Jonathan Gottschall
The Storytelling Animal
You might not realize it, but you are a creature of an imaginative realm called Storyland. Storyland is your home and before you die you will spend decades there. If you haven’t noticed this before, don’t feel bad: story is for a human as water is for a fish—all encompassing and not quite palpable. While your body is always stuck at a particular point in space-time, your mind is always free to ramble in lands of make-believe. And it does.
We read novels. We go to movies. We watch TV serials, and the faux non-fiction of reality shows and pro wrestling. We groove to ultra-short fictions in popular songs. We lose ourselves in video games that make us the rock-jawed heroes of action films (or fleshed-out characters in story-rich games like The World of Warcraft).
When we are not consuming stories made up by others, we are making up our own. Our children play at story by instinct—inventing scenarios and acting them out in Neverland. When our bodies sleep, our restless minds stay awake all night telling fevered stories. And we don’t stop dreaming when the sun comes up.
We spend hours per day spontaneously generating daydreams in which all of our vain, dirty wishes—and all of our secret fears—come true.
Scientists and philosophers have long debated the human essence—the thing that sets us apart most fundamentally from the rest of creation. Is it intelligence (Homo sapiens)? Is it the sophistication of tool use (Homo habilis)? Is it upright posture (Homo erectus)? Is it playfulness (Homo ludens)? Or could it be language or the complexity of our social behavior? These factors are all important, but an equally important factor has been overlooked. Big brains and upright posture set us apart—so does the way we live in Storyland. I give you Homo fictus (fiction man), the great ape with the storytelling mind.
Kung San Storyteller. 1947. Photograph by Nat Farbman.
Editor: Erind Pajo
The Storytelling Animal
Jonathan Gottschall The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 272 pages, 5 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches ISBN 978 0547391403
Available here →April 16, 2012
20120416-gottschall-jonathan-on-storytelling-animal-how-stories-make-human-1-1-1
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Jonathan Gottschall
Jonathan Gottschall teaches in the English Department at Washington & Jefferson College, is the author or editor of six books, and is one of the leading figures in a new effort to bridge the humanities-sciences divide. While his Ph.D. is in English, his main dissertation advisor was the prominent evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, and he splits his publishing between psychology and literary journals. Gottschall’s work has been featured and quoted in venues such as the New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Scientific American Mind, New Scientist, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nature, and Science.
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Story is what most sets humans apart, and fiction survived evolution because stories are flight simulators for social life.
Against KO · The philosophers who insist most on the man/animal divide depend most heavily on animals for their arguments. On: There is a difference in kind, not merely of degree, between human minds and animal minds
Against PL · Neanderthals could not produce the vowels that make speech clear, yet they talked, so language was no sudden human event. On: There is a difference in kind, not merely of degree, between human minds and animal minds
Against DS · The physics and neuroscience behind every musical style can be taught with grade-school arithmetic, and conservatories teach none of it. On: There is a difference in kind, not merely of degree, between human minds and animal minds
Alongside GS · Reason and language are irrelevant to moral status, so killing and eating animals is unjustifiable. On: There is a difference in kind, not merely of degree, between human minds and animal minds
Alongside ET · Gods were an incidental byproduct of brain evolution, born when autobiographical memory taught humans they would die. On: There is a difference in kind, not merely of degree, between human minds and animal minds
Alongside HT · Apes never learned to use symbols as names, so teaching them sentences was futile from the start. On: There is a difference in kind, not merely of degree, between human minds and animal minds
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