Against Narrative: Are stories bad for us? Part 2

It’s hard to imagine human beings without storytelling and literature. Surely, these are some of the very things that define us. Narratives give our lives and our world meaning, but what if there’s a dark side to their sorcerous power? In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore the storyteller’s potent spell.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and we're back with part two of our discussion of
whether stories are bad for us. If you haven't heard

(00:23):
the first episode, you should probably go back and listen
to that. It's where we first discussed what got us
interested in this topic and general thoughts about ways that
though Robert, you and I we both love narratives, love stories,
love fiction, that stories might not always be great for
human civilization. Yeah, it's it's a it's a weird thing
to think about. But but then again, like part of

(00:44):
it is because I look back, especially on certain times
in my life where like a prize narrative above anything
that was happening in real life. You know, like a
great book was an escape. A fictional book, Yeah, great,
great fictional book was an escape. They were great. Unfiction
book can also be a tremendous escape too, But I
specifically remember escaping into into various novels, and it was

(01:07):
there was something so comforting about that. But then there's
a similar there's there's something similar occurring when we have
these negative examples of people escaping into narrative, though it
might not be the pure alternate narrative of say, life
on another planet or in an imagined age, but just
a a different version of reality in which things are

(01:31):
simplified and made more story shaped, with more key with
with with clearer villains and heroes, and some sort of
of eventual come upance and uh and redemption. So we
should brief recap. In the last episode, we talked about
this idea that maybe stories aren't so great for us.

(01:51):
That we were inspired to talk about this because I
read a read an interview with a Duke University professor
and philosopher of science named Alex Rosenberg, who has written
a book about How How Well Number One, about how
we're wired to prefer stories over other types of receiving information,
and then also about how stories cloud our our views

(02:12):
of history and that a lot of times we don't
appreciate what actually happened in the past because we read
a sort of personal narrative about history that has characters
with motivations, and we think we identify with those characters,
and we you know, we engage in theory of mind.
We put our brain inside their brain, and we think
we understand history in this way, but in fact it

(02:33):
just leads to a lot of misunderstanding and false certainty
about why things happened in the past, right, and then
sometimes about what's happening in the present and in the future.
Because he specifically points to the science of global warming
and how there's a tendency to to for for the
science of global warming to to lose out to the
narrative of global warming. And this wouldn't be an issue

(02:55):
if the narratives were closely aligned with the science, but
as we see can sadly continue to see, the problem
is that some of the narratives about global warming run
counter to what the science is telling us and have
a have a different agenda. Right. I mean, of course,
the clear scientific consensus is global warm warming is absolutely real.

(03:16):
It's going on right now. It's it is primarily driven
by human behavior, and that behavior is primarily the emission
of greenhouse gasses, and that if we want to do
something to stop it, we should stop the emission of
greenhouse gasses and maybe even at this point try to
find a way to remove them from the atmosphere, if
that's even possible. But you know, there there are lots
of very fun narratives that tell you something else, that

(03:38):
tell you it's a Chinese hoax, or that tell you,
you know, there's some evil cabal of globalists who want
to do X, Y and Z, and they're using this
scam to you know, I don't you know, keep up
with all what all that stuff is. But you know
where you can go to find it YouTube predominantly, Uh,
you know, but part of it. But a lot of

(03:58):
this is it's out, Rosenberg describes. You know, a lot
of it comes down to the fact that we're we're
using old tricks. Uh. These are basically sort of shortcuts
in our perception of reality and that all of you know,
the reality that we have is not like pure objective
reality like of course, you know, one of the like

(04:20):
fun little I'll go and go ahead and even call
it a mind blower that he drops in that ideas
with Paul Kennedy episode was that you know that that
we live in a world that doesn't actually have odors
or colors. That's just our sense world, that's our way,
that's the way that our our bodies in our minds, uh,
interpret the stimula. Yeah, there is actually light, and there

(04:40):
are actually volatile molecules, but the idea of color is
something that happens only in the brain. Right. We constantly
air in this perception of the world because it's adaptive. Uh.
And it's certainly not maladaptive, but you can see how
it stands in the way of a proper understanding of
objective reality. If it mattered, like if I don't know,

(05:02):
if some fantastic scenario presented itself, say there was an
alien invasion, that's generally a good one to go for,
and the key to defeating the aliens was a perception
of reality that did not, uh, did not rely on
an understanding of reality in which odors and colors exist.
You know, we're doomed. Yeah, we would. We would be

(05:24):
doomed because we have this this built in handicap that
has never been maladaptive up until now. And so one
of the things he's arguing is that is that storytelling
was adaptive early on, but then is perhaps increasingly maladaptive
as we as as civilization becomes more complicated. Oh yeah,
I mean, this is one of the clear things that
we've discovered through you know, the recent decades of psychology

(05:48):
and neuroscience focusing on bias and misperception. You know that
that's been been a key to to what we've learned
about the brain in the past few decades, is that
we we have just all kinds of ways of getting
reality wrong, and a lot of this is based on heuristics,
you know, simple, quick, fast, dirty rules that the mind
uses to try to come up with an answer without

(06:10):
doing too much work. And in fact, you can more
often get a more accurate answer by using a slow,
laborious mechanical process of figuring out what's true. But usually
it doesn't make sense to do that in real life
because you just don't have the time and the energy.
So we use heuristics and we get maybe sometimes roughly
right answers, maybe sometimes really wrong answers, but in most

(06:31):
scenarios it doesn't matter enough for us to actually change
our behavior. And story based thinking about reality, I think,
is one of these heuristics. Yeah, you know, one one
thing that came to my mind was how like some
of my earliest memories, some of them are definitely memories,
but other things are not so much memories, but me

(06:53):
remembering stories about something that happened when I was very young.
And those become a sort of memory. They become a
kind of false memory of something that that happened. But
to what degree it happened, like the story, I'm not sure,
because we do this all the time right where we
take we oftentimes will take an external story or just
like the general shape of a story, use that to

(07:14):
interpret something that happened to us, and then that becomes
the memory. We are remembering the story that we came
up with about the thing that happened, as opposed to
any anything like a purely objective understanding of what occurred. Right,
And so a classic example of this that I was
just thinking about is when you sort events into a

(07:35):
structure of rising tension. You know, it's how like you
could you could, like take a number of events that
happened over a course of different days or even different weeks,
and we're really not all that related. But you're telling
a story maybe about how you started, you know, why
you're feeling down right now, and you you introduce like
one thing that went wrong and then another thing that

(07:57):
went wrong at a different time, and you you escale
the tension on the story like you would if you're
showing the increasingly dangerous obstacles that a hero almost face
in their journey. Right, Sometimes the things that we pick
out to put into that story to be like the
set pieces of the story might not be the real
causes and effects of what we're trying to explain with
the story. Why you're actually feeling down now, You don't

(08:18):
necessarily know why you're feeling down now. Yeah, there are
a number of reasons we've discussed in the show that
that are not related to um so much to something
going on in the mind, that's something going on and
say with your gut, bacteria, etcetera. And of course we've
also discussed on the show how even an outright lie
can impact how we think about something. Um uh, you know,

(08:39):
and something that's not even presented as a possible truth,
if we hear it enough times, it can become part
of our understanding of reality. Yeah, the illusory truth effect.
You hear something enough, you start to kind of think
it's true, even if you should know better. And so
like that situation as well, is just this sort of
holding our life up to other examples, be it little

(09:00):
biographies or myths or motion pictures that we've seen. Um.
It reminds me a bit of something that's discussed in
Mercelles Eliades The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos
in History, the book I've I've talked about on the
show before. It's kind of a you know, an important
text in religious studies, and in this the author discusses
how humans uh would have situated themselves within cyclical time. Uh.

(09:26):
The idea here being that that ancient people thought of
time is more as cyclical as opposed to linear, not
something that has a beginning and an end that ultimately
follows sort of the the ups and downs of a
narrative plot, but is more of just a continual cycle.
I guess more like a sitcom in that respect, right, Uh,
as a as sitcom rather than blockbuster. And so the
idea here is that ancient people would have viewed time

(09:48):
as cyclical and that all important acts in life were
ultimately things that were revealed by the gods, and that
all humans did was engaged in acts and rituals of repetition. So,
I don't know, there's something that might define you in life,
like say, something that is associated with with being a parent,
or being a warrior, or being a uh, you know,

(10:12):
a craftsman and artisan. What have you like these things
are only important because a god did them or some
sort of divine figure did them, and then you were
just repeating those things. Um a quote from the book
An object or act becomes real only in so far
as it imitates or repeats an archetype. But then again,

(10:32):
the move to linear time or one way time allows
for a different sort of narrative structure to emerge um
and to take root in life, myth and religion, tales
of fall and ultimately redemption and ultimate justice. Yeah. And
this is, in in Lad's estimation, negative in that it
allows for the terror of history, the realization that we

(10:54):
keep falling and failing and suffering not because of divine
acts or something set in motion by the gods for repetition,
but because of our own failings. So we've abandoned mythical thought,
he argues, and are confronted with this modern terror, these
modern anxieties because of this way that we view time

(11:14):
and and ultimately kind of place it in a narrative
structure in our understanding of what has come before does
color what comes comes comes later. I mean, the whole
go back to the idea of you know, those who
who who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Um
also reminds me of quote from soreign h Crcy Guard

(11:35):
from repetition, and I actually I encountered this quote for
the first time in the intro to uh Alan robe
Gerlay's novel Repetition. But it goes like this, repetition and
recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions. For
what is recollected has been it is repeated backwards, whereas repetition,

(11:55):
properly so called, is recollected forward. Well, that does tend
to suggest, I mean, another way of thinking about the
possible effects of narrative on our lives is that if
you tell a certain kind of story about yourself, do
you make it more likely that you do a similar
kind of story in the future. Right? Is it a
story about what I was or who I am or

(12:18):
who I will be? And I didn't think that can
be instructive to a certain extent, Right, Like I am
a good person, I am a moral person, and therefore
I have acted morally and I will act morally. That
sort of thing. But another thing that I think is
really important about the psychology of storytelling is just the
power that stories now when you're not even talking about
self narrative. You're just talking about narrative, external narratives, fictional stories,

(12:41):
narratives like we were talking about with global warming. Uh,
somebody wants to tell a story about an evil conspiracy
to push this hoax on people. That kind of story
can be incredibly persuasive and powerful. Stories have the power
to persuade for good and evil, And this can be
a really frightening power because they often seem so much
more persuasive than good evidence. Like if you're a lawyer,

(13:04):
I mean, it's a truism among lawyers, right that if
you if you're doing a court case and the evidence
is against you, if you tell a good enough story,
you still might win the jury over that. Often, like
presenting a case to a jury is about telling a
believable story, and how believable the story is might not
always correlate to how good the evidence is. And so

(13:25):
there's plenty of evidence that stories have persuasive power that
you know that they A lot of this is applied
like within the business world. You know, you've probably seen
people doing business presentations or giving ted talks or something
like that, and they go up and the first thing
they do is they tell a story. I want to
tell you a story about a young man who had
a dream, and that man was me. And you know,

(13:48):
but they tell you a story and it's got a
narrative arc, it's got obstacles that the character must face.
They've got desires, they've got emotions. You you seek to
have emotional engagement between the audience and the character, and
that supposedly helps people pay more attention to what you're
talking about. It helps people retain more information from what
you said, and it helps you persuade people to your

(14:10):
point of view, which I guess is all contingent on,
you know, whether the ultimate point of what you're saying
is good or not. I mean, you can use this
for good and you can use it for quite evil purposes. Yeah.
For instance, on the idea of narrative for good, we
we've touched on some of the positives of telling stories already,
but you know, it's worth noting that narrative is sometimes
part of, you know, of an actual like clinical healing practice,

(14:31):
such as narrative expressive writing. For instance of May two
thousand seventeen study in Psychosomatic Medicine, Journal of Bio Behavioral
Medicine found that the writing about their emotions and creating
a meaningful narrative of their experience UH may reduce the
harmful cardiovascular effects of stress related to marital separation and patients. UM.

(14:53):
But you know, more specifically, like just the idea that
engaging and narrative can be used in but they're they're
apew process UM. I also ran across some notes on
the pros and cons of storytelling from Ethics of Storytelling, Narrative, Hermoneutics,
History and the Possible by Hannah Maritosa, Professor of Comparative

(15:14):
Literature at the University of Turku in Finland, and she
points out that the narrative gives us a sense of
what is possible within a culture and what could be possible,
and this is all good. You know, we see empowering
stories and we think that could be me, or you know,
I can do something like that. You know, I'm maybe
I'm not going to go and engage in a boxing match,

(15:35):
but this boxing movie has shown me that if I
have the eye of the tiger, then nothing can UM.
And then also it shapes what we think a good
life is, what gender norms are, what success is, and
this can be positive or negative. I mean, it really
can run run run the gamut here. Yeah, I think

(15:55):
we tend to. Some research shows that we tend to
identify with characters in narrow It is much the same
way we would end up identifying with people in the world.
And you know, when you see people in the world
acting a certain way, their values can be contagious, their
cultural values, their moral values. And I think the same
can be true and narrative absolutely. She She also points

(16:16):
to the Nazi regime is giving us a good example
of what can happen when a strong narrative is developed
to embolden one people but at the expense of others.
Nazism was a story. It was a storytelling exercise, you know.
It was telling a story about a great people, you know,
who who had once been great and who were now
being attacked by a conspiracy and parasitized by people who

(16:38):
were unworthy, and that they would rise from this and
become great once again. It was, in a way, it
was kind of like a catastrophic reboot project of a culture.
Yeah you know, um, yeah sou but also attempting to
achieve what they this story, they this mythology they had
about past greatness exactly. Yeah, But speaking of the Nazis,

(16:59):
she also points out that we have to be careful
not to demonize evil doers too much in our narrative
understanding of past horrors in order to quote properly engage
with the conditions that made the atrocities possible. Well, this
is getting back to Alex Rosenberg, right, I mean like that,
often thinking of history as a narrative and seeing you know,
villains and heroes and stuff in history causes us to

(17:21):
fail to appreciate some material conditions that brought brought about events.
You know, when you think about history as stories of
characters who succeed against all odds, all that and all that,
and you and you get into that, you you engage
in theory of mind and you think about what they
were thinking. You stop thinking about what the price of
bread was this week and how that influenced what was

(17:41):
possible within a polity. Absolutely, and you know, with with
the Nazis particularly, you know, it's interesting to look at
your cinema, right and and certainly we have we have
so many examples, even very entertaining examples of just like
pure storybook Nazis, the rates of the Lost Ark is
a great example of this, Like the Nazis are just
straight up cardboard villains, and within the context of Raiders

(18:04):
the Lost Art, it's arguably okay. But then how do
you treat characters like this in other works, because you
you know, to to her point here, you want to
make sure that there is that human element there, that
people are realizing that these are not demons, these are
people and therefore their errors are our potential errors. Yes,
I think that's very important to see them as people

(18:26):
so you can realize, like this could happen again, other
people could become like this, Right, So, like, say you
look at a character, say like Joseph Mangela, and you
want to be able to say he was not a monster.
He you know, not an inhuman monster. He was a
human who did monstrous things. And let's look at how
that came to be. Um, you know, how as not

(18:48):
to create more of them? Right? But then but then
also I guess you do kind of run the risk
of like making the characters like this to relate, Like
you don't want to make them too sympathetic either, right, well, right,
I mean you don't want to make it'm like, hey,
you know, wouldn't be so bad to be like, you
don't want to lose the object lessons the experience. So yeah,
I think that's just one example of how how complicated

(19:11):
choosing the form of narrative to place over history or individuals,
how how problematic it can be, even with something that
is relatively straightforward, by making sure that mass murderers and
uh and you know, xenophobic individuals are are properly vilified,
but vilified to the appropriate degree and in specifically the

(19:32):
appropriate way. I mean, yes, uh yeah. Coming up with
stories is it's a it's a task on which you
have great responsibility on your shoulders, and people take it
so lightly. I mean, you notice the almost it's almost
like the level of responsibility goes exactly backwards. I tend
to notice when people are talking about history in terms
of uh, you know, minute fact matter about history, the

(19:57):
you know, the weekly price of bread and a place
throughout history, that they tend to exercise a lot more
caution than people who are talking about history in a
way that tells a narrative story. I mean, I guess
you're always going to have people doing both, but it
seems like the person who's putting together a narrative that
reads like a story with characters. They should be exercising
ten times as much caution as the person just collecting,

(20:20):
you know, factual minutia about history. We've got it exactly backwards.
The way people sling narratives about history is sometimes just breathtaking. Yeah.
Like one example, not not not to discuss this film
in too much detail, but uh, the the adaptation of
three hundred Oh yeah, well, I mean I was thinking

(20:40):
more about just like you know, the dude shooting his
mouth off about what the Nazis were really about, you know.
But but but what you're saying is correct to like
that's a film that is I don't know, there's like
three different ways of looking at it. I guess like
like one is that like this is clearly a case
where you took a you took an historical, uh military engagement,

(21:02):
and then you just made one side like the opra
ultra masculine heroes, and the other side you made into
like actual mutated debas demons, and then and then said
that they were the Persians, you know, an entire culture
and entire people, and that there is a that that's
inherently reckless to do that, and then it's I've seen

(21:23):
it defended by saying, well, the whole story is as
told by this individual, and therefore it's supposed to be
because it's ultimately about the distortions of storytelling. I don't
know to what extent that truly holds up. I mean,
I can see the role for that kind of story
that's told by an unreliable narrator, but I don't remember
that really coming through. I don't think I don't remember

(21:45):
that either. I remember at the time initially kind of
like naively experiencing it. I think the same way that
it was perhaps intended, like here's just a crazy story
where we made history more like Lord of the Rings,
you know, and a goblins and demons and oh that's
that and muscles and and and muscle abs for miles.
I significantly doubt that I would have that same experience today.

(22:09):
I think I would feel very conflicted about it. I mean,
in a way, it's I feel it's going to be
hard to go through life not spinning occasionally, at least
spinning tidy, bold narratives about history that you have not
really properly thought through the implications of, because that's that's
just how we tend to think about past events, and
we get caught up in story, We get caught up

(22:30):
in the power of narrative. I was just thinking, I've
probably sort of even though I've been trying to be careful,
I've probably sort of done that today already. I mean, so,
I try not to create heroes and villains unnecessarily. But
one of the problems with creating heroes and villains in
h in history is especially like when you go try
to create a hero in history, is you almost inevitably

(22:51):
find out stuff that like complicates your your idea of
them as a hero, like, oh, this was the good
guy at some point in his story, and then you
read into their biography and it's like, oh, yeah, I
did some stuff that you wouldn't you wouldn't write a
hero doing. And your standard uncomplicated adventure movie right or
just in the like looking up the personal getting to

(23:13):
too acquainted with the personal history of say contemporary heroes. Yeah,
we're like, oh, I really like this particular artist or
actor or a musician. You're doomed. Don't look it up
like you're you're ultimately it seems like you're sometimes it
seems like often your best hope is that they just
don't have a lot out there about their all right,
well let's take a break. When we come back, we

(23:35):
will dive deeper into the world of narrative. Thank thank you,
thank you. All Right, we're back. So I wanted to
look at a bit at the idea of narrative and neuroscience.
There's all kinds of evidence that the brain is fundamentally
oriented towards producing stories, consuming stories, seeing the world in
terms of stories. Stories appear to have a kind of

(23:57):
special purchase on our neurological architect Sure, So I just
wanted to mention a few weird findings about how narratives
work in the human brain. And so one thing I
came across is the work of the Princeton University psychologist
and neuroscientist Uri Hassan. And so Hassan has carried out
brain imaging research to see exactly what happens in the

(24:19):
human brain when we're engaged in various forms of communication.
So he studies communication broadly, but one of those types
of communications that he's studied is what happens when we're
being told a story, like a personal narrative, or even
like a like a fictional story like an episode of
a TV show. So repeatedly, Hassan has found through f

(24:39):
m R I that when people engage in successful verbal
communication with one another, their brain activity tends to be
to become physically aligned or coupled, meaning records of the
physical activity of their brains show similarities or complementarity across
space and time. So, like your brain image to people

(24:59):
who are having a conversation, and you will see this
interesting kind of brain activity ping pong where their their
brains are almost sort of locked in sync and reacting
and kind interesting, revealing that the relationship between storyteller and
the listener is more of a like a melding of
minds in the same way to say, like people singing

(25:20):
together engaging in a ritual, they're also kind of like
melding their their mental states. Yeah. Absolutely, So Hassen has
argued that communication in general is quote a single act
performed by two brains. I like that, but yeah, what
so what happens when that communication takes the form of
a story? Uh? And so I was reading an article
where where Hassan himself writes about his research on this. Uh.

(25:44):
So he wrote, quote, in one experiment, we brought people
to the f m r I scanner and scanned their
brains while they were either telling or listening to real
life stories. We started by comparing the similarity of neural
responses across different steners in their auditory cortices, the part
of the brain that processes the sounds coming from the ear.

(26:06):
When we looked at the responses before the experiment started,
while our five listeners were at rest waiting for the
storyteller to begin, we saw the responses were very different
from each other and not in sync. And Robert, I've
attached some images for you to see here. Uh, he continues. However,
immediately as the story started, we saw something amazing happen.

(26:28):
Suddenly we saw the neural responses in all of the
subjects begin to lock together and go up and down
in a similar way. So you're seeing this synchronization of
physical records of brain activity as the story starts. Now,
when people's different brain responses become synchronized or locked in
response to speech like I was talking about, that, this

(26:50):
is known as neural entrainment. In what Hassen's research found
is that you could in train some parts of the
brain without a coherent story So if you just play
the audio of the story backwards and they did that
to try to produce many of the same sounds as
the story, but without any of the meaning, it entrains
the auditory cortices, but nothing else. So that's just you know,

(27:11):
the part for detecting sound. I'm just listening to noise.
And then when you play whole words but scramble them
out of order, this entrains the auditory cortices and the
quote early language areas, but nothing else. Then when you
play whole sentences that makes sense individually but don't form
a coherent narrative, you get entrainment in the previous areas

(27:33):
plus areas associated with processing language and grammar, but nothing else.
But then finally, when you actually play a story that
has narrative coherence, that has an arc, where you're actually
telling a coherent story, you get similarities and alignments across
listeners in areas of higher brain function like the frontal
cortex and the parietal cortex. And as much as like Robert,

(27:56):
you and I often talk about the particular powers of
languages and how things can be lost in translation, it
turns out that some important neurologically salient features of stories
are generally not lost in translation. So Hassan has also
been involved in research that shows that if you take
a real life story originally from a Russian speaker and

(28:17):
you translate it into English and the authors specified quote
we tried to preserve the content of the narrative while
reducing the structural similarities across languages unquote uh. They found
that Russian speakers and English speakers also show aligned patterns
of brain activation when listening to the story quote, beginning

(28:37):
just outside early auditory areas and extending through temporal, parietal,
and frontal cerebral cortices. So this means that it doesn't
have anything to do with people sitting in a room
listening to English. You take a story in one language,
translate it to a different language, and play it to
people in those different languages, and you will still see
this strange brain imaging alignment. So it's like we can

(28:58):
pick up on the shape of story even if the
the the the actual language is the one we don't
we don't understand, yes, and so this research gets even weirder.
So Hassan and colleagues have done if F M R
I scanning on people watching TV shows like the BBC's Sherlock.
Did you watch someone, Robert, I've watched a few episodes. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
so uh you know it's it can be pretty engrossing.

(29:20):
So they had people watched Sherlock while getting brain scan,
and they later scanned subjects in a dark room retelling
the story of what they had watched out loud. Then
later they played back a recording of one of those
subjects describing the story from the Sherlock episode to someone
who hadn't seen the shows. And this was pretty interesting.

(29:43):
People in all three scenarios showed some alignment of higher
order brain function that played out in similar ways seen
by scene. Despite the fact that these three different that
they were doing these three totally different sensory tasks. Watching
a TV show, remin remembering a show you've already watched,
and then listening to somebody described the plot of a

(30:05):
TV show to you, you'd still get, like when somebody
describes a particular scene in the show, you'd get some
alignment of brain activity that's similar to what happens when
people watch that scene. And I think this cross media
alignment suggests that brain activity can be aligned by the
content of the story itself, that it doesn't necessarily depend
on whether you're watching with your eyes or listening or remembering.

(30:29):
The brain seems to be, at least at some level
responding strongly to stories as stories. And this makes me
think back to the idea of the story of narrative
is being like just a basic survival adaptation, like the
ability to to convene with other members of say your tribe,
and and get info, get intel about what is happening

(30:52):
in the immediate surroundings or in what may happen. Well, yeah,
it seems like stories they like they suddenly they justness
our attention and we lock into them. And it's almost
as if the brain has sort of built in story
recognition functions that work different than just receiving verbal information
of any other kind or watching somebody do something. If

(31:14):
there's a character I to identify with and they're facing
a plot, then something happens. All right, we're gonna take
a quick break, but we'll be right back. Thank alright,
We're back all right now. When thinking about neurochemistry and
and how stories work in the brain, one of the
things that comes up the most on Internet searches about

(31:34):
this is we're coming out of the lab of the
neuroeconomist Paul J. Zach about narrative experience, attention, empathy, and UH,
specifically the hormone oxytocin. Now, oxytocin, unfortunately is one of
those uh, one of those things. I think I mentioned
this in the last episode where sometimes a story about

(31:55):
neuroscience or a story about neurochemistry can become radically over
simplified and misrepresented, especially in the popular press. You may
have seen articles using the you know, the dreaded nicknames,
the love drug, the cuttle chemical, the moral molecule. It
turns out the truth about this, uh, this hormone is
is much more complicated. There's still so much about it

(32:17):
we don't even know yet. It's a complicated story of
what it's doing in our brains and in our bodies.
But it did want to at least take a look
at this angle since there's a lot of stuff out
about it, a lot of stuff out there about it
in in in science media. So what do we know
about oxytocin from existing research? First of all, it's a
molecule that's synthesized in the hypothalamus and mammal brains that

(32:39):
has both physiological and psychological effects. Oxytocin levels can be
sampled in the blood. It does it's produced in the brain,
but it does get into the bloodstream or by matt
measuring patterns of stimulation in the vagus nerve. Classically, it's
associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing, contributing to physiological coal

(33:00):
effects such as uterine contractions before birth and the milk
ejection reflects during nursing. It's also highly associated with mother
infant bonding. But the effects do appear to go beyond this,
and this is where we get into some of the
the more difficult territory. It does appear to play a
vast and complicated role in human social behavior. Uh. Some

(33:21):
of the earliest research on its social effects where that
oxytocin is important in establishing trust and cooperation between humans.
We appear to experience elevated levels of oxytocin when someone
shows us that they trust us, or when somebody does
something kind for us. And these findings really shaped a
lot of what people thought about oxytocin in the past

(33:42):
twenty years. Yeah, but kind of it kind of big
takes on this roll of like this kind of magical
elixir wine that your body kind of squirts out when
it's doing things that are aligned properly with sort of
you know, reproductive child rearing or social health. Yeah, exactly
got this reputation of being you know, quote the moral

(34:02):
molecule or something that or something that even could be
given to people in doses that would make them more
moral or something like that. And it turns out the
truth is much much more complicated than that. Right. But
but of course we see why that narrative is is
so appealing, right, I mean, Lord's got a hero, a hero,
and we love a good narrative that involves, you know,

(34:22):
a pill based solution to something, or in this case,
I think it would be a nasal injection spray solution.
This is even better than a pill. I do love
a good nasal nasal injection solution in a narrative. Though.
I think actually the last thing I read about that
was that there's actually some question about the extent to
which nasal spray dosings of oxytocin really even take effect

(34:43):
within the body, but they're used in a lot of studies.
So uh. But anyway, this guy who's been behind a
lot of the love drug moral molecule vision of oxytocin.
Is this neuroeconomist Paul Zach who's who's written on this
subject a lot, and so his name pops up a
lot when you read about story to helling and the
brain and neurochemistry, and he has done some research on this,

(35:04):
like he's been involved in or at least him and
his colleagues and his lab have been involved in research
about UH, say, subjecting people to narratives and testing blood
oxytocin levels before and after they've they've experienced these narratives.
And what they claim to find is that when you
watch a story that's got a narrative arc, classic example

(35:26):
is like a story of a father talking about his
son who's dying of cancer and and how to relate
to his son, and it like it has building tension
and gets to a climax and then he overcomes his problems.
Narratives like this increase our blood oxytocin levels, and this
indicates that narratives cause oxytocin synthesis within the brain. And

(35:47):
then he links this to all these ideas showing UH
that oxytocin leads to cooperation, causes people to donate more
money to charities, and and all these things like that,
so and so, the general thrust is that narrative can
be used to trigger these neurochemical reactions that cause us
to experience more generosity, to experience more cooperation, to be

(36:10):
more charitable, to trust more, to give of ourselves, and
that this happens naturally when we experience stories and and
he frames this motivation to take a pro social, cooperative,
self sacrificing action after a narrative. But I remember, after
reading about some of this research, assuming the research holds
up and this as we've been saying this, Uh, some

(36:30):
of this research has had plenty of critics, especially in
how it's interpreted. But you know, I also started to
wonder if the inverse would be true, Like if it
is true that watching stories tends to cause these neurochemical
cascades that uh, that do in fact make us more
likely to cooperate or something. Would higher levels of oxytocin
after watching a narrative also make you more motivated to

(36:52):
go beat someone up if the story implied that you should.
I don't know, but I wonder, I mean, you could
I can imagine what it would be the case if
you had if you had a work of say, cinema
that is ultimately inciting violence against some group, or clearly
there have been there have been films of this caliber
exactly right now. This guy writes also a lot about

(37:14):
like their particular details he identifies as being most important,
and narratives that are salient and the that are neurologically salient,
including having rising tensions. So like there's a dramatic arc
where things keep getting you know, there's maybe a mystery
or there's a problem to face, and the tension keeps
getting ratcheted up and up. I'd say this correlates with

(37:35):
conventional wisdom about what good good storytelling is, like you've
got to keep escalating the tension. Yet I do think
it's fascinating that, like we know some of these things
about storytelling, and yet so many professionally told stories are
still so bad and like do not engage the audience
emotionally at all, and do not escalate tension this way,

(37:56):
Like so many movies are just awful stories, and yet
the recipe is pretty simple. Yeah, I mean, it's sometimes
just like a simple story of the simple story, the
nice like trope filled story is just told semi adequately
at the heart of a film. It can make all
the difference, be it be it like a really stylish
film or a film like even like a b film

(38:18):
like some of the a lot of the films that
the you and I go for, like whether it is
watchable or not, well, whether you know it's it's just
it's at all. You know, a film you can engage
with a lot of it hinges on there just being
sort of a basic story structure that is in place,
and of course many films managed to trip that up.

(38:39):
But but but yeah, as long as there's like the
basic story there, you can you can forgive so much.
There was a little turtle named Edna, and every day
Edna swam out to the middle of the pond where
she lived and met her friend, uh, the turtle ed.
But one day she swam out to the middle of
the pond and ed was not there. Where did ed go?
You got a mystery. I don't want to brag, but

(38:59):
I think I've already created more narrative tension than like
than half of the action movies that exist. Yeah, but anyway,
coming back to this and and and questioning some of
what we've been talking about. So from what I've read,
Zach repeatedly stresses in public speeches and popular articles all
the good things about this, I mean, assuming that this

(39:21):
research is somewhat valid, that there are these links between
you know, oxytocin synthesis in the brain and engaging in
narratives that escalate tension and make you identify with the characters.
If there is something to that, he he stresses, this
is a good thing, that it fosters cooperation and trust
and compassion and charity and all that. But as we
mentioned earlier, it's really worth noting that some of this

(39:42):
public messaging that's been going on about oxytocin has been
criticized for oversimplifying the role of oxytocin and human life,
especially in focusing too much or too exclusively on its
role in positive emotions and pro social behaviors, and for
overstating what the research allows us to conclude at this point.
Just one quick example, one of my favorite science writers,

(40:05):
d Young, wrote at least a couple of really good
articles on this subject, including one in the Atlantic, and
and he points out that a more powerful emerging theory
of the role of oxytocin in the brain that we
still don't know a whole lot about it is that
it increases the salience of social information. So it's not
necessarily that it makes us trust or makes us love,

(40:26):
or makes us cooperate. It increases our attention in response
to inputs that are socially relevant. Uh. And this might
seem to cash out the fact that it has been
linked to trust and all these other things, but it's
also been linked to phenomena like outgroup prejudice, willingness to
be dishonest if it would protect the in group, schaden freud, envy,

(40:49):
boasting or boasting or gloating, I mean, all these things
that we don't think of as very good positive social
emotions or behaviors. Yeah, I guess one of the things
that keep him mind is that I think it's true
you can you can take a read on on the
human experience that we are chemicals and uh and a
lot of what we do is governed by by chemical reactions. Right,

(41:11):
But it's not just one chemical and it's not just
one chemical reaction. Well, even when you focus on one chemical,
it turns out that this one chemical has an extremely
strange range of effects that are probably highly context dependent.
You know. Earlier and I think in the last episode,
we were talking about the importance of context on when
a story matters and and what its effects are. Context

(41:32):
is probably very important on what the actual effects of
oxytocina are. Again, I don't want to overstate what we
know now about about this hormone. But if it is
something like uh, like a neurochemical that increases the salience
and increases our openness to and attention to socially relevant
incoming information, that could be very good or very bad. Right.

(41:55):
It might help you pick up on cues that that
allows you to cooperate with somebody, but it also might
make you more socially paranoid and vulnerable to bullying and
afraid that people hate you because of little signals you're
picking up on. And that's just with this provisional idea
that that's what it does. Ultimately, we don't know everything
about what oxytocin does yet, so it is not just
a love drug. It's not a cuddle chemical. Instead, it

(42:18):
seems that it's it's a hormone related to a suite
of powerful socially salient emotions and motivations, So we should
definitely blast it up our noses. This was saying, well,
I mean, you know, it's great for research to continue,
but don't conclude that, you know, you go out and
dose all the dictators with with a nasal spray and
will cure all the world's ills. I absolutely think we

(42:39):
should do solve the dictators of the world with a
nasal spray, but we just have different thoughts about what
is the appropriate substance. So given all those massive caveats,
I'm not quite sure what to make of this last
line of evidence here. But if it is true that
narratives increase levels of body oxytocin, and if it is
true that knoxy that oxytocin increases the salience of socially

(43:01):
relevant information, you can see how that would give narrative
a lot of power as well. Essentially, it opens you
up to being socially receptive to ideas and behaviors, to
to trigger motivations for action, not necessarily good ones, so
maybe they could be good. I think it does bring
us to you know, helps to just drive on the
point that that narrative is something that's deeply ingrained in

(43:22):
how we think, how we behave, and what it is
to be human. UH. To to go back to one
of the UH the the experts that we mentioned in
the first episode episode Carol McGranahan, I she I believe
argues that that essentially, like our species is something like
homo narrative or something to that effect, like that that

(43:44):
that that's how like just ingrained in this this this
need for narratives and this desire to to think about
narratives truly is we're Homo ds X mocking us. But
you know, at the same time, it's kind of like
language in that like if you try to imagine a
human without language, if you engage in in the denial

(44:05):
of language, you're talking about a severe abuse, or at
least a severe negligence. And therefore, to to to deprive
someone of of stories of narrative like it's it is
equal parts unimaginable and monstrous, Like you would have to
be like a diabolical, uh, you know, experiment in which
you've denied somebody that this basis of understanding the world. Yeah,

(44:29):
I think you're absolutely right, and I don't know what
to do about this knowledge. I mean, I feel fairly
convinced that Rosenberg is correct that narratives cloud our understanding
of history, and I guess necessary necessarily of the present
as well. Essentially, thinking of things in terms of stories
prevents us from understanding what's really happening with causes and

(44:50):
effects and reality. I think that's absolutely correct. He's right
about that. And yet I don't know what to do
about it, because I don't think we can we can
beat story impulses out of people. I don't know what
to do other than to just say, like, hey, be
aware of this. Maybe maybe that'll help you. I know
it will help. I think. I think I think awareness
is is the key. And in in a way it's

(45:11):
it's kind of beautiful in this simplicity, right, because this
is ultimately the same thing that has been been been
preached in in in a few different religions, particularly in Buddhism.
You know, the idea that one that is a self
awareness that has to take place, like you have to
be aware that of these various influences on your perception

(45:34):
of of reality. And so if we're aware of the
dangers of narrative as well as the benefits of narrative,
then hopefully we can be in a better place to
properly navigate uh these pitfalls. Here's one piece of practical
advice actually that that does come out of this research.
For me, is if you're worried that a narrative is

(45:55):
working on you, is is working on your brain in
a way that may actually prevent you from, say, understanding
the truth or doing the right thing, or something like that.
You know, if you're worried about a narrative's power over you,
break your attention that this is the most powerful thing
we can do in reaction to a narrative, because the
way the narrative maintains its grip on us is by

(46:17):
holding our attention. If you just force yourself to look
away and think about something else, it's often shocking suddenly
how quickly the spell breaks. Have you ever noticed this,
Like you're talking about focusing on something in your environment, Yeah,
it could be in your environment. I mean narratives take
different forms. So it might be you're reading a book,

(46:38):
it might be you're watching a video or a movie.
It might be somebody's telling you something, whatever it is,
a lot of the power of the narrative is in
keeping your attention wrapped. You are there, and you always
have the power to break. To break that attention, right,
you can look at something else, you can focus on
something else, you can think about something else and see
and see see what happens when you come back, see

(47:01):
if it was worthy of your attention in the first place.
But that reminds me of something Galen Strawson said about,
you know, consider the lilies of the field. I mean,
he didn't say that he's quoting the Bible, but you know,
like in order to go back to, you know, various
meditative practices like focusing on breath, coming back to my breathing,
coming back to something that is not this uh this,

(47:21):
you know, this, this this storm of narratives about past
and future and self and other and coming back to
something as as basic and ultimately largely objective as what
is my breath doing? Is it going in or is
it coming out? What am I watching that bird doing?
You know? I mean that's one of the reasons it's
so calming to to uh, you know, participate in nature,

(47:43):
to to observe nature. I think that's a really good point.
And bringing it back to fictional narratives, do you ever
notice You might not agree, but I feel like there's
a counterintuitive process where I notice and understand the structure
of movie plots better if I pay less close attention
to the movie, Like if I'm sitting with somebody watching

(48:05):
a movie and we're occasionally like commenting or chatting back
and forth, and I'm breaking my attention on the film.
I actually have a clearer picture in my head of
the shape of the story and where the beats are
and all that. And I think that might be because
I'm not I'm not just totally sucked in on the
story and riding along with it. I'm being pulled out
and I'm getting I'm getting a zoomed out view by

(48:27):
doing that. Interesting, I wonder if one could combat the
potentially negative aspects of narrative by just anytime someone tells
you a story, imagine Nicholas Cage in every role, you know,
because uh, I feel like increasingly nothing, nothing brings me
out of a film, like like a good Nicolas. And
I know there's been kind of a Cage renaissance of late,

(48:49):
but still, uh, you know, throw in something that kind
of turns it nuts on its head. It makes it
less of a of of a narrative. I mean, maybe
that's what we do when we say picture picture the
eye's in their underwear, you know, like transformed the narrative
of what's happening into something that is lower stakes. I
don't know. Picture Nicolas Cage in his pyramid in New Orleans. Wait, no,

(49:12):
what what? Oh? I was trying to think, what did
I see him in? It was so great? Recently it
was Mandy Oh, yeah, he was. He was great in that.
But at the same time, um, he was inherently distracted,
you know. Um, I think that was maybe the right
movie for him. But I'm gonna, I'm actually gonna maybe
go against public opinion and say that I wonder if

(49:34):
it might have been a better film with maybe a
slightly more nuanced performance in that role. But I'm still
perfectly happy with what I got, though, made me pull
on my long chainsaw. Robert, All right, Well, there you
have it. I'm sure everyone has something to add on
this one, because we all love stories, we all love
different types stories, and then we're all dealing with with

(49:54):
various forms of narrative and self narrative in our own lives.
So we'd love to hear from you. In the meantime.
If you to check out more episodes of Stuff to
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(50:15):
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(50:36):
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(51:06):
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