June 19, 2012 • 41 mins
" Don't underestimate the power of the storyteller. His tale may begin with whimsy, but by the end of it he'll have changed the world you live in. He might even change who you are. In this episode, Julie and Robert examine fiction's effect on reality.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
before we get into the podcast, uh, I just want
to mention real quick we have a new sponsor, UM
new sponsor Netflix, So pay attention. Uh tune back in
(00:25):
later on in the podcast, We're gonna have a special
offer related to Netflix. And now for the topic of today, Yeah,
this one stems from your recent journey to New York
for the World Science Festival two thousand twelve. How was it?
I like how you say journey like I was in
a covered wagon. Well, it's kind of a you have
to go to Atlanta's airport, so that is a journey
(00:46):
in and of it so traumatic. It was wonderful. World
Science Festival two thousand and twelve. UM got to see
a lot of really cool panels and one of them
was UM the Science of Narrative, and it had a
bunch of people on it UM including Joyce Carol Oates,
one of my favorite authors, I mean, uh so it
(01:11):
was great to see her talk about the process of
writing and UM. Dr Kevin Oatley was another person's psychologist
who who talked about several others I don't have. Yeah,
Jeffrey eugen needs uh like Eugene and I d e
yes at the end if I'm saying that correctly. He's
also the author of Virgin Suicide and he read and
(01:31):
I think the marriage plotted this new one, right, Yes,
but he read an incredible um excerpt from Virgin Suicides
to talk about some of what we'll talk about today,
which is how readers are engaged in this world and
meant to feel as though they occupy it themselves so
much so that they began to um to really feel
(01:54):
a reality in the text. And it's and what's awesome
about that too, is that sometimes the reality is you're
immersed in or kind of Nightmark Joyce Carol Oates, for example.
I recently read her book Zombie, which is kind of
a fictionalized narrative based on the life of Jeffrey Dahmer.
So you have a very disturbed individual who is plotting
(02:15):
and trying to carry out these murders so that he
can create a zombie out of somebody and keep them
in his seller as a it's like kind of a
sex slave. So it's a very dark tale, but you're
so immersed in the narrative you find yourself kind of
rooting for the guy. I mean, you're feeling for him
because she's a talented writer, and via the narrative experience,
(02:37):
you kind of become this character and on some level
you want him to succeed. And it's it can be
a very weird feeling in some of these It really
messes with your mind. And that's really what we're gonna
talk about today. We're gonna talk about this idea that
that fiction we usually think of as separate from ourselves,
but the idea is can fiction transform our reality? And
(03:00):
we were discussing this earlier that you know, usually you think, okay,
the truth is stranger than fiction, but sometimes that truth
is actually inspired by fiction. And um, what I'm thinking
about and what we talked about is, uh, this incredibly
bizarre spate of bath salts that have been in the news.
(03:21):
And by the time this airs will probably have a
lot more information about this. But uh, if you guys
haven't heard about this, this is actually a designer drug
that is running a monk. Yeah. Not, it's not actually
bath salts, So you don't have to worry about. Oh
my goodness, my grandma has some of those. She's going
to have, right, She's gonna go have a cawgullan moment
and then turn into a zombie. No. Uh, what we're
(03:44):
talking about here again as a designer drug and the
key ingredients UM that go into it or something called
m D p V and I won't go way into that.
Just think of it as a sort of like a
cross between meth and acid because the nervous him really
kicks in to overdrive and then a hallucinogenic state takes hold. Well,
(04:05):
you know, math is pretty bad, but but maybe the
ideas here maybe if you had acid to it, if
he experiences somehow better. So let's talk about what we're
talking about. You mentioned the guy eating the other dudes face.
Oh well, I mean basically, I think the scenario was
you went out of town for a week and then
it seemed like the zombie holocaust. Almost coincidence, I don't know. Well,
(04:25):
we did. We had the incident with in Miami with
the individual who allegedly on bath salts. UH is running
around naked under an overpass. UH strips the homeless man
and eats most of his face. Off eighteen minutes. Yeah,
and then the police finally show up and uh, and
he like turns around and snarls at them, and they
end up shooting him down there in the street. And
that alone was pretty crazy. And then you had all
(04:46):
these other incidents that were showing up, incidents that involve
someone confessing to acts of cannibalism, man Um disemboweling himself
and throwing his guts at police officers when they came
to attend to him, which incidentally reminds me of a
great scene from the Hong Kong film Story of Ricky
and which, oh, the Ballad of Rickie Yeah, yeah, and
(05:06):
which it's like a prison movie with the most over
the top violence everyon. There's a scene where an individual
um is he gets beat by Ricky because Ricky is
like a superman and he has to fight these these
other villains inside the prison, and the gore effects are
super cheesy but but kind of awesome. Like there's so
it's so cartoony, you don't really feel the violence at all.
(05:28):
But there's a character that Um splits his stomach in
an act of sepku and then reaches in and grabs
his own intestines out and starts strangling Ricky with them,
and uh, it's hilarious, slash gross and also kind of awesome. Yeah,
but but it's the kind of thing it's hilarious slash gross.
When it's encountered in a cheesy Hong Kong martial arts,
(05:49):
perfectly fine there, but when it happens on the evening news,
it is troubling. Well, and you know that the thread
through all of these is that is zombie like behavior,
right right, Mindless, flat, cheating behavior, cannot be reasoned with,
can only be apparently gunned down on the streets like
a dog. It's troubling because it's one of those that
(06:09):
we we've been laughing about zombies for years now. I
mean it's become it's become to the point where we're
almost a little sick of it. Well, and it is
so much in the culture, right, I mean, The Walking
Dead is a show that is enormously popular from the
graphic novel. Yeah, the CDC had in sort of Jess
had Zombie Survival Kit about a year ago. Yeah, because
(06:32):
they were raising i think we've mentioned in a past episode,
they were raising legitimate concerns about um, about diseases and
the spread of disease and how to limit them, and
how to respond to a situation where there's been sort
of an outbreak or pandemic. All important stuff to know,
and they were just sort of using zombies as a
cool launching point to discuss that topic, and so you
(06:53):
can kind of understand why the spate of incidents happened.
And then people start to kind of go, wow, really,
is it, like the zombie theme is fiction like that
so deeply ingrained that is being um acted out in
these very particular cases. Yeah, like me, because at first,
first people to comment and we're probably, hey, looks like
the zombie apocalypse is is happening, And then they were like, oh, seriously,
(07:17):
maybe it is, and they remind himself, no, that's impossible.
But maybe something is going on in our minds where
the idea of the zombie is so ingrained in us
from our fiction that it ends up boiling to the
surface of our reality. Well, CNN interviewed a former Bath
Salts user. Granted this is just one person, but Freddy
Sharp is his name, and he described his own experience
(07:37):
with great Bath Salt user name Freddie Sharp. I know
because it's got the Freddie from nightmare on Elm Street too, Um,
Freddy Sharp anyway, it's got that sort of image. But anyway,
Freddie described his experience when he was strapped into a
gurney in restrained by a paramedic. He said that when
he was hallucinating about being in he was hallucinating about
(07:59):
being in a mental hospital and being possessed by Jason
Vorheis of you know Friday thirteenth. Oh he I figured
which one that is. There's a particular Friday thirteenth film
where Jason Vorhees does possess people. It's generally not highly
thought of in the in the saga, right, but he
does have bases uh in cannon for that behavior. Just
(08:23):
but it is it's very odd to see that. I mean,
it's not on to know that we have this dark
side of our psyches and that we have these themes,
these horror themes that are couched there. I mean they
could be the fairy tales that we read when we
were little, or it could be you know Oedipus right,
um gouging out his own eyes, or Friday thirteenth or zombies. Um.
(08:44):
I think what's scary is just to see that, you know,
some of it is being played out. But we what
we really want to talk about is is why we
have these bits of fiction, these bits of storytelling in
our minds. Um, it's so deeply entrenched in our minds,
yet how we are actually working in concert with the material. Yeah,
(09:05):
because there's the there's one view on everything where you
and this is the view that absolutely doesn't hold up
to the research. But he's still encounter inmplity of people
where fiction it's fairy tales, it is for kids, it's
the it's like it's this bubble of fantasy or this
bucket of fantasy that you stick your head into when
you don't want to deal with everything else. Just pure escapism,
(09:25):
no connection to real issues, reality or anything. I've spoken
to at least one friend of mine about the topic
where he has to actually defend reading fiction to his father,
who's who's who's totally into the nonfiction and you know,
philosophical historical work, so what have you, And he has
to actually defend fiction is a worthwhile thing to read.
(09:45):
And I imagine that that's that's the sort of mindset
he's coming from. The father in this case, is that
fantasy and fiction is something that exists outside of the
norm and is completely detached. But as we'll see in
this episode, and as we saw in our research chere,
the the roots of fiction uh are totally interwoven with
(10:07):
our reality. Yeah. I mean basically, your friend and other
listeners who may need to defend their own fiction consumption
habits or should emerge from this podcast with a list
of bullet points about why you should read it. Um.
And one of the things we want to talk about
is how we lose ourselves in fiction and how that's
so important to something called theory of mind. Yes, so
(10:27):
the theory of mind, um, which I'm sure we've discussed
this in the past, but uh, it entails the ability
of one person to understand another's perspective, all right, to
empathize with, communicate with, to deceive and uh, if you'll
think back to Blade Runner, uh, the motion picture, they
had an empathy test to tell if someone was replicant android,
(10:52):
a fake human, or a real human and uh, and
it was a rather elaborate test, but that we actually
have a test that we can use, particularly on children,
because the theory of mine only kicks in after a
certain point. But this test is called the false belief test,
and it goes like this, Child one and Child Too
are playing with a marble in a room. When they're done,
(11:14):
they put the marble in a box. Child one leaves
and child Too takes the marble out and puts it
in a bag. When Child one returns to the room,
where will she look for the marble? The correct answer is,
of course, the box where she left it last. But
children under the age of four always picked the bag
because they lack theory of mind. And so some researchers
(11:37):
argue that this is because before that age they lack
the necessary language fluency to actually deal with the reality. Um.
There was a New Scientist article from two thousand nine
called language Maybe the Key to Theory of mind um
And in that article they take a look at a
fascinating case from Nicaragua in which a community of deaf
people created their own sign language. And then so they
(12:01):
create it on sign language, and the next generation improved
on that sign language, and when given the false belief test,
the younger members with a more advanced sign language performed
better on the test. And we see that too with
kids who are who have a steady diet of fiction. Right,
they get a more nuanced idea of how other people's
minds work, because that is what theory of mind is
(12:23):
really for. It's this idea that you could kind of
map out someone else's intentions. So when you read fiction,
all of a sudden, you're able to exercise this ability.
You identify with the character's longings and frustrations. You can
guess that they're hidden motives, their agendas, um and the
relationships in their lives. So this is a way of
of your brain trying to occupy someone else. That's really
(12:46):
and this is actually called experience taking. And when you
are lost in fiction, it's a little bit different from
perspective taking. Right, perspective taking you can just kind of say,
I identify, I get what this person is going through.
Experience taking is taking those experiences for your own. And
researchers at Ohio State University observed what happened when study
(13:09):
participants lost themselves in fiction. Uh. They took a bunch
of students and they had them read an engaging story
about a person who had overcome adversities in order to
vote that day, and they gave several different scenarios um
of this, uh, this piece of fiction, and one of
the different scenarios was that the the protagonists went to
(13:30):
the same school as the fiction readers, right, and you
know another protagonist did not go to the same school.
So what they found is that the people who um
who read the story about the protagonist going to the
same school as them, were something like sixty five per
cent uh likely to actually vote themselves or did vote
(13:53):
themselves um when they had to vote, you know, the
next week or so an election, as compared to the
readers who read about a protectonist from another school. So
what you're seeing is that actually like clear line of
action from this piece of fiction that they were absorbed
in this person's trials and errors and trying to get
(14:16):
to vote this this um you know, these obstacles in
this protagonist way to try to vote, and they felt
so in line with her that it actually influenced their behavior.
It's um. I mean, it's crazy when you think about
like the nature of story, because on one level of
the story is how we remember things. That's how we
process things that have happened to us. The discussing is
(14:37):
this in the past, you you take a series of
events that just happened, you form the story in your mind.
In which you were the center character or if you're
being if you're able to empathize and use that theory
of mind, then you're you're creating that's a similar story
around another person to enhance your understanding of them. But
stories stories even really exist, are they? They're kind of
(14:58):
this linguistic viral thing that we have created to make
sense of the world and to to serve as the
bedrock for a culture. You know, because it's you. You
take it the most accurate nonfiction book, the most not
actuate accurate nonfiction story available, and you can still probably
poke holes in it. You can say, is this really
(15:19):
what is? Is Is this really what happened? And you have
to say, no, it is a structure of what happened.
It is a structuring of events and characters and people
and attitudes and emotions, um, that is presented in the
form of story. Yeah. And I do think it is
interesting that a lot of it has to do in
the way that it is presented, right, um, to to
(15:40):
motivate people. UM. And I mean I'm thinking about a
different study. Um. It was it was Ohio State as well,
and this one had to do with sexuality and it
was administered to seventy heterosexual men. And so again they
have this narrative of this young man in different scenarios.
In one scenario he's pretty much outed at the beginning, um.
(16:04):
And another scenario he's outed later in the story and um,
and in the third he's heterosexual. Well, what happened is
that they found that, um, the people's attitudes towards this
character when he was late outed, they felt much more um,
(16:25):
accepting of him as homosexual when they found out after
after sort of identifying with him, after going through this
journey with him in this story, as opposed to when
he was at it at the very beginning. And so
that's why I think it's so fascinating that a lot
of it has to do in the in the way
that um, we present the details, that we create these
(16:47):
sort of realities, um, and that it would actually affect
how we perceive people. Yeah, I mean it's and you
can kind of look at it too in terms of
a nonfiction book, especially a nonfiction book about say, political issues.
It's one person saying, hey, this is how the world works,
and this is how it works best versus how it
is broken, Whereas a narrative puts you in the shoes
(17:08):
of someone experiencing some uh some some level of those events,
and be it something that is supporting the uh an
idea or opposing it. You know, you're you're put in
those shoes. Well, let's let's crack a bit a little
bit of science here and talk about mirror neurons and
why we react the way we do to narratives, whether
(17:30):
it's a text for a piece of music or a movie.
All right, So the phase mirror neurons or mirror neurons,
if you want to say it together, refers to neurons
in the frontal cortex that fire both when you do
something and when you see something else being done when
you see someone else doing it. Okay, Uh, The and
and very important here a subset of these neurons fires
(17:52):
during your own actions, um, but inhibit when you just
observe actions. So, uh, that way, the mirror neuron systems
signal whether the action in question is your own or
somebody else's. Right, So that way, you're not acting on
what you're seeing. Right. So if you know that you're
you're supposed to be the passive observer, then you don't
try to go out on the baseball field. He'll and
(18:14):
you know, try to hick that ball. UM. So yeah,
I mean, actually that's that's a good example. When you
perform an action like throwing a baseball for the first time,
this behavior gets encoded in a clutch of brain cells.
But um scientists discovered that these brain cells also fire,
as you say, when you see someone else perform the
same action. And it also ends up sucking in emotional
(18:35):
entanglement as well. And that's where it really gets interesting.
And if you want to see an example of this,
I invite you to view any sporting event, because you're
seeing your neurons. You your neurons. It's like the mirror neurons.
These are mirror neurons in action. When you go to
the sporting event and you see a rabid crowd who's
(18:56):
totally into the action on the field. Clearly there is
one small group of people who are playing a game
and being paid for it, and h then there is
there is another group of people, a larger group of
people that have paid to see the game and are
not actually directly involved in the action, but their enthusiasm
for it at times seems to not only equal but
(19:18):
surpass that of the individuals on the field. And it
it comes down to mirror neurons. They're able to observe
the actions of another UH compared to their own experience,
and the emotional context becomes intertwined between the two. What
I think is really interesting is what happens when someone
reads a text right, like, how do you know how
they're reacting to that? UM? And it turns out that
you can actually map metaphor in the brain using m
(19:41):
r I. Researchers from Emory University had subjects read a
metaphor metaphor and meta far metaphor UH involving texture, and
the sensory cortex lit up here, and that the sensory
cortex is responsible for perceiving texture through tough right, that
became active. So you had metaphors like the singer had
(20:05):
a velvet voice and he had a leathery hand, and
this roused the sensory cortex, while phrases that matched for meaning,
like the singer had a pleasing voice and he had
strong hands did not. And I think that is what's
so interesting about why our mind does engage so fiercely
(20:25):
with literature or you know, really any kind of fiction,
because again, you're in that theory of mind and your
brain is reacting um to these words. I love that.
I love that a leathery hand can can make your
sensory cortex go nuts. Um. And then in a study
led by the cognitive scientists Veronica of the Laboratory of
(20:48):
Language Dynamics in France, UM, she had them scan um
words like or rather sentences like John grass the object
and Pablo kicked the ball, and the m rs revealed
that there was of course activity in the motor cortex.
So to me, what this says is that storytelling fiction
(21:09):
is really I mean, if we've from more motor cortex,
is is kind of lighting up here. All of this
is really important into the way that we actually developed
as human beings. That storytelling is intrinsic um to actually
motivating us and motivating the different parts of our body. Um,
it's not just you know, part of our language center
(21:31):
that is passive. Yeah. I found it interesting that, you know,
discussions of how mere and neurons allowed us to to
survive in an early stage because we're able to put
our mind inside the mind of say a predatory animal
or an animal that is surviving a winner. We see
all the bear is surviving, and we can put ourselves
in its footsteps in a way that it just cannot do. Um.
(21:55):
And and then I the idea too that near and
neurons allow us to, uh, especially with metaphor, to essentially
run a simulation based on that metaphor. Metaphor enters in
and we, no matter how silly or tried, the metaphor,
and some level we can't help but fulfill it. To
take one of the most famous metaphors in the English language,
coaches from William Shakespeare from As You Like It says,
(22:16):
all the world's a stage, and all the men and
women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances,
so you can't help it on some level. Imagine then
everyone in your life standing on this stage, following these lines,
entering in and out, and then they're there. Are various
ramifications of what that scenario means. Likewise, metaphors that don't
really work kind of fall flat because of that. Take,
(22:38):
for instance, UH, this famous line she's a brick house. Now,
obviously in the same way that we're not actually all
players on a stage, she whoever she is, is not
actually a brick house. And when I try to imagine
this mysterious her as a brick house. It never works
for me. Maybe I'm missing something, but I just imagine
(22:59):
a woman made out of ricks. Well, this is it's
attached to the song now, so of course there are
parts of my brain that are singing it. Yea, the
song is the song is is great. So it manages
to make it fooliss into thinking that this means something
where I'm not convinced it actually means anything, or if
it means anything, it means that someone made a woman
out of bricks, which is kind of cool too. Yeah,
I kind of go alem kind of way. I guess, yeah, yeah,
(23:22):
well it's a funky way, right, and then then get
down way. Um, but I think it's just so cool too.
About you know, seeing that these mirror neurons are firing
in the motor cortex, is that it's not just the
motor cortex. It's actually like corresponding with what you're seeing.
So if you're seeing someone pitch baseball, then your motor
(23:43):
cortex neurons are firing, and and um, what would be
related to the area that moves your arm and uh,
and then also if you see someone playing soccer and
you see the lake movements, then it's the same thing
that that they're specific to with part of your body.
So it's not just like, hey, this is the part
of the of my brain that makes me move my limbs.
(24:05):
It's your specific limbs. So yeah, I don't know. I'm
burto echo. In his ugly it was in his book
of essays, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Um, he
spends a lot of time discussing just the nature of fiction,
and he discusses it on all levels. He's talking about
literary stuff, he's talking about comic books, he's talking about
b movies, and he's talking about pornography at times, all
(24:26):
levels of storytelling. By the way, this perfectly, this whole
conversation about mirror neurons explains pornography, right Like if anybody's
ever wondered why exists, which I don't think anybody probably
wonders that this is the reason right here right well indeed,
and the Echo goes into this a lot in in
that book. I recommend picking it up. But he discusses
particularly the use of everyday activities in certain books and
(24:50):
certain films. For instance, he specifically mentions the James Bond novels,
which if you read, say, Doctor No, a lot of
crazy stuff happening, and the Bond is picting shooting people.
I believe in Dr No. In the book itself, he
wrestles a giant squid. It's easier to forget when people
get all up tied about about the purity of James
Bond and fiction versus film. Just remember he did wrestle
(25:12):
a giant squid. Ones But but then, a lot of
time is devoted in these books to Bond having dinner,
to Bond eating things um or Bond having coffee, Bond
doing things that we can relate to. Most of us
cannot relate to being shot in the shoulder or wrestling
a giant squid. There's only we can only become so
immersed in bad activity. But if the author immerses us
(25:33):
in these other activities that we do have experience with.
Although I will say this, I was watching True Blood
and there's just one point in which, um, someone stabbed
another person in the hand with a fork. Now that's
not the first time I've watched that on film at
least um, But I immediately pulled my hand up because
you can relate to something like that far more than
(25:55):
you can to uh. I mean horr movies are a
great example of this, and and directors who understand horror
and how a version works for the viewer get this.
If someone loses an arm, if like Arnold Swartz narrogets
his arm blown off in a film or something, um,
we can't relate to that. Most of us cannot relate
(26:15):
to that. What that could be would be like it's
it's out of our experience. However, if you have a
character hold up their hand against someone like strikes at
him a machete and they get a cut across the
palm or something like that, or even like a paper
cut times ten or yeah, yeah, we can relate or
just a paper cut. Have someone get paper cut in
(26:36):
the film, you have an entire horror film based on
paper cuts, you know. But but we can relate to that.
It's a more of an everyday event. And uh in
any way, Burtlecca goes into it a lot more doubt.
He also gets into the use of every day I
think it's car rides that he discusses in Like the
way to tell if you're watching a regular film or
pornographic film is how long a car ride last in
(26:58):
the film. The longer at last more likely that you're
watching a pornographic film. All right, Okay, there we go.
It's a marker. Um. All right, we're going to take
a quick break, but when we get back, we're going
to talk about empathy and fiction. Can can you increase
your own empathy through fiction? And is there a downside
the fiction? Alright, we're back. So empathy and fiction, as
(27:26):
we mentioned, are there via mirror neurons, via theory of mine.
We're reading these stories and we cannot help but become
immersed in that character, be it James Bond wrestling a squid,
or um the character in Zombie trying to kidnap somebody
and keep them in their basement. Alright, so of course
I have to mentioned study okay by Washington and Lee
(27:47):
psychologist Dan Johnson. He had people read a short story
that was specifically written to induce compassion in the reader,
and he wanted to see not only a fiction increased empathy,
but whether it would lead to actually helping someone. So
he found that the more absorbed subjects were in the story,
the more empathy they felt, and the more empathy they felt,
the more likely the subjects were to help. When the
(28:10):
experiment er accidentally in quotation marks UH dropped a handful
of pens. UH. The highly absorbed readers were twice as
likely to help out, which I thought was interesting that presumably,
UM the researcher does this while they're reading and they're
absorbed in the text. I would think that that would
be they would be so absorbed that they wouldn't even
(28:32):
notice the pens dropping. But that's a that's one little
test that has been carried out. And then there are
studies published in two thousand and six and two thousand
and nine by Dr Keith Oatley. This is the guy
that was at the World Science Festival UH. He reports
the individuals who frequently read fiction performed better on theory
of mind tests regardless of gender. Because we've heard this
(28:53):
before that women are are more compassionate or have more empathy,
and UH is sometimes pointed to because of more mirror
neurons that they possessed. UM. But one such theory of
mind test is called the mind's eye test, which participants
look at photos of nothing but people's eyes and then
have to describe what the people are feeling. We took
this on the Facebook, didn't we? We did you? It
(29:16):
fits the stereo thoughts you actually perform better on it
than I did. I get a thirty on it, which
is something. Yeah, I think the normal range is like
thirty and anything over thirty like your super empathizer or
something like that. So what is bad under under two? Okay,
I'm good. Yeah, you're cleared it by a couple points there. Um.
(29:37):
But there's this idea that you could actually increase your
own empathy through reading fiction. Hi is just sort of interesting, right,
because it's helpful if you decrede stuff like flat land
like flatland and flatland fan fiction. W you're just reading
about shades. Well, you know what. Here's the thing, though,
is that you ascribe meaning to nearly anything. So there's
(30:00):
this is a really cool um thing that they did
at the panel about the narrative of um or the
science of narrative. They actually showed a film of a circle,
a square, and um a triangle and anyway, the shapes
move around inside this box and they kind of do
things to each other. And after they share the film,
(30:23):
they say that, how how many of you saw a
story in this? And nearly everyone except for like one guy,
raise their hand and then they sort to say, well,
who saw a female and then other people say, who
saw a male who saw someone trying to trap this
other person in a room, and it was amazing, Like,
we can't help but to create these stories. So we
talked story of five like mad gods. Um. But then
(30:51):
there there comes a question could there be a possible
downside to this? Well? Um, I mean the big thing
here is that by engaging us uh in these stories
that that often have have important social context to them,
we can we can use fiction to change the world
for the better. But if we can change and when
(31:14):
we say change the world, obviously none of these stories
they are altering physical reality, but they can adjust culture
in the way we view the world, um, such as
the way some sitcoms are able to change the way
and or influence the way that we view various social issues.
All Right, there have been a bunch of studies that
say that when people identify with characters like such as um,
(31:35):
the gay characters there, that people are that more accepting
of them. Or even our current vice president said that
when talking about the gay marriage issue. UM, he said
that he was really one over from watching what was which,
which everyone got to laugh out of that, but it
(31:55):
it lines up exactly with what we know about the
power of of fiction and particularly popular media to alter
the way that we view the world. So that's the thing, right,
because when you are involved in fiction or some sort
of narrative that is fictitious, you lose your sense of skepticism.
And the researchers have seen this over and over again.
When you are reading something that you know that is nonfiction,
(32:18):
then you're apt to be much more critical of it,
analyze a lot more. But if you know you're in
a story, or you're lulled into a story, I guess
you could say, um, then you you do lose skepticism.
So if one sitcom could could influence me and help
me decide that, yes, this group of people deserve rights
(32:39):
that they don't have, could another sitcompetentially make me say
this group of people do not deserve certain rights? Well, um, yeah, actually,
I mean that's that's the fear. Here. There's Jonathan Gotshall
who is also on the panel. He wrote something called
The Story Storytelling Animal has said that we are suckers
for story. Lab studies show that we are deeply absorbed
(33:01):
in a story. We lose our skepticism and we can
be made to feel and believe just about anything the
storyteller wants. And he actually brought up on the panel
that that's mainly good. But then you think about the
nineteen fifteen film The Birth of a Nation, which inflamed
racist sentiments. This is the one where the clickklux klansmen
or are riding around like victorious nights, um and uh,
(33:22):
and they're fighting the evil um black man. It's I mean,
it's it's it's. It's a very interesting and important film
in terms of film history. And and if you've ever
taken a history of film class, you've probably seen it
or seen parts of it. Um. But it is not
enforcing um good moral ideas right right, and it has
(33:45):
I mean the plotline obviously has been manipulated to in
do certain feelings and that actually did um that that
gave sort of new life to the KLi klux klan
um when the film was shown. So you know, he
says it can go both ways. Um. There's also the
idea of over consumption of media. Now when I say that, well,
(34:06):
I see this this is for an entirely different podcast, um,
but I thought it was interesting to mention. And when
I when I stayed media, I'm talking about games or gaming. UM.
Computer scientists Stuart Staniford says that the room this is
is kind of interesting. I mean it's a little bit
out there. Said that as the robot population surpasses humans
(34:26):
and takes most of our jobs, but the least disruptive
approach to managing this is for the underclass to disappear
into technology mediated secondary universes um and that he can't
help but see video games imagined here is a widely
used opiate. So this is the Yeah, this is this
idea of over consumption. Because you know, there's there's this
(34:48):
um other idea that back in the day, if you
wanted a good story, you hope that someone in your
circle was a really great aural storyteller. Right yeah, you
would have someone tell that story, that story, or that
joke or that whatever, that narrative experience. Let's go and
hear it. The storytellers come into town, you know, let's go,
let's go hear what they have to say. But now that,
(35:10):
I mean, you can have any type of story any
which way you want it, um from myriad bits of media,
right um. And so there's an idea that it's really
similar to an obesity epidemic that we evolved in a
world where food was scarce, so we're very comfortable right now.
And and so that you have this idea of like
(35:30):
there's too much on the plate for us to consume.
Because back in the old days they were there were
only so many stories that could think really, they passed around.
You had you had the creation story, the end of
the world story. Um, and it is important, I guess
when I'm you know, half joking there. But but but
certainly in the olden days you had all these stories
(35:50):
that that had definite meanings, that were important culturally, that
culturally that were the bedrock upon which civilization existed. Um.
I mean you had stories in which positive values were
tested and found to be held true, negative values are
tested and found to be false. Where something simple has
proven complex, where something complex has proven simple, where the
(36:11):
other has proven normal than normal has proven other. I mean,
these are all about maintaining a certain worldview. And today
are our stories of We have more of them, and
some of them are are less involved in maintaining the
fabric of our reality, but they're all still uh engaging
in that conversation on one level or another. Well, and
(36:32):
to that point, I wanted to to to leave you
with this um. This quote from Jonathan Gottshaw um about
storytelling and no matter how much we consume or don't consume,
he says, humans aren't really Earthlings. Above all, we are
citizens of an omnidimensional virtual world called Storyland. Of course,
our bodies are always fixed at a particular time and
(36:55):
place on planet Earth. But our minds are always free
to voyage in Storyland, and they you, They voyage through
stories from most of the day and into the night.
It's wrong to think of story as a mirror frill
in human life. We live most of our lives in
various kinds of story. Story, as much as upright posture,
tool use, language, or intelligence, is what makes us human.
(37:17):
So I thought was really interesting because we talked about
even daydreaming, that that we uh, we daydream like half
of our waking hours away. Right, I'm sorry, what are
you saying? Nice? Nice? All right, Well, let's pull open
the mail bag, bring it over here. I think it's funny.
You calm robot, but I call him Arnie. We have
(37:40):
a different relationship with robot. You have more empathy. You
you're firing up more of those mirror neurons. Do you
think he has a limp? It looks like he's not
walking correctly. All right, So here's a little bit of
listener mail from Ann and Wrightson says, sorry for the
slow response. I've been meaning to write until you have tickled.
I was to hear your honorary air response my email below,
(38:01):
and her email was the one about uh where she
said words and it was about how I used frank
and beans to describe penis and yes, to do it
again with kind okay, but anyway, she was responding to
to that, and and and we we addressed it, you know,
and and sort of we gave our perspective on on
(38:23):
presenting material for various age groups and all. Anyway, she
continues and says, it gave me an entirely new perspective
on some of the pressures and issues you were dealing with.
I stand by my opinion, but definitely understand your position
better now see empathizing. I know we can't help ourselves. Um,
She says. I also wanted to let you know how
much I've been enjoying the Lucid Dreaming theme. I'm a
(38:44):
world class dreamer. Last night was a multi generational saga
set in the early nineteenth century night and often have
quite bizarre dreams, dreams within dreams, whatever. But despite decades
of interest in the topic, I've never managed a lucid dream.
What I can't seem to do is make that first
step in the process, knowing that you're dreaming and taking control.
(39:06):
Oh well, it doesn't stop me from flying and sometimes
even underwater swimming, which is pretty cool and I think
much more unusual. Good flying all the best, man, I'm
gonna try that underwater flying. Yeah, well, I've I've definitely
had underwater dreams before, like one where I was chasing
a sorcerer across the ocean floor. He had a book
or something. But the other night I just had one
(39:27):
of those dreams where I thought I'd pee pee the beds.
So those aren't very exciting, but happy ending I could
not pee the bed. Oh my goodness, what have you
had these dreams before? Yes, I'm sorry, there's so much.
There's so many words there that I want to playoff of,
but I won't out of interest of um keeping it
(39:49):
clean folks. Okay, Well, I just find it in right
because I was talking to a group of friends and
out of four or five of us, only two of
us claim to have had dreams in which they were
peeing that they it and then we'll to find find
that they had not. So oh well, you know, actually
I do take that back now, and I'm focusing more.
Um yeah, my body is mainly it is basically saying, hey,
(40:10):
you need to get up and use the restroom. Yeah,
flying is better. I'm not. I'm something everybody wanted to know.
If there you go, let's keep to the flying all right. Well, hey,
if you want to write into us and you want
to let us know about your fiction versus reality, um idea,
Where do you stand on this? How do you think
fiction alters our perceptions of reality or does it, as
(40:34):
with the works of say Suttercane, actually change physical reality.
Let us know. You can find us on Facebook where
we are Stuffed to Blow Your Mind, or you can
find us on Twitter where we are Blow the Mind,
and you can always drop us a line at Blew
the Mind at Discovery dot com. Be sure to check
out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join
(40:57):
How Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising
and flexing possibilities of tomorrow.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
before we get into the podcast, uh, I just want
to mention real quick we have a new sponsor, UM
new sponsor Netflix, So pay attention. Uh tune back in
(00:25):
later on in the podcast, We're gonna have a special
offer related to Netflix. And now for the topic of today, Yeah,
this one stems from your recent journey to New York
for the World Science Festival two thousand twelve. How was it?
I like how you say journey like I was in
a covered wagon. Well, it's kind of a you have
to go to Atlanta's airport, so that is a journey
(00:46):
in and of it so traumatic. It was wonderful. World
Science Festival two thousand and twelve. UM got to see
a lot of really cool panels and one of them
was UM the Science of Narrative, and it had a
bunch of people on it UM including Joyce Carol Oates,
one of my favorite authors, I mean, uh so it
(01:11):
was great to see her talk about the process of
writing and UM. Dr Kevin Oatley was another person's psychologist
who who talked about several others I don't have. Yeah,
Jeffrey eugen needs uh like Eugene and I d e
yes at the end if I'm saying that correctly. He's
also the author of Virgin Suicide and he read and
(01:31):
I think the marriage plotted this new one, right, Yes,
but he read an incredible um excerpt from Virgin Suicides
to talk about some of what we'll talk about today,
which is how readers are engaged in this world and
meant to feel as though they occupy it themselves so
much so that they began to um to really feel
(01:54):
a reality in the text. And it's and what's awesome
about that too, is that sometimes the reality is you're
immersed in or kind of Nightmark Joyce Carol Oates, for example.
I recently read her book Zombie, which is kind of
a fictionalized narrative based on the life of Jeffrey Dahmer.
So you have a very disturbed individual who is plotting
(02:15):
and trying to carry out these murders so that he
can create a zombie out of somebody and keep them
in his seller as a it's like kind of a
sex slave. So it's a very dark tale, but you're
so immersed in the narrative you find yourself kind of
rooting for the guy. I mean, you're feeling for him
because she's a talented writer, and via the narrative experience,
(02:37):
you kind of become this character and on some level
you want him to succeed. And it's it can be
a very weird feeling in some of these It really
messes with your mind. And that's really what we're gonna
talk about today. We're gonna talk about this idea that
that fiction we usually think of as separate from ourselves,
but the idea is can fiction transform our reality? And
(03:00):
we were discussing this earlier that you know, usually you think, okay,
the truth is stranger than fiction, but sometimes that truth
is actually inspired by fiction. And um, what I'm thinking
about and what we talked about is, uh, this incredibly
bizarre spate of bath salts that have been in the news.
(03:21):
And by the time this airs will probably have a
lot more information about this. But uh, if you guys
haven't heard about this, this is actually a designer drug
that is running a monk. Yeah. Not, it's not actually
bath salts, So you don't have to worry about. Oh
my goodness, my grandma has some of those. She's going
to have, right, She's gonna go have a cawgullan moment
and then turn into a zombie. No. Uh, what we're
(03:44):
talking about here again as a designer drug and the
key ingredients UM that go into it or something called
m D p V and I won't go way into that.
Just think of it as a sort of like a
cross between meth and acid because the nervous him really
kicks in to overdrive and then a hallucinogenic state takes hold. Well,
(04:05):
you know, math is pretty bad, but but maybe the
ideas here maybe if you had acid to it, if
he experiences somehow better. So let's talk about what we're
talking about. You mentioned the guy eating the other dudes face.
Oh well, I mean basically, I think the scenario was
you went out of town for a week and then
it seemed like the zombie holocaust. Almost coincidence, I don't know. Well,
(04:25):
we did. We had the incident with in Miami with
the individual who allegedly on bath salts. UH is running
around naked under an overpass. UH strips the homeless man
and eats most of his face. Off eighteen minutes. Yeah,
and then the police finally show up and uh, and
he like turns around and snarls at them, and they
end up shooting him down there in the street. And
that alone was pretty crazy. And then you had all
(04:46):
these other incidents that were showing up, incidents that involve
someone confessing to acts of cannibalism, man Um disemboweling himself
and throwing his guts at police officers when they came
to attend to him, which incidentally reminds me of a
great scene from the Hong Kong film Story of Ricky
and which, oh, the Ballad of Rickie Yeah, yeah, and
(05:06):
which it's like a prison movie with the most over
the top violence everyon. There's a scene where an individual
um is he gets beat by Ricky because Ricky is
like a superman and he has to fight these these
other villains inside the prison, and the gore effects are
super cheesy but but kind of awesome. Like there's so
it's so cartoony, you don't really feel the violence at all.
(05:28):
But there's a character that Um splits his stomach in
an act of sepku and then reaches in and grabs
his own intestines out and starts strangling Ricky with them,
and uh, it's hilarious, slash gross and also kind of awesome. Yeah,
but but it's the kind of thing it's hilarious slash gross.
When it's encountered in a cheesy Hong Kong martial arts,
(05:49):
perfectly fine there, but when it happens on the evening news,
it is troubling. Well, and you know that the thread
through all of these is that is zombie like behavior,
right right, Mindless, flat, cheating behavior, cannot be reasoned with,
can only be apparently gunned down on the streets like
a dog. It's troubling because it's one of those that
(06:09):
we we've been laughing about zombies for years now. I
mean it's become it's become to the point where we're
almost a little sick of it. Well, and it is
so much in the culture, right, I mean, The Walking
Dead is a show that is enormously popular from the
graphic novel. Yeah, the CDC had in sort of Jess
had Zombie Survival Kit about a year ago. Yeah, because
(06:32):
they were raising i think we've mentioned in a past episode,
they were raising legitimate concerns about um, about diseases and
the spread of disease and how to limit them, and
how to respond to a situation where there's been sort
of an outbreak or pandemic. All important stuff to know,
and they were just sort of using zombies as a
cool launching point to discuss that topic, and so you
(06:53):
can kind of understand why the spate of incidents happened.
And then people start to kind of go, wow, really,
is it, like the zombie theme is fiction like that
so deeply ingrained that is being um acted out in
these very particular cases. Yeah, like me, because at first,
first people to comment and we're probably, hey, looks like
the zombie apocalypse is is happening, And then they were like, oh, seriously,
(07:17):
maybe it is, and they remind himself, no, that's impossible.
But maybe something is going on in our minds where
the idea of the zombie is so ingrained in us
from our fiction that it ends up boiling to the
surface of our reality. Well, CNN interviewed a former Bath
Salts user. Granted this is just one person, but Freddy
Sharp is his name, and he described his own experience
(07:37):
with great Bath Salt user name Freddie Sharp. I know
because it's got the Freddie from nightmare on Elm Street too, Um,
Freddy Sharp anyway, it's got that sort of image. But anyway,
Freddie described his experience when he was strapped into a
gurney in restrained by a paramedic. He said that when
he was hallucinating about being in he was hallucinating about
(07:59):
being in a mental hospital and being possessed by Jason
Vorheis of you know Friday thirteenth. Oh he I figured
which one that is. There's a particular Friday thirteenth film
where Jason Vorhees does possess people. It's generally not highly
thought of in the in the saga, right, but he
does have bases uh in cannon for that behavior. Just
(08:23):
but it is it's very odd to see that. I mean,
it's not on to know that we have this dark
side of our psyches and that we have these themes,
these horror themes that are couched there. I mean they
could be the fairy tales that we read when we
were little, or it could be you know Oedipus right,
um gouging out his own eyes, or Friday thirteenth or zombies. Um.
(08:44):
I think what's scary is just to see that, you know,
some of it is being played out. But we what
we really want to talk about is is why we
have these bits of fiction, these bits of storytelling in
our minds. Um, it's so deeply entrenched in our minds,
yet how we are actually working in concert with the material. Yeah,
(09:05):
because there's the there's one view on everything where you
and this is the view that absolutely doesn't hold up
to the research. But he's still encounter inmplity of people
where fiction it's fairy tales, it is for kids, it's
the it's like it's this bubble of fantasy or this
bucket of fantasy that you stick your head into when
you don't want to deal with everything else. Just pure escapism,
(09:25):
no connection to real issues, reality or anything. I've spoken
to at least one friend of mine about the topic
where he has to actually defend reading fiction to his father,
who's who's who's totally into the nonfiction and you know,
philosophical historical work, so what have you, And he has
to actually defend fiction is a worthwhile thing to read.
(09:45):
And I imagine that that's that's the sort of mindset
he's coming from. The father in this case, is that
fantasy and fiction is something that exists outside of the
norm and is completely detached. But as we'll see in
this episode, and as we saw in our research chere,
the the roots of fiction uh are totally interwoven with
(10:07):
our reality. Yeah. I mean basically, your friend and other
listeners who may need to defend their own fiction consumption
habits or should emerge from this podcast with a list
of bullet points about why you should read it. Um.
And one of the things we want to talk about
is how we lose ourselves in fiction and how that's
so important to something called theory of mind. Yes, so
(10:27):
the theory of mind, um, which I'm sure we've discussed
this in the past, but uh, it entails the ability
of one person to understand another's perspective, all right, to
empathize with, communicate with, to deceive and uh, if you'll
think back to Blade Runner, uh, the motion picture, they
had an empathy test to tell if someone was replicant android,
(10:52):
a fake human, or a real human and uh, and
it was a rather elaborate test, but that we actually
have a test that we can use, particularly on children,
because the theory of mine only kicks in after a
certain point. But this test is called the false belief test,
and it goes like this, Child one and Child Too
are playing with a marble in a room. When they're done,
(11:14):
they put the marble in a box. Child one leaves
and child Too takes the marble out and puts it
in a bag. When Child one returns to the room,
where will she look for the marble? The correct answer is,
of course, the box where she left it last. But
children under the age of four always picked the bag
because they lack theory of mind. And so some researchers
(11:37):
argue that this is because before that age they lack
the necessary language fluency to actually deal with the reality. Um.
There was a New Scientist article from two thousand nine
called language Maybe the Key to Theory of mind um
And in that article they take a look at a
fascinating case from Nicaragua in which a community of deaf
people created their own sign language. And then so they
(12:01):
create it on sign language, and the next generation improved
on that sign language, and when given the false belief test,
the younger members with a more advanced sign language performed
better on the test. And we see that too with
kids who are who have a steady diet of fiction. Right,
they get a more nuanced idea of how other people's
minds work, because that is what theory of mind is
(12:23):
really for. It's this idea that you could kind of
map out someone else's intentions. So when you read fiction,
all of a sudden, you're able to exercise this ability.
You identify with the character's longings and frustrations. You can
guess that they're hidden motives, their agendas, um and the
relationships in their lives. So this is a way of
of your brain trying to occupy someone else. That's really
(12:46):
and this is actually called experience taking. And when you
are lost in fiction, it's a little bit different from
perspective taking. Right, perspective taking you can just kind of say,
I identify, I get what this person is going through.
Experience taking is taking those experiences for your own. And
researchers at Ohio State University observed what happened when study
(13:09):
participants lost themselves in fiction. Uh. They took a bunch
of students and they had them read an engaging story
about a person who had overcome adversities in order to
vote that day, and they gave several different scenarios um
of this, uh, this piece of fiction, and one of
the different scenarios was that the the protagonists went to
(13:30):
the same school as the fiction readers, right, and you
know another protagonist did not go to the same school.
So what they found is that the people who um
who read the story about the protagonist going to the
same school as them, were something like sixty five per
cent uh likely to actually vote themselves or did vote
(13:53):
themselves um when they had to vote, you know, the
next week or so an election, as compared to the
readers who read about a protectonist from another school. So
what you're seeing is that actually like clear line of
action from this piece of fiction that they were absorbed
in this person's trials and errors and trying to get
(14:16):
to vote this this um you know, these obstacles in
this protagonist way to try to vote, and they felt
so in line with her that it actually influenced their behavior.
It's um. I mean, it's crazy when you think about
like the nature of story, because on one level of
the story is how we remember things. That's how we
process things that have happened to us. The discussing is
(14:37):
this in the past, you you take a series of
events that just happened, you form the story in your mind.
In which you were the center character or if you're
being if you're able to empathize and use that theory
of mind, then you're you're creating that's a similar story
around another person to enhance your understanding of them. But
stories stories even really exist, are they? They're kind of
(14:58):
this linguistic viral thing that we have created to make
sense of the world and to to serve as the
bedrock for a culture. You know, because it's you. You
take it the most accurate nonfiction book, the most not
actuate accurate nonfiction story available, and you can still probably
poke holes in it. You can say, is this really
(15:19):
what is? Is Is this really what happened? And you have
to say, no, it is a structure of what happened.
It is a structuring of events and characters and people
and attitudes and emotions, um, that is presented in the
form of story. Yeah. And I do think it is
interesting that a lot of it has to do in
the way that it is presented, right, um, to to
(15:40):
motivate people. UM. And I mean I'm thinking about a
different study. Um. It was it was Ohio State as well,
and this one had to do with sexuality and it
was administered to seventy heterosexual men. And so again they
have this narrative of this young man in different scenarios.
In one scenario he's pretty much outed at the beginning, um.
(16:04):
And another scenario he's outed later in the story and um,
and in the third he's heterosexual. Well, what happened is
that they found that, um, the people's attitudes towards this
character when he was late outed, they felt much more um,
(16:25):
accepting of him as homosexual when they found out after
after sort of identifying with him, after going through this
journey with him in this story, as opposed to when
he was at it at the very beginning. And so
that's why I think it's so fascinating that a lot
of it has to do in the in the way
that um, we present the details, that we create these
(16:47):
sort of realities, um, and that it would actually affect
how we perceive people. Yeah, I mean it's and you
can kind of look at it too in terms of
a nonfiction book, especially a nonfiction book about say, political issues.
It's one person saying, hey, this is how the world works,
and this is how it works best versus how it
is broken, Whereas a narrative puts you in the shoes
(17:08):
of someone experiencing some uh some some level of those events,
and be it something that is supporting the uh an
idea or opposing it. You know, you're you're put in
those shoes. Well, let's let's crack a bit a little
bit of science here and talk about mirror neurons and
why we react the way we do to narratives, whether
(17:30):
it's a text for a piece of music or a movie.
All right, So the phase mirror neurons or mirror neurons,
if you want to say it together, refers to neurons
in the frontal cortex that fire both when you do
something and when you see something else being done when
you see someone else doing it. Okay, Uh, The and
and very important here a subset of these neurons fires
(17:52):
during your own actions, um, but inhibit when you just
observe actions. So, uh, that way, the mirror neuron systems
signal whether the action in question is your own or
somebody else's. Right, So that way, you're not acting on
what you're seeing. Right. So if you know that you're
you're supposed to be the passive observer, then you don't
try to go out on the baseball field. He'll and
(18:14):
you know, try to hick that ball. UM. So yeah,
I mean, actually that's that's a good example. When you
perform an action like throwing a baseball for the first time,
this behavior gets encoded in a clutch of brain cells.
But um scientists discovered that these brain cells also fire,
as you say, when you see someone else perform the
same action. And it also ends up sucking in emotional
(18:35):
entanglement as well. And that's where it really gets interesting.
And if you want to see an example of this,
I invite you to view any sporting event, because you're
seeing your neurons. You your neurons. It's like the mirror neurons.
These are mirror neurons in action. When you go to
the sporting event and you see a rabid crowd who's
(18:56):
totally into the action on the field. Clearly there is
one small group of people who are playing a game
and being paid for it, and h then there is
there is another group of people, a larger group of
people that have paid to see the game and are
not actually directly involved in the action, but their enthusiasm
for it at times seems to not only equal but
(19:18):
surpass that of the individuals on the field. And it
it comes down to mirror neurons. They're able to observe
the actions of another UH compared to their own experience,
and the emotional context becomes intertwined between the two. What
I think is really interesting is what happens when someone
reads a text right, like, how do you know how
they're reacting to that? UM? And it turns out that
you can actually map metaphor in the brain using m
(19:41):
r I. Researchers from Emory University had subjects read a
metaphor metaphor and meta far metaphor UH involving texture, and
the sensory cortex lit up here, and that the sensory
cortex is responsible for perceiving texture through tough right, that
became active. So you had metaphors like the singer had
(20:05):
a velvet voice and he had a leathery hand, and
this roused the sensory cortex, while phrases that matched for meaning,
like the singer had a pleasing voice and he had
strong hands did not. And I think that is what's
so interesting about why our mind does engage so fiercely
(20:25):
with literature or you know, really any kind of fiction,
because again, you're in that theory of mind and your
brain is reacting um to these words. I love that.
I love that a leathery hand can can make your
sensory cortex go nuts. Um. And then in a study
led by the cognitive scientists Veronica of the Laboratory of
(20:48):
Language Dynamics in France, UM, she had them scan um
words like or rather sentences like John grass the object
and Pablo kicked the ball, and the m rs revealed
that there was of course activity in the motor cortex.
So to me, what this says is that storytelling fiction
(21:09):
is really I mean, if we've from more motor cortex,
is is kind of lighting up here. All of this
is really important into the way that we actually developed
as human beings. That storytelling is intrinsic um to actually
motivating us and motivating the different parts of our body. Um,
it's not just you know, part of our language center
(21:31):
that is passive. Yeah. I found it interesting that, you know,
discussions of how mere and neurons allowed us to to
survive in an early stage because we're able to put
our mind inside the mind of say a predatory animal
or an animal that is surviving a winner. We see
all the bear is surviving, and we can put ourselves
in its footsteps in a way that it just cannot do. Um.
(21:55):
And and then I the idea too that near and
neurons allow us to, uh, especially with metaphor, to essentially
run a simulation based on that metaphor. Metaphor enters in
and we, no matter how silly or tried, the metaphor,
and some level we can't help but fulfill it. To
take one of the most famous metaphors in the English language,
coaches from William Shakespeare from As You Like It says,
(22:16):
all the world's a stage, and all the men and
women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances,
so you can't help it on some level. Imagine then
everyone in your life standing on this stage, following these lines,
entering in and out, and then they're there. Are various
ramifications of what that scenario means. Likewise, metaphors that don't
really work kind of fall flat because of that. Take,
(22:38):
for instance, UH, this famous line she's a brick house. Now,
obviously in the same way that we're not actually all
players on a stage, she whoever she is, is not
actually a brick house. And when I try to imagine
this mysterious her as a brick house. It never works
for me. Maybe I'm missing something, but I just imagine
(22:59):
a woman made out of ricks. Well, this is it's
attached to the song now, so of course there are
parts of my brain that are singing it. Yea, the
song is the song is is great. So it manages
to make it fooliss into thinking that this means something
where I'm not convinced it actually means anything, or if
it means anything, it means that someone made a woman
out of bricks, which is kind of cool too. Yeah,
I kind of go alem kind of way. I guess, yeah, yeah,
(23:22):
well it's a funky way, right, and then then get
down way. Um, but I think it's just so cool too.
About you know, seeing that these mirror neurons are firing
in the motor cortex, is that it's not just the
motor cortex. It's actually like corresponding with what you're seeing.
So if you're seeing someone pitch baseball, then your motor
(23:43):
cortex neurons are firing, and and um, what would be
related to the area that moves your arm and uh,
and then also if you see someone playing soccer and
you see the lake movements, then it's the same thing
that that they're specific to with part of your body.
So it's not just like, hey, this is the part
of the of my brain that makes me move my limbs.
(24:05):
It's your specific limbs. So yeah, I don't know. I'm
burto echo. In his ugly it was in his book
of essays, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Um, he
spends a lot of time discussing just the nature of fiction,
and he discusses it on all levels. He's talking about
literary stuff, he's talking about comic books, he's talking about
b movies, and he's talking about pornography at times, all
(24:26):
levels of storytelling. By the way, this perfectly, this whole
conversation about mirror neurons explains pornography, right Like if anybody's
ever wondered why exists, which I don't think anybody probably
wonders that this is the reason right here right well indeed,
and the Echo goes into this a lot in in
that book. I recommend picking it up. But he discusses
particularly the use of everyday activities in certain books and
(24:50):
certain films. For instance, he specifically mentions the James Bond novels,
which if you read, say, Doctor No, a lot of
crazy stuff happening, and the Bond is picting shooting people.
I believe in Dr No. In the book itself, he
wrestles a giant squid. It's easier to forget when people
get all up tied about about the purity of James
Bond and fiction versus film. Just remember he did wrestle
(25:12):
a giant squid. Ones But but then, a lot of
time is devoted in these books to Bond having dinner,
to Bond eating things um or Bond having coffee, Bond
doing things that we can relate to. Most of us
cannot relate to being shot in the shoulder or wrestling
a giant squid. There's only we can only become so
immersed in bad activity. But if the author immerses us
(25:33):
in these other activities that we do have experience with.
Although I will say this, I was watching True Blood
and there's just one point in which, um, someone stabbed
another person in the hand with a fork. Now that's
not the first time I've watched that on film at
least um, But I immediately pulled my hand up because
you can relate to something like that far more than
(25:55):
you can to uh. I mean horr movies are a
great example of this, and and directors who understand horror
and how a version works for the viewer get this.
If someone loses an arm, if like Arnold Swartz narrogets
his arm blown off in a film or something, um,
we can't relate to that. Most of us cannot relate
(26:15):
to that. What that could be would be like it's
it's out of our experience. However, if you have a
character hold up their hand against someone like strikes at
him a machete and they get a cut across the
palm or something like that, or even like a paper
cut times ten or yeah, yeah, we can relate or
just a paper cut. Have someone get paper cut in
(26:36):
the film, you have an entire horror film based on
paper cuts, you know. But but we can relate to that.
It's a more of an everyday event. And uh in
any way, Burtlecca goes into it a lot more doubt.
He also gets into the use of every day I
think it's car rides that he discusses in Like the
way to tell if you're watching a regular film or
pornographic film is how long a car ride last in
(26:58):
the film. The longer at last more likely that you're
watching a pornographic film. All right, Okay, there we go.
It's a marker. Um. All right, we're going to take
a quick break, but when we get back, we're going
to talk about empathy and fiction. Can can you increase
your own empathy through fiction? And is there a downside
the fiction? Alright, we're back. So empathy and fiction, as
(27:26):
we mentioned, are there via mirror neurons, via theory of mine.
We're reading these stories and we cannot help but become
immersed in that character, be it James Bond wrestling a squid,
or um the character in Zombie trying to kidnap somebody
and keep them in their basement. Alright, so of course
I have to mentioned study okay by Washington and Lee
(27:47):
psychologist Dan Johnson. He had people read a short story
that was specifically written to induce compassion in the reader,
and he wanted to see not only a fiction increased empathy,
but whether it would lead to actually helping someone. So
he found that the more absorbed subjects were in the story,
the more empathy they felt, and the more empathy they felt,
the more likely the subjects were to help. When the
(28:10):
experiment er accidentally in quotation marks UH dropped a handful
of pens. UH. The highly absorbed readers were twice as
likely to help out, which I thought was interesting that presumably,
UM the researcher does this while they're reading and they're
absorbed in the text. I would think that that would
be they would be so absorbed that they wouldn't even
(28:32):
notice the pens dropping. But that's a that's one little
test that has been carried out. And then there are
studies published in two thousand and six and two thousand
and nine by Dr Keith Oatley. This is the guy
that was at the World Science Festival UH. He reports
the individuals who frequently read fiction performed better on theory
of mind tests regardless of gender. Because we've heard this
(28:53):
before that women are are more compassionate or have more empathy,
and UH is sometimes pointed to because of more mirror
neurons that they possessed. UM. But one such theory of
mind test is called the mind's eye test, which participants
look at photos of nothing but people's eyes and then
have to describe what the people are feeling. We took
this on the Facebook, didn't we? We did you? It
(29:16):
fits the stereo thoughts you actually perform better on it
than I did. I get a thirty on it, which
is something. Yeah, I think the normal range is like
thirty and anything over thirty like your super empathizer or
something like that. So what is bad under under two? Okay,
I'm good. Yeah, you're cleared it by a couple points there. Um.
(29:37):
But there's this idea that you could actually increase your
own empathy through reading fiction. Hi is just sort of interesting, right,
because it's helpful if you decrede stuff like flat land
like flatland and flatland fan fiction. W you're just reading
about shades. Well, you know what. Here's the thing, though,
is that you ascribe meaning to nearly anything. So there's
(30:00):
this is a really cool um thing that they did
at the panel about the narrative of um or the
science of narrative. They actually showed a film of a circle,
a square, and um a triangle and anyway, the shapes
move around inside this box and they kind of do
things to each other. And after they share the film,
(30:23):
they say that, how how many of you saw a
story in this? And nearly everyone except for like one guy,
raise their hand and then they sort to say, well,
who saw a female and then other people say, who
saw a male who saw someone trying to trap this
other person in a room, and it was amazing, Like,
we can't help but to create these stories. So we
talked story of five like mad gods. Um. But then
(30:51):
there there comes a question could there be a possible
downside to this? Well? Um, I mean the big thing
here is that by engaging us uh in these stories
that that often have have important social context to them,
we can we can use fiction to change the world
for the better. But if we can change and when
(31:14):
we say change the world, obviously none of these stories
they are altering physical reality, but they can adjust culture
in the way we view the world, um, such as
the way some sitcoms are able to change the way
and or influence the way that we view various social issues.
All Right, there have been a bunch of studies that
say that when people identify with characters like such as um,
(31:35):
the gay characters there, that people are that more accepting
of them. Or even our current vice president said that
when talking about the gay marriage issue. UM, he said
that he was really one over from watching what was which,
which everyone got to laugh out of that, but it
(31:55):
it lines up exactly with what we know about the
power of of fiction and particularly popular media to alter
the way that we view the world. So that's the thing, right,
because when you are involved in fiction or some sort
of narrative that is fictitious, you lose your sense of skepticism.
And the researchers have seen this over and over again.
When you are reading something that you know that is nonfiction,
(32:18):
then you're apt to be much more critical of it,
analyze a lot more. But if you know you're in
a story, or you're lulled into a story, I guess
you could say, um, then you you do lose skepticism.
So if one sitcom could could influence me and help
me decide that, yes, this group of people deserve rights
(32:39):
that they don't have, could another sitcompetentially make me say
this group of people do not deserve certain rights? Well, um, yeah, actually,
I mean that's that's the fear. Here. There's Jonathan Gotshall
who is also on the panel. He wrote something called
The Story Storytelling Animal has said that we are suckers
for story. Lab studies show that we are deeply absorbed
(33:01):
in a story. We lose our skepticism and we can
be made to feel and believe just about anything the
storyteller wants. And he actually brought up on the panel
that that's mainly good. But then you think about the
nineteen fifteen film The Birth of a Nation, which inflamed
racist sentiments. This is the one where the clickklux klansmen
or are riding around like victorious nights, um and uh,
(33:22):
and they're fighting the evil um black man. It's I mean,
it's it's it's. It's a very interesting and important film
in terms of film history. And and if you've ever
taken a history of film class, you've probably seen it
or seen parts of it. Um. But it is not
enforcing um good moral ideas right right, and it has
(33:45):
I mean the plotline obviously has been manipulated to in
do certain feelings and that actually did um that that
gave sort of new life to the KLi klux klan
um when the film was shown. So you know, he
says it can go both ways. Um. There's also the
idea of over consumption of media. Now when I say that, well,
(34:06):
I see this this is for an entirely different podcast, um,
but I thought it was interesting to mention. And when
I when I stayed media, I'm talking about games or gaming. UM.
Computer scientists Stuart Staniford says that the room this is
is kind of interesting. I mean it's a little bit
out there. Said that as the robot population surpasses humans
(34:26):
and takes most of our jobs, but the least disruptive
approach to managing this is for the underclass to disappear
into technology mediated secondary universes um and that he can't
help but see video games imagined here is a widely
used opiate. So this is the Yeah, this is this
idea of over consumption. Because you know, there's there's this
(34:48):
um other idea that back in the day, if you
wanted a good story, you hope that someone in your
circle was a really great aural storyteller. Right yeah, you
would have someone tell that story, that story, or that
joke or that whatever, that narrative experience. Let's go and
hear it. The storytellers come into town, you know, let's go,
let's go hear what they have to say. But now that,
(35:10):
I mean, you can have any type of story any
which way you want it, um from myriad bits of media,
right um. And so there's an idea that it's really
similar to an obesity epidemic that we evolved in a
world where food was scarce, so we're very comfortable right now.
And and so that you have this idea of like
(35:30):
there's too much on the plate for us to consume.
Because back in the old days they were there were
only so many stories that could think really, they passed around.
You had you had the creation story, the end of
the world story. Um, and it is important, I guess
when I'm you know, half joking there. But but but
certainly in the olden days you had all these stories
(35:50):
that that had definite meanings, that were important culturally, that
culturally that were the bedrock upon which civilization existed. Um.
I mean you had stories in which positive values were
tested and found to be held true, negative values are
tested and found to be false. Where something simple has
proven complex, where something complex has proven simple, where the
(36:11):
other has proven normal than normal has proven other. I mean,
these are all about maintaining a certain worldview. And today
are our stories of We have more of them, and
some of them are are less involved in maintaining the
fabric of our reality, but they're all still uh engaging
in that conversation on one level or another. Well, and
(36:32):
to that point, I wanted to to to leave you
with this um. This quote from Jonathan Gottshaw um about
storytelling and no matter how much we consume or don't consume,
he says, humans aren't really Earthlings. Above all, we are
citizens of an omnidimensional virtual world called Storyland. Of course,
our bodies are always fixed at a particular time and
(36:55):
place on planet Earth. But our minds are always free
to voyage in Storyland, and they you, They voyage through
stories from most of the day and into the night.
It's wrong to think of story as a mirror frill
in human life. We live most of our lives in
various kinds of story. Story, as much as upright posture,
tool use, language, or intelligence, is what makes us human.
(37:17):
So I thought was really interesting because we talked about
even daydreaming, that that we uh, we daydream like half
of our waking hours away. Right, I'm sorry, what are
you saying? Nice? Nice? All right, Well, let's pull open
the mail bag, bring it over here. I think it's funny.
You calm robot, but I call him Arnie. We have
(37:40):
a different relationship with robot. You have more empathy. You
you're firing up more of those mirror neurons. Do you
think he has a limp? It looks like he's not
walking correctly. All right, So here's a little bit of
listener mail from Ann and Wrightson says, sorry for the
slow response. I've been meaning to write until you have tickled.
I was to hear your honorary air response my email below,
(38:01):
and her email was the one about uh where she
said words and it was about how I used frank
and beans to describe penis and yes, to do it
again with kind okay, but anyway, she was responding to
to that, and and and we we addressed it, you know,
and and sort of we gave our perspective on on
(38:23):
presenting material for various age groups and all. Anyway, she
continues and says, it gave me an entirely new perspective
on some of the pressures and issues you were dealing with.
I stand by my opinion, but definitely understand your position
better now see empathizing. I know we can't help ourselves. Um,
She says. I also wanted to let you know how
much I've been enjoying the Lucid Dreaming theme. I'm a
(38:44):
world class dreamer. Last night was a multi generational saga
set in the early nineteenth century night and often have
quite bizarre dreams, dreams within dreams, whatever. But despite decades
of interest in the topic, I've never managed a lucid dream.
What I can't seem to do is make that first
step in the process, knowing that you're dreaming and taking control.
(39:06):
Oh well, it doesn't stop me from flying and sometimes
even underwater swimming, which is pretty cool and I think
much more unusual. Good flying all the best, man, I'm
gonna try that underwater flying. Yeah, well, I've I've definitely
had underwater dreams before, like one where I was chasing
a sorcerer across the ocean floor. He had a book
or something. But the other night I just had one
(39:27):
of those dreams where I thought I'd pee pee the beds.
So those aren't very exciting, but happy ending I could
not pee the bed. Oh my goodness, what have you
had these dreams before? Yes, I'm sorry, there's so much.
There's so many words there that I want to playoff of,
but I won't out of interest of um keeping it
(39:49):
clean folks. Okay, Well, I just find it in right
because I was talking to a group of friends and
out of four or five of us, only two of
us claim to have had dreams in which they were
peeing that they it and then we'll to find find
that they had not. So oh well, you know, actually
I do take that back now, and I'm focusing more.
Um yeah, my body is mainly it is basically saying, hey,
(40:10):
you need to get up and use the restroom. Yeah,
flying is better. I'm not. I'm something everybody wanted to know.
If there you go, let's keep to the flying all right. Well, hey,
if you want to write into us and you want
to let us know about your fiction versus reality, um idea,
Where do you stand on this? How do you think
fiction alters our perceptions of reality or does it, as
(40:34):
with the works of say Suttercane, actually change physical reality.
Let us know. You can find us on Facebook where
we are Stuffed to Blow Your Mind, or you can
find us on Twitter where we are Blow the Mind,
and you can always drop us a line at Blew
the Mind at Discovery dot com. Be sure to check
out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join
(40:57):
How Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising
and flexing possibilities of tomorrow.
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