The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human By Jonathan Gottschall

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Rating: 9 (6706 reviews)
Author: Jonathan Gottschall

Books,Literature & Fiction,History & Criticism The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human Jonathan Gottschall

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Humans live in landscapes of make-believe. We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives. Yet the world of story has long remained an undiscovered and unmapped country. It’s easy to say that humans are “wired” for story, but why?In this delightful and original book, Jonathan Gottschall offers the first unified theory of storytelling. He argues that stories help us navigate life’s complex social problems—just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult situations. Storytelling has evolved, like other behaviors, to ensure our survival.Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Gottschall tells us what it means to be a storytelling animal. Did you know that the more absorbed you are in a story, the more it changes your behavior? That all children act out the same kinds of stories, whether they grow up in a slum or a suburb? That people who read more fiction are more empathetic?Of course, our story instinct has a darker side. It makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, advertisements, and narratives about ourselves that are more “truthy” than true. National myths can also be terribly dangerous: Hitler’s ambitions were partly fueled by a story.But as Gottschall shows in this remarkable book, stories can also change the world for the better. Most successful stories are moral—they teach us how to live, whether explicitly or implicitly, and bind us together around common values. We know we are master shapers of story. The Storytelling Animal finally reveals how stories shape us.

At this time of writing, The Mobi The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human has garnered 10 customer reviews with rating of 5 out of 5 stars. Not a bad score at all as if you round it off, it’s actually a perfect TEN already. From the looks of that rating, we can say the Mobi is Good TO READ!

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This is a fascinating book presenting important findings and theories on stories as a critical dimension of human evolutiont. This core idea is well reflected in the following passages:“In recent decades, roughly corresponding with the rise of TV, psychology has begun a serious study of story’s effects on the human mind… fiction does mold our minds. Story—whether delivered through films, books, or video games—teaches us facts about the world; influences our moral logic; and marks us with fears, hopes, and anxieties that alter our behavior, perhaps even our personalities. Research shows that story is constantly nibbling and kneading us, shaping our minds without our knowledge or consent” (p. 148); and “Humans are creatures of Neverland. Neverland is our evolutionary niche, our special habitat” (p. 177). But, while recognizing some dangers, the book is too optimistic on the impacts of storytelling on humanity. Thus, the book does not confront the negative effects of amusement industry, advertisement fables and political marketing stories. Its most serious error assumes morality-enhancing effects of stories, as if there exists an universal and timeless human morality reinforced by them. The author mentions violence caused by conflicting religious beliefs, but then forgets all about it when making statements claiming that “as with sacred myths, ordinary stories—from TV shows to fairy tales—steep us all in the same powerful norms and values” (p. 134). Thus the book ignores the pluralism of values which contradict each other. If the author had taken into account Nazi stories and movies he would not make a grievous error: ignoring a fundamental feature of humanity, namely self-righteous highly moral persons and collectives clinging fanatically to different stories producing a sense of moral duty to kill non-believers, inferior races, exploiters and so on – making history into what Hegel called a “slaughterhouse” and quite likely. when driven with fitting stories and equipped with increasingly effective tools of mass killing, endangering the future of the human species.. Related is the author’s statement “that fiction, by constantly marinating our brains in the theme of poetic justice, may be partly responsible for the overly optimistic sense that the world is, on the whole, a just place. And yet the fact that we take this lesson to heart may be an important part of what makes human societies work (p. 135).True, the human species continues to exist, though its future is not assured. And most humans are at present materially better off than ever before. But the masses of India, Africa, large parts of South America and more hardly think that global society works well; and lack of coping with climate change throws even more doubts on the “working” of human society as a whole. Therefore, much of the story telling giving a good feeling to parts of humanity may be a toxic tranquillizer.Thus, besides its many merits, the book suffers from what I call the “Better Angels Mirage.” A more critical stance on the impacts of stories would have made this book even better.Professor Yehezkel DrorThe Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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