On his book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
Cover Interview of April 15, 2012
In a nutshell
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.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
In a nutshell
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.