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Dr. Michael Austin |
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Darwin’s Library Why do we love stories? As human beings, we belong to a relatively young primate species that occupies a “cognitive niche” in the environment. Our survival depends—and has always depended—on our ability to extract reliable information from our immediate surroundings and process it through our extraordinarily large brains. Why, then, do people from all cultures love fictional stories? And, perhaps even more importantly, why do we devote to fictional narratives (books, movies, TV shows, music, etc.) money, time, and other resources that could be employed in more evolutionary sensible tasks such as hunting large animals, gathering berries, or seeking opportunities to mate? This is a question that has stumped evolutionary biologists and cognitive psychologists for years. Research clearly shows that the human brain uses a narrative format to process information. “Thinking,” very often means placing information in spatial and temporal sequences with identifiable beginnings, middles, and ends. But classical evolutionary theory strongly suggests that these narratives are useful only to the extent that they correspond to facts that can be acted upon. This presentation will explore the origins of the human attraction to counterfactual narratives. By combining recent findings in narrative theory, biology, game theory, and evolutionary psychology, it will argue that many of our basic thought processes involve “useful fictions,” or narratives whose adaptive value do not depend on their truth value. I will invoke two of the greatest characters in all of world literature to illustrate this concept: Scheherazade, whose stories both create and relieve the anxiety of a sultan; and Don Quixote, whose delusions and self-deceptions enable him to perform feats worthy of the man he imagines himself to be.
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