,
Speaker 1: so and so, the general thrust is that narrative can
Speaker 1: be used to trigger these neurochemical reactions that cause us
Speaker 1: to experience more generosity, to experience more cooperation, to be
Speaker 1: more charitable, to trust more, to give of ourselves, and
Speaker 1: that this happens naturally when we experience stories and and
Speaker 1: he frames this motivation to take a pro social, cooperative,
Speaker 1: self sacrificing action after a narrative. But I remember, after
Speaker 1: reading about some of this research, assuming the research holds
Speaker 1: up and this as we've been saying this, Uh, some
Speaker 1: of this research has had plenty of critics, especially in
Speaker 1: how it's interpreted. But you know, I also started to
Speaker 1: wonder if the inverse would be true, Like if it
Speaker 1: is true that watching stories tends to cause these neurochemical
Speaker 1: cascades that uh, that do in fact make us more
Speaker 1: likely to cooperate or something. Would higher levels of oxytocin
Speaker 1: after watching a narrative also make you more motivated to
Speaker 1: go beat someone up if the story implied that you should.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but I wonder, I mean, you could
Speaker 1: I can imagine what it would be the case if
Speaker 1: you had if you had a work of say, cinema
Speaker 1: that is ultimately inciting violence against some group, or clearly
Speaker 1: there have been there have been films of this caliber
Speaker 1: exactly right now. This guy writes also a lot about
Speaker 1: like their particular details he identifies as being most important,
Speaker 1: and narratives that are salient and the that are neurologically salient,
Speaker 1: including having rising tensions. So like there's a dramatic arc
Speaker 1: where things keep getting you know, there's maybe a mystery
Speaker 1: or there's a problem to face, and the tension keeps
Speaker 1: getting ratcheted up and up. I'd say this correlates with
Speaker 1: conventional wisdom about what good good storytelling is, like you've
Speaker 1: got to keep escalating the tension. Yet I do think
Speaker 1: it's fascinating that, like we know some of these things
Speaker 1: about storytelling, and yet so many professionally told stories are
Speaker 1: still so bad and like do not engage the audience
Speaker 1: emotionally at all, and do not escalate tension this way,
Speaker 1: Like so many movies are just awful stories, and yet
Speaker 1: the recipe is pretty simple. Yeah, I mean, it's sometimes
Speaker 1: just like a simple story of the simple story, the
Speaker 1: nice like trope filled story is just told semi adequately
Speaker 1: at the heart of a film. It can make all
Speaker 1: the difference, be it be it like a really stylish
Speaker 1: film or a film like even like a b film
Speaker 1: like some of the a lot of the films that
Speaker 1: the you and I go for, like whether it is
Speaker 1: watchable or not, well, whether you know it's it's just
Speaker 1: it's at all. You know, a film you can engage
Speaker 1: with a lot of it hinges on there just being
Speaker 1: sort of a basic story structure that is in place,
Speaker 1: and of course many films managed to trip that up.
Speaker 1: But but but yeah, as long as there's like the
Speaker 1: basic story there, you can you can forgive so much.
Speaker 1: There was a little turtle named Edna, and every day
Speaker 1: Edna swam out to the middle of the pond where
Speaker 1: she lived and met her friend, uh, the turtle ed.
Speaker 1: But one day she swam out to the middle of
Speaker 1: the pond and ed was not there. Where did ed go?
Speaker 1: You got a mystery. I don't want to brag, but
Speaker 1: I think I've already created more narrative tension than like
Speaker 1: than half of the action movies that exist. Yeah, but anyway,
Speaker 1: coming back to this and and and questioning some of
Speaker 1: what we've been talking about. So from what I've read,
Speaker 1: Zach repeatedly stresses in public speeches and popular articles all
Speaker 1: the good things about this, I mean, assuming that this
Speaker 1: research is somewhat valid, that there are these links between
Speaker 1: you know, oxytocin synthesis in the brain and engaging in
Speaker 1: narratives that escalate tension and make you identify with the characters.
Speaker 1: If there is something to that, he he stresses, this
Speaker 1: is a good thing, that it fosters cooperation and trust
Speaker 1: and compassion and charity and all that. But as we
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, it's really worth noting that some of this
Speaker 1: public messaging that's been going on about oxytocin has been
Speaker 1: criticized for oversimplifying the role of oxytocin and human life,
Speaker 1: especially in focusing too much or too exclusively on its
Speaker 1: role in positive emotions and pro social behaviors, and for
Speaker 1: overstating what the research allows us to conclude at this point.
Speaker 1: Just one quick example, one of my favorite science writers,
Speaker 1: d Young, wrote at least a couple of really good
Speaker 1: articles on this subject, including one in the Atlantic, and
Speaker 1: and he points out that a more powerful emerging theory
Speaker 1: of the role of oxytocin in the brain that we
Speaker 1: still don't know a whole lot about it is that
Speaker 1: it increases the salience of social information. So it's not
Speaker 1: necessarily that it makes us trust or makes us love,
Speaker 1: or makes us cooperate. It increases our attention in response
Speaker 1: to inputs that are socially relevant. Uh. And this might
Speaker 1: seem to cash out the fact that it has been
Speaker 1: linked to trust and all these other things, but it's
Speaker 1: also been linked to phenomena like outgroup prejudice, willingness to
Speaker 1: be dishonest if it would protect the in group, schaden freud, envy,
Speaker 1: boasting or boasting or gloating, I mean, all these things
Speaker 1: that we don't think of as very good positive social
Speaker 1: emotions or behaviors. Yeah, I guess one of the things
Speaker 1: that keep him mind is that I think it's true
Speaker 1: you can you can take a read on on the
Speaker 1: human experience that we are chemicals and uh and a
Speaker 1: lot of what we do is governed by by chemical reactions. Right,
Speaker 1: But it's not just one chemical and it's not just
Speaker 1: one chemical reaction. Well, even when you focus on one chemical,
Speaker 1: it turns out that this one chemical has an extremely
Speaker 1: strange range of effects that are probably highly context dependent.
Speaker 1: You know. Earlier and I think in the last episode,
Speaker 1: we were talking about the importance of context on when
Speaker 1: a story matters and and what its effects are. Context
Speaker 1: is probably very important on what the actual effects of
Speaker 1: oxytocina are. Again, I don't want to overstate what we
Speaker 1: know now about about this hormone. But if it is
Speaker 1: something like uh, like a neurochemical that increases the salience
Speaker 1: and increases our openness to and attention to socially relevant
Speaker 1: incoming information, that could be very good or very bad. Right.
Speaker 1: It might help you pick up on cues that that
Speaker 1: allows you to cooperate with somebody, but it also might
Speaker 1: make you more socially paranoid and vulnerable to bullying and
Speaker 1: afraid that people hate you because of little signals you're
Speaker 1: picking up on. And that's just with this provisional idea
Speaker 1: that that's what it does. Ultimately, we don't know everything
Speaker 1: about what oxytocin does yet, so it is not just
Speaker 1: a love drug. It's not a cuddle chemical. Instead, it
Speaker 1: seems that it's it's a hormone related to a suite
Speaker 1: of powerful socially salient emotions and motivations, So we should
Speaker 1: definitely blast it up our noses. This was saying, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it's great for research to continue,
Speaker 1: but don't conclude that, you know, you go out and
Speaker 1: dose all the dictators with with a nasal spray and
Speaker 1: will cure all the world's ills. I absolutely think we
Speaker 1: should do solve the dictators of the world with a
Speaker 1: nasal spray, but we just have different thoughts about what
Speaker 1: is the appropriate substance. So given all those massive caveats,
Speaker 1: I'm not quite sure what to make of this last
Speaker 1: line of evidence here. But if it is true that
Speaker 1: narratives increase levels of body oxytocin, and if it is
Speaker 1: true that knoxy that oxytocin increases the salience of socially
Speaker 1: relevant information, you can see how that would give narrative
Speaker 1: a lot of power as well. Essentially, it opens you
Speaker 1: up to being socially receptive to ideas and behaviors, to
Speaker 1: to trigger motivations for action, not necessarily good ones, so
Speaker 1: maybe they could be good. I think it does bring
Speaker 1: us to you know, helps to just drive on the
Speaker 1: point that that narrative is something that's deeply ingrained in
Speaker 1: how we think, how we behave, and what it is
Speaker 1: to be human. UH. To to go back to one
Speaker 1: of the UH the the experts that we mentioned in
Speaker 1: the first episode episode Carol McGranahan, I she I believe
Speaker 1: argues that that essentially, like our species is something like
Speaker 1: homo narrative or something to that effect, like that that
Speaker 1: that that's how like just ingrained in this this this
Speaker 1: need for narratives and this desire to to think about
Speaker 1: narratives truly is we're Homo ds X mocking us. But
Speaker 1: you know, at the same time, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: language in that like if you try to imagine a
Speaker 1: human without language, if you engage in in the denial
Speaker 1: of language, you're talking about a severe abuse, or at
Speaker 1: least a severe negligence. And therefore, to to to deprive
Speaker 1: someone of of stories of narrative like it's it is
Speaker 1: equal parts unimaginable and monstrous, Like you would have to
Speaker 1: be like a diabolical, uh, you know, experiment in which
Speaker 1: you've denied somebody that this basis of understanding the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you're absolutely right, and I don't know what
Speaker 1: to do about this knowledge. I mean, I feel fairly
Speaker 1: convinced that Rosenberg is correct that narratives cloud our understanding
Speaker 1: of history, and I guess necessary necessarily of the present
Speaker 1: as well. Essentially, thinking of things in terms of stories
Speaker 1: prevents us from understanding what's really happening with causes and
Speaker 1: effects and reality. I think that's absolutely correct. He's right
Speaker 1: about that. And yet I don't know what to do
Speaker 1: about it, because I don't think we can we can
Speaker 1: beat story impulses out of people. I don't know what
Speaker 1: to do other than to just say, like, hey, be
Speaker 1: aware of this. Maybe maybe that'll help you. I know
Speaker 1: it will help. I think. I think I think awareness
Speaker 1: is is the key. And in in a way it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of beautiful in this simplicity, right, because this
Speaker 1: is ultimately the same thing that has been been been
Speaker 1: preached in in in a few different religions, particularly in Buddhism.
Speaker 1: You know, the idea that one that is a self
Speaker 1: awareness that has to take place, like you have to
Speaker 1: be aware that of these various influences on your perception
Speaker 1: of of reality. And so if we're aware of the
Speaker 1: dangers of narrative as well as the benefits of narrative,
Speaker 1: then hopefully we can be in a better place to
Speaker 1: properly navigate uh these pitfalls. Here's one piece of practical
Speaker 1: advice actually that that does come out of this research.
Speaker 1: For me, is if you're worried that a narrative is
Speaker 1: working on you, is is working on your brain in
Speaker 1: a way that may actually prevent you from, say, understanding
Speaker 1: the truth or doing the right thing, or something like that.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're worried about a narrative's power over you,
Speaker 1: break your attention that this is the most powerful thing
Speaker 1: we can do in reaction to a narrative, because the
Speaker 1: way the narrative maintains its grip on us is by
Speaker 1: holding our attention. If you just force yourself to look
Speaker 1: away and think about something else, it's often shocking suddenly
Speaker 1: how quickly the spell breaks. Have you ever noticed this,
Speaker 1: Like you're talking about focusing on something in your environment, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it could be in your environment. I mean narratives take
Speaker 1: different forms. So it might be you're reading a book,
Speaker 1: it might be you're watching a video or a movie.
Speaker 1: It might be somebody's telling you something, whatever it is,
Speaker 1: a lot of the power of the narrative is in
Speaker 1: keeping your attention wrapped. You are there, and you always
Speaker 1: have the power to break. To break that attention, right,
Speaker 1: you can look at something else, you can focus on
Speaker 1: something else, you can think about something else and see
Speaker 1: and see see what happens when you come back, see
Speaker 1: if it was worthy of your attention in the first place.
Speaker 1: But that reminds me of something Galen Strawson said about,
Speaker 1: you know, consider the lilies of the field. I mean,
Speaker 1: he didn't say that he's quoting the Bible, but you know,
Speaker 1: like in order to go back to, you know, various
Speaker 1: meditative practices like focusing on breath, coming back to my breathing,
Speaker 1: coming back to something that is not this uh this,
Speaker 1: you know, this, this this storm of narratives about past
Speaker 1: and future and self and other and coming back to
Speaker 1: something as as basic and ultimately largely objective as what
Speaker 1: is my breath doing? Is it going in or is
Speaker 1: it coming out? What am I watching that bird doing?
Speaker 1: You know? I mean that's one of the reasons it's
Speaker 1: so calming to to uh, you know, participate in nature,
Speaker 1: to to observe nature. I think that's a really good point.
Speaker 1: And bringing it back to fictional narratives, do you ever
Speaker 1: notice You might not agree, but I feel like there's
Speaker 1: a counterintuitive process where I notice and understand the structure
Speaker 1: of movie plots better if I pay less close attention
Speaker 1: to the movie, Like if I'm sitting with somebody watching
Speaker 1: a movie and we're occasionally like commenting or chatting back
Speaker 1: and forth, and I'm breaking my attention on the film.
Speaker 1: I actually have a clearer picture in my head of
Speaker 1: the shape of the story and where the beats are
Speaker 1: and all that. And I think that might be because
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not just totally sucked in on the
Speaker 1: story and riding along with it. I'm being pulled out
Speaker 1: and I'm getting I'm getting a zoomed out view by
Speaker 1: doing that. Interesting, I wonder if one could combat the
Speaker 1: potentially negative aspects of narrative by just anytime someone tells
Speaker 1: you a story, imagine Nicholas Cage in every role, you know,
Speaker 1: because uh, I feel like increasingly nothing, nothing brings me
Speaker 1: out of a film, like like a good Nicolas. And
Speaker 1: I know there's been kind of a Cage renaissance of late,
Speaker 1: but still, uh, you know, throw in something that kind
Speaker 1: of turns it nuts on its head. It makes it
Speaker 1: less of a of of a narrative. I mean, maybe
Speaker 1: that's what we do when we say picture picture the
Speaker 1: eye's in their underwear, you know, like transformed the narrative
Speaker 1: of what's happening into something that is lower stakes. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Picture Nicolas Cage in his pyramid in New Orleans. Wait, no,
Speaker 1: what what? Oh? I was trying to think, what did
Speaker 1: I see him in? It was so great? Recently it
Speaker 1: was Mandy Oh, yeah, he was. He was great in that.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, um, he was inherently distracted,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, I think that was maybe the right
Speaker 1: movie for him. But I'm gonna, I'm actually gonna maybe
Speaker 1: go against public opinion and say that I wonder if
Speaker 1: it might have been a better film with maybe a
Speaker 1: slightly more nuanced performance in that role. But I'm still
Speaker 1: perfectly happy with what I got, though, made me pull
Speaker 1: on my long chainsaw. Robert, All right, Well, there you
Speaker 1: have it. I'm sure everyone has something to add on
Speaker 1: this one, because we all love stories, we all love
Speaker 1: different types stories, and then we're all dealing with with
Speaker 1: various forms of narrative and self narrative in our own lives.
Speaker 1: So we'd love to hear from you. In the meantime.
Speaker 1: If you to check out more episodes of Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. That's where we find all the episodes.
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