From the Vault: The Gods Must Be Counterintuitive

What’s the key to a lasting myth, a captivating religion or a sensational film pitch? Some cognitive scientists and anthropologists argue that the key is a minimally counterintuitive narrative: the right balance of the mundane with just a dash of the unreasonable and unexpected. Join Robert and Joe as they discuss the minimal counterintuitiveness effect. (Originally published August 2, 2018)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to venture into the vault, this time for an
episode from August of This was an episode that I
really enjoyed where we got to talk about some of
the weirder grim fairy tales if I recall, Yeah, and
just like, how counterintuitive does a narrative need to be

(00:27):
to really work as a myth or a fairy tale?
And then at what point did it does it become
too convoluted to really have any staying power in the
in our zide geist. Uh? Yeah, it was a really
fun discussion. Now. I remember after this episode, I really
really wanted us to get in our T shirt store
online to get like a mock up of a cover

(00:47):
for what would be basically Walt Disney's The Donkey Cabbage Is. Uh,
you know what would that look like as a Disney poster?
And we never got to make that happen. But hey,
if you're an artist out there, especially if you're in
I don't know, ooster design or whatever, will you make
us a Walt Disney's The Donkey Cabbage Is poster or
VHS box cover. Oh yeah, and by the way, we

(01:09):
do love listener submitted art. If you're ever inspired to
create art based in an episode or a vault episode
that you hear, or if you're inspired to do so
based on an episode of Invention, feel free to send
it in. If it all possible, we'll use it on
like a future Listener mail episode. You know it's the
landing page art. Yeah, we can't, We can't pay you,
but you'll get all the credit in the Listener Mail episode. Absolutely.

(01:32):
All right, Well, let's venture once more into the vault.
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 Joe McCormick and Robert.

(01:53):
This might be kind of a strange question, but if
I forced you to tell me the whole story Cinderella
on Command, do you think you could tell me that
folk tale? All right, it's not one of my favorite
folk tales, but I believe it goes something like this,
poor lady puts on a magic shoe and becomes a
rich lady. Uh, the end you have? You have missed

(02:14):
some key elements, but I bet you could do it.
Come on you you know the story of Cinderella. Yeah, okay,
so there's some magic mice in there that that talk
and have engaged in some some comic mischief with a cat. Uh.
There's an evil stepmother. Uh. They're evil step sisters. And
I believe in the more uh, you know, classic versions

(02:34):
of the tale, the non Disney versions, there's a little
bit of like nasty uh torture revenge at the end. Yeah,
there's a lot of foot cutting and stuff like that
in the in the classic versions, as told by like
the brothers Grim and Charles Perrault. Uh. These old classic
folk tales that were collected hundreds of years ago often
had very strong, bloody, uh sadistic elements to them, but

(02:58):
they're also intensely memorable. Yeah. But at the same time,
it's you know, you get down to its roots. I
feel like it's a deeply unpleasant story. And then even
in the Disney version, like Nobody Nobody turns into a dragon.
There are no monsters. There's you know a little bit
of magic, but it's it has it has a lot
to compete with with when it comes to other like
major uh you know, you know tent poles fairy tales. Well, Robert,

(03:23):
you are a spoil sport for my examples today. Uh,
come on, you you know the story of Cinderella. You
definitely know the story of Rapunzel. That's got some good
eye gouging and all kinds of hard nous h. But
what I bet you don't know is the story of
the donkey cabbage is a k a. The Donkey Lettuce.
This is true. I was not familiar with this tale
prior to this recording. Also a story recounted by the

(03:46):
brothers grim. It's a classic folk tale that that has
been put into these collections of folk tales, and I
think maybe I'm going to do the horrible, horrible act
of trying to tell it from memory. Okay, stop me
if this is getting on horble, Okay, Donkey cabbages. So
you've got a young huntsman. He goes out one day
into the forest and he comes across an old crone

(04:07):
in the forest, and the old crone is begging for alms.
So he takes pity on her and he gives her
what he can afford. And she likes this. She's like, Wow,
you took pity on me. So I'm gonna give you
some advice. Up ahead in the forest, you're gonna come
across a tree that has nine birds in it, and
those birds are gonna be tearing at a cloak. Now,
what you need to do is shoot those birds, and

(04:29):
then one of them will fall dead, and you need
to take its heart out and eat it. And when
you eat the heart, every time, every time you wake up,
after you eat that bird's heart, you will have a
piece of gold under your pillow. And also hang onto
that cloak, because by putting it on, you can wish
yourself into any place and magically appear there. So the

(04:52):
young huntsman walks a little bit further into the forest.
Sure enough, he comes across the birds. He shoots into
the flock of birds, one of them falls dead. He
takes the cloak from the birds, and he cuts the
heart out of the dead bird and he eats it.
So then he goes home. He goes to sleep. Next day.
Sure enough, there's gold under his pillow, and so he
waits a while accumulating the wealth, right the sleep wealth,

(05:15):
until he's got a good collection of gold. And now
he thinks time to go explore the world. Right, I'm
I'm young, I've got a magic transportation cloak, and I've
got gold under my pillow every night. So he goes
roman all over the place and eventually ends up at
a castle. At the castle, he sees another ugly old Crone,
but not the original crone. This is a different crone

(05:35):
who is in fact a witch. And he sees a
beautiful young woman, and so he asks to be led
into the castle where there is a witch who knows
about his magical items and wants to take them. And
so the witch gets her beautiful young daughter to seduce
the huntsman so that they can steal his magical items.
And so, first of all, the young daughter gets him

(05:55):
to drink and poisonous draft that the witch has created
that will cause him to vomit up the bird heart
that he ate. And so she gets him to drink
that he vomits up the bird heart. She takes it
and she eats it, so now she can get the
Now she can get the gold under the pillow. Second thing,
the young the young beautiful daughter takes him up on

(06:16):
the mountains one day by saying, oh, I wish you
could use that cloak of transportation to take me where
we can gather some gyms up in the mountains, so
they travel there together with the use of the magic cloak,
and then while he is drowsy on the mountain, she
steals the cloak from him and leaves him there. He
comes across some giants on the mountain, and the giants
they discussed whether or not they should kill him, but

(06:38):
eventually they decide, now we'll just leave him here because
eventually the clouds will carry him away. So the young
huntsman gets carried away by the clouds. He ends up
getting deposited in the field of cabbage is. He's hungry
and so he eats some of the cabbage. This cabbage
transforms him into a donkey. He doesn't really like being
transformed into a donkey, but he eats some other cabbin

(07:00):
from a nearby field and transforms back into a human.
He realizes that each of these fields grows cabbage. One
type of cabbage transforms people into donkeys, the other type
transforms donkeys into people. So he takes cabbages of both
kinds and he goes back to the castle. He goes
to the old witch and tricks her into eating some
of the bad cabbage that turns you into a donkey.

(07:21):
The old witch turns into a donkey. He also accidentally
tricks the maid servant and the young daughter who are
at the castle also into eating the donkey cabbage, and
they turn into donkeys. Then he takes the donkeys to
a miller and he tells the miller to basically tells
them to mistreat the old donkey and to be nicer
to the young donkeys. The miller comes back to him

(07:42):
a little while after that and says, well, your old
donkey died, and the other two they're not going to
hang on much longer. But then the huntsman he relents
from his revenge and he says, you know what, I'll
transform those donkeys back into people. So he gives them
the good cabbage that transformed back into humans, and then
the the which his daughter and he get married and
they live happily ever after. Well that is quite a story, Joe.

(08:07):
If it were, I would say it was. It would
be pretty great if it were. If this was a
summary of kind of like a freewheeling like randomly generated
like dungeons and dragons in a series of encounters, you know,
because it has that kind of vibe to it, Like
there's just kind of a seeming randomness to it. The magic,
it feels convoluted, the characters are confusing. The moral message

(08:32):
of the piece is uh is equally lost on me.
Um now, I certainly. Well it's sort of a weird
revenge story. Yeah, but it it really takes this time
getting there. It's kind of it does kind of feel
like a winding Goat trail to nowhere. Uh, it's shaggy
dog story. Yeah. But but at the same time, it

(08:53):
does remind me of some of I mean, I've had
this experience with other folk tales before, where you start
reading it and it seems to be kind of going
in circles and it's making nonsensical choices. But then I
often end up reminding myself, well, I'm not encountering this
story in its original language. I am not a part

(09:13):
of the culture that that it was the intended. Uh,
you know, listener to the to the tale. Like I've
had a similar situation watching some of the old Russo
Finish fairytale epics. Oh, like Jack Frost, the one they
did on Mystery Science Theater three thousand, which is just
the best. Yeah, it's one of my favorite episode. It's
tremendous in the movie itself. That's father measure. I mean,

(09:37):
the movie is beautiful. I mean that if you challenge
anyone who has only seen that MST three K episode
to to look online and find a more pristine, uh
copy of it, because the footage is just beautiful. It's
this is a high budget film at the time. But
the story, yeah, for for for non russo finished viewers,
I guess it it is confusing and you kind of

(10:01):
lose track of like what magical piece of magic is
in play and what's the what's the morality of the
character turning in like having his head turned into the
head of a bear and then he he loses the
head of a bear just for promising to be good
to the outsider. That story just feels like the hell
you go to if you get killed in the Tiger
by a gnome. But it reminds me a bit of

(10:23):
Donkey Cabbages. Well yeah, so, I guess that the big
question that we're we've we've led ourselves to at this
point is like what is what is ultimately the difference?
What what makes one story Cinderella and one story uh
Donkey Cabbages and why does Cinderella stick with us, whereas
donkey cabbage is is just it's just leaking through your
your fingers almost immediately upon grasping it. Yeah, exactly. I mean,

(10:47):
one thing is that Cinderella is not just the the
sort of European tradition grim fairy tale Cinderella. They're Cinderella
type stories all over the world. This is almost one
of those those horror stories you know that seems to
have an ancient prototype that filters into cultures all around
the world or maybe has parallel development because it's themes
are so basic. Um, Cinderella is a widely known, widely distributed,

(11:13):
ineradicable myth. Meanwhile, donkey cabbages is it feels like donkey
cabbages could disappear from the earth and we would all
be poorer for having lost donkey cabbages because I kind
of love donkey cabbages, but nobody not that many people
would notice it was missing, right, Um, it has not
penetrated the culture in the same way that the Cinderella

(11:35):
archetype narrative has. And so the question is why are
some narratives more successful than others, Like you're saying, what
makes one story? Uh, the the the narrative equivalent of
a highly successful insect species and the other one and
endangered species. Why is donkey cabbages endangered while Cinderella is thriving.

(11:56):
It would be a shame if we lost donkey cabbages forever,
But it seems like that's much more plausible of an
outcome than losing Cinderella. Right, Okay, Well, we'll come back
to this question in just a minute. First, let's explore
a related question and see how these two subjects come together.
This question is why do religions emerge and what makes
one religion more successful than another in the same way

(12:18):
that one narrative can be more successful than another. You know,
we've talked before on the show about all of the
various psychological and biological explanations that people think may exist
for the emergence of religions. I think I think it's
safe to say this is not a subject where there
is a settled, known answer, But there are some answers
that seem more plausible than others, right, And I mean,

(12:40):
you have some answers are certainly models for how it
could occur. And I am often inclined to think, well,
it's probably multiple different models at once. Of course, it's
it's hard to just say that, like, this is the
equation for religion in human culture. Yeah, there's probably not
one cause of the emergence of religion, But what are
the dominant physical, biological, psychological factors that make a religion

(13:05):
a thing that exists? Why did how did we get
this way? Now some of you might be wondering what
you were talking about fairy tales, now you're talking about
about religion. You know, what is the connection between Cinderella
and the great religions of the modern world or the
ancient world or the ancient world? I mean, obviously one
of the big ones is that there is any religion
you look at, there is going to be some sort
of narrative or narratives that they're at the heart of

(13:26):
its sacred narratives upon which it is based. Yeah, there
are almost no successful religions that don't have at least
some strong narrative component in them. And uh, and so
obviously narrative might might be the common thread between the
success of folklore and the success of a religion. Yeah,
religions tend to have heroes. They didn't have villains. They
they they are stories. That have just taken on a

(13:50):
grander cultural and personal meaning. So as far as the
emergence of religion explanation goes that, there are a lot
of ideas that have been put forward by scholars over
the years. I know, actually recently, Robert, you talked a
little bit to Barbara J. King about this at the
World Science Festival, like what psychological drives and biological drives
play into the emergence of religion? And I know part

(14:12):
of her answer had to do with with social cohesion
and stuff, right, yeah, and in grieving and bereavement and
sort of the the precursors to grieving and bereavement that
it can arguably be identified in in certain animals, such
as some of our closer primate relatives exactly. Another very
common explanation from evolutionary psychology is the idea of the

(14:35):
hyperactive agency detection. And we've talked about this on the
show before, but the basic idea here is that there's
going to be an evolutionary selection pressure in favor of
people who are over sensitive about the possibility of detecting agents,
meaning beings with intentions like animals or other people from
ambiguous data. So the classic example as you imagine two

(14:58):
different scenarios. One is you hear a twig breaking in
the forest at night and you think it's a tiger,
or you know it's my nemesis, Jeffrey and he's come
for his revenge, and then you raise your guard and
try to get yourself out of the situation safely. The
other scenario is you hear a twig breaking in the
forest at night and you think it's probably nothing. You
just keep collecting firewood, and then I don't know, maybe

(15:19):
break some other horror movie sins. You split up, you
drink some beer, you do all the bad stuff. Those
are the very people who either are either eaten by
tigers are killed by Jeffrey. Right, So the people in
the latter scenario are probably going to be correct more
often right. More often it's probably nothing, But there's a
relatively small benefit to being correct. The person in the

(15:40):
first situation who's afraid hyper aware of what might be
an animal or a person, some kind of intentional agent.
They might waste some time and energy being overly cautious,
but they're less likely to get killed in the off
chance that they're correct about detecting an agent. And so
because this person survives more often the genes that put
them on the hyper active lookout for people or for animals.

(16:02):
These intentional agents, those genes proliferate in the gene pool
and this causes us to read intentions into our environment
at an unusual rate just to be safe. And this
reading of intentions into all kinds of random phenomena lead
us to the belief that there actually our minds controlling
events that we don't understand, in essence to the idea

(16:22):
of God's So that's one interesting possible explanation. There's also
like the meme obedience duality, which basically says there's a
selection advantage for children with brains that tend to tell
them to believe what adults tell them. You know, if
you are warned that it's dangerous to leave the camp
fire at night, more children who believe that warning and

(16:44):
accepted are going to survive to adulthood. And then pigging
backing on this, you'd eventually have adults spreading religious memes
by telling myths, stories, folk tales, and the beneficial belief
in obedience mechanism that causes children to survive after a
warning not to leave the firelight also causes them to
take these stories very seriously, to believe them, to pay

(17:04):
heed to their values. But whatever the actual biological and
psychological reasons for the emergence of religion, it leads to
this question that we asked a minute ago of why
some religions are more successful than others. I mean, there
are tons of religions throughout human history that have been
invented and now they're extinct, and very few people ever

(17:25):
followed them. Right, So they winted that the ancient Egyptian religion,
why is it? Why has it not survived in a
in a real tangible sense in the modern age? Why
did it not even travel well beyond Egypt in its
own day? But even it was relatively successful last time.
I mean, think about all the variations on it, or
all of the other types of mythologies that got started

(17:46):
but never really went anywhere. I think of all the
cults that emerge that we know relatively little about. I
think of all the heresies that were that were squashed
out before they could be really take a name beyond
heresy exactly. I think because you think about how we
refer to them, we don't even refer to them as religions.
They were just upstarts that were destroyed by the more

(18:10):
popular and powerful models of belief exactly. So the question
we want to look at today is could the variable
success of new religions have anything to do with the
question we were asking a minute ago why some folk
tales and legends are more successful than others, Because, Robert,
as you mentioned a minute ago, what religions and and

(18:31):
folklore have in common is narrative. Almost all of the
world's religions past and present have major narrative elements. They're
based on stories. Um So, even though there are other
components to religions, we know there's metaphysical incentives, a sense
of meaning, social inclusion, and all that stuff. Since the
narrative element is so common, wouldn't it be reasonable to

(18:54):
guess that part of what makes a successful religion is
containing successful stories, the right kind of stories that you know,
made me feel a little bit good and also makes
me feel a little bit bad and just the right way. Right,
A good religious narrative, it hurts so good. Uh So
this this could be wrong. I mean, maybe a narrative
is not actually a major element, but I think it's

(19:15):
a very reasonable starting assumption. And if this is the
case that the success of a narrative plays into the
success of a religion? What makes a story that leads
to a successful faith? Maybe we should take a quick
break and then explore more when we come back. Alright,
we're back. So we've asked the question what sort of narrative,

(19:36):
what kind of story is going to make a religion successful?
Or just make a story of a fairy tale successful?
In general? Like, what what are the elements that are
going to get guarantee that it resonates and remains in
human culture? Yeah, I guess maybe it makes sense to
start with narratives and then see how this applies to religions. Um,
so it's time to explore. Basically, I would say the

(19:58):
key idea of this episode the idea of what's come
to be known as minimally counterintuitive elements of belief. Now
we can't know for sure what makes one religion or
one story more successful than another, and it is probably
due to multiple factors rather than just one. But this
minimally counterintuitive elements paradigm, I think is a really clever answer,

(20:19):
offering what I guess is an important part of the
picture of the comparative success of stories. Narratives and belief structures.
There have been a ton of papers investigating this over
the years, a lot of studies, but I thought we
should examine the issue through one one important study from
the year two thousand six, and that's a paper published
in Cognitive Science by Aura norn Zion's got A tran

(20:43):
Jason Faulkner, and Mark Schaller called Memory and Mystery the
cultural selection of minimally counterintuitive narratives. So I want to
read a quote from their introduction starts to set the
scene for why memory would be a relevant issue. Here
the author's right quote. Of the many ecological and psychological
factors that influence the extent to which any such narrative

(21:04):
achieves cultural success, Mnemonic resilience maybe one of the most important.
Memorability places necessary constraints on the cultural transmission of narratives
and ideas in oral traditions that characterize most of human
cultures throughout history. A narrative cannot be transmitted and achieve

(21:25):
cultural success unless it stands the test of memory. So,
in other words, in the telephone game of belief, you've
got to have a core story that is going to
remain more or less intact with each retelling in each embellishment. Yeah,
and I mean part of the problem is that most
of human history, most people have not had access to

(21:45):
any recording method for narratives. Most people throughout the history
of the world have been illiterate and have transmitted stories
orally by hearing them told and then retelling them to others.
So if a story cannot be accurately remembered, that story
doesn't really have much of a chance of survival, right, right,

(22:06):
I mean, I'm reminded. I want to in one of
our recent episodes that dealt with writing, I want to
say there was one description that uh discussed writing as
an ability to like freeze thought or to in some
way you have to to to to freeze thought in time,
And that's exactly what it's doing. When otherwise, Yeah, these
stories would be perpetually changing. Yeah, and of course I

(22:28):
think there there is plenty of evidence that stories do
change through transmission in in oral cultures, right, I mean,
this happens all the time. Every time you tell the story,
you make little changes to it, and over time those
changes accumulate. But how does a story become resilient, How
do its key elements become set well enough that it
can survive the sort of changing landscape of of forcing,

(22:53):
of of being stored in human minds alone and being
transmitted through human retelling alone. Well, there's the old quote, right,
it don't mean it's sing if it if it ain't
got that swing right at this what you know, there's
gotta be this that, there's gotta be that element that
just really stands out right. It makes it stick. Um,
And I think that probably seems like a no brainer

(23:13):
on the surface, right, Memorable stories are going to resonate
and survive. I can't help but think of the modern
elevator pitch idea and all of this. You know, like
you you're in the elevator. You've got you got two
sentences sell me on your script. You gotta you gotta
phrase it in a memorable way. Yeah, so what do
you say? Say Jaws with pause and they're like, that's brilliant.
What does that mean? It's like ku jo, I guess
you know, you took this thing that I was familiar with.

(23:36):
It's just become mundane in my my world of cinema.
But you put a twist on it. You put this
there's there's this new idea and that's what's standing out
in my mind. Plus it rhymes, well, I would certainly
not discount the power of rhyming. Rhyming poetry might be
selected not just because it sounds good, but because it's
a memory ating device, right, And this can certainly be
a factor, you know we're talking about Sometimes the fairy

(23:58):
tale loses something in trent relation. Sometimes it just loses
the rhyme, Like these are the connections between words that
make a fanciful story makes sense. But anyway, that the
broader point here is that the contents of our narratives,
our folk tales, and our religions are influenced by the
underlying capabilities and biases of our brains. So just one

(24:21):
crazy example of this, all other things being equal, you
probably would not expect a religion that offered a reward
in the afterlife for good behavior of being thrown into
an ocean of spiders. And there's a reason for that.
People have enough of a natural dislike of spiders that
this type of religion would not be successful. The human

(24:41):
brain is not fertile soil in which to grow that myth, right,
it just naturally grows some types of content better than others,
based on natural predispositions, capabilities, and biases of the brain. Right, So,
the authors are pushing a hypothesis in this paper about
one possible relationship between memory cognition and the success of

(25:03):
narratives like religious myths. They write, quote, we hypothesize that
narratives combining mostly intuitive concepts with a minority of counterintuitive
ones enjoy a memory advantage and as a result, achieve
cultural success. Such a m c I template. An MCI
stands for minimally counterintuitive, a little bit counterintuitive, not totally counterintuitive.

(25:29):
Such an MCI template maybe no accident. Indeed, we propose
that it may be a recipe for cultural success compared
to narratives that fit other templates, for example, no counterintuitive
concepts at all, or many counterintuitive concepts. Those that are
minimally counterintuitive maybe especially memorable, and therefore more likely to

(25:50):
achieve cultural stability. All Right, So it's not a situation
where it's like going to the movie, right, the movie
is not just an accurate depiction of real life. That
would be so boring. Right, But it's also not just
so bonkers, that is just complete surrealism, which granted can
be great. Give but but but it's that middle ground
that's where you're gonna find the really successful films, right,

(26:13):
It's where every most everything is pretty mundane, but there's
there's some element that's out of out of whack, there's
a mysterious stranger that's not what they seem, you know.
I often think about how there are there are versions
of this that work at various levels of narrative that
contribute to their how aesthetically pleasing they are. One thing
I think about is the realism of dialogue characters. Sometimes

(26:36):
people say, I love the way that characters in this
movie talk how people really talk. The characters in that
movie did not talk how people really talk. If they
actually talked how people really talked, you would be so bored.
You would think the movie was terrible. People do not
talk in deliverable dialogue that drives a plot. What you
probably mean is they talked in an unnatural way that

(26:59):
was just bare really unnatural enough to be interesting, but
not so unnatural that it felt false, the way bad
dialogue in a movie often does. And of course it's
easy to to just to to go to examples that
have like a specuative element that's thrown in, like everything
is normal, except one character is magic. But but it
can also work in other ways to right, where there's
an inversion of of character, like the you know, the

(27:23):
village priest is actually evil as opposed to good, and
you know, whatever the expectation might be like that the
character that is that is expected to behave in one
way morally behaves another way. Yeah, aesthetically pleasing narratives are
surprising enough, but they can't be too surprising otherwise you

(27:44):
just stop being able to appreciate them as narratives. Right,
you want to keep with it. It's like they say,
you want to keep one foot on the ground, right,
you don't want to keep both feet on the ground.
And likewise you don't want both feet just floating free.
So but in this uh, we've been using the idea
loosely here for a moment. What in the literature itself
makes a concept intuitive or counterintuitive? And so the author's

(28:08):
right quote. As several psychologists and anthropologists have noted, the
key is whether the concept is consistent with or violates
ontological assumptions about the properties of ordinary objects. So they're
going with this idea of ontologies, and all that means
is how things normally work, right. Um. The one trope

(28:28):
I'm instantly reminded of is just the the with a
heart of gold trope, you know, because there's she's a
prostitute with a heart of gold. He's a prostitute with
a heart of gold. Their assassins with hearts of gold. Uh,
you know that's the you see that spend time and
time again, right um? Or one of my favorite recent ones,
even though I never actually watched the show. I just

(28:49):
really love the trailers. He's not just a pope, he's
a young pope. Popes aren't supposed to be young, I know,
and I want to find out just how young is
this pope. He's a baby, baby pope. I'd watch baby Pope.
Actually that's not a bad idea for they had Boss Baby.
Um what does boss Baby? I don't I don't know,
I just know it exists. Um. You have that movie

(29:10):
where the horse played professional football. I don't know what
you're talking about, Like, was it like Airbud? It was, yeah,
basically the Airbud trope. Okay, but this was a horse
that was, due to some sort of loophole and the
rules was able to play a professional football and maybe
was college football. So This is not exactly what the
author noted and talking about, but it's pretty close. So

(29:31):
they're basically a few different types of intuitive ontologies that
govern our basic understanding of the world at several levels,
and the author's list for example, our intuitive theory of physics.
This is the ontology of our basic understanding of how
objects and energy work. This is the intuitive theory you
used to conclude that a brick will sink in water

(29:52):
and not float, or to conclude that a falling snowflake
won't land with enough force to pierce a hole in
your skull. Right, then you've got the intuitive theory of biology,
and this is our basic understanding of life forms. This
one will intuitively tell you that trees do not speak French,
and sharks can't walk up onto the beach and bite
you off your towel, and snails don't live to be

(30:14):
thirty seven million years old. And then you've got your
theory of mind. And this ontology tells you that, for example,
other people can have both true and false beliefs, and
they can't read your mind, but they can see where
you're looking with your eyes, and they can imagine what
you're thinking based on external clues, And if you break
any of these theories, you instantly find yourself dealing with

(30:36):
narrative elements right now. Oh yeah, you break physics, theory
of physics, and then you have superpowers, you have miracles,
you you you break the theory of biology and you
get magical creatures and immortal bodies, and you break theory
of mind and you get things like psychics. Yeah, it's
almost It's kind of telling, isn't it that anytime you
come up with an idea of breaking one of these
intuitive ontologies, you instantly have what sounds like a concept

(30:59):
for a story. Isn't that odd? Now? The author is
right that there are some minor cultural differences in how
these ontologies work, like different cultures sometimes have slightly different
beliefs about theory of mind or biology. But then again,
some bottom level elements of these theories appears so early
in development and are found in so many different cultures
that it looks like they might be more sort of

(31:19):
hard coded instincts from primitive parts of the brain more
so than culturally conditioned belief And the examples that the
authors give or studies that have found evidence that babies
as young as four months old already show expectations based
on some core aspects of our theory of physics. For example,
they've got the idea of a solid object, and they

(31:39):
clearly do not expect one solid object to be able
to pass through another solid object. And they also do
not expect that a solid object can be in more
than one place at a time. Yeah, I mean children
have an innate number sense. Each one is a natural Euclidean,
born to navigate a three dimensional world of fixed and
movable objects. The words. We start utilizing geometry before we

(32:02):
can even name things. We don't understand wall or cap,
but we already can think in geometric terms. For instance,
kids will use geometric clues to navigate through rooms, uh
and uh, And given all the means of navigating their environment,
they're most likely to use lengths of walls in a
room to remember where a toy is hidden, rather than
color or decoration. We're also born within anate understanding of

(32:25):
basic physical laws. Only adults believe in magic. Well, toddler
will see right through all of the supernatural. There was
actually any m my T study that even found out
that young children understand that teleportation is not feasible. Yeah,
I mean, it makes you wonder how much of our
understanding about the world, like our coded, our coded knowledge
about how things work is actually instinctual, like a kid

(32:48):
would know it without ever having to observe anything. Yeah,
like just sort of the basics of gravity, you know,
I mean that is the environment that we have evolved
to thrive it. Yeah, that's going to be an interesting
study when for the first time, when children are brought
up in space in microgravity environments. Though actually that might
be a really bad idea because that could disrupt development

(33:08):
and everything like that. But just assuming it were to
happen somehow, you'd wonder, would those kids have an intuitive
understanding of how gravity worked back on Earth? Would it
be that built in? Also, the authors of this paper
right that preschool aged kids in most cultures already have
a common set of biological intuitions. For example, they know
that making superficial alterations to an animal doesn't alter what

(33:31):
kind of species it is, So they know that you
can't just like put a put a carrot on a
horse's head and make it a unicorn. It's still a horse. Also,
children from preschool age typically have a basic theory of mind.
The classic example is understanding that other people can have
false beliefs. Kind of a profound thing to realize. Do
you remember realizing that, Robert, I mean it might have

(33:53):
come from having younger siblings, you know. I feel like
that that that might be the area where those those
kind of ideas are initially introduced. You know, where you're
you're told you're younger sibling does not know not to
touch this hot surface, you know, and then therefore there
might be some false belief baked into their understanding of
their immediate surroundings. Yeah, I wonder well. Anyway, so the

(34:16):
authors observed that despite how universal or near universal these
beliefs are, our folk tales and religious mythologies are full
of stories and images that violate these ontologies. We were
just talking about this. Anytime you you just say something
that violates the ontology, immediately it sounds like a story
and not just like a concept. But you want to
tell a story about it. Frogs that can talk, people

(34:39):
that can pass through walls like ghosts, or people who
can read minds or otherwise have knowledge of that they
couldn't access. Nasty Old Richmond, who are capable of change
from Christmas, I can't. I kept thinking of that one
in the research. You know, Christmas Carol and Scrooge. Oh,
I'm kind of a Christmas Carol lover. Actually, Oh, I mean,
you can't help but love it. But I did keep

(35:01):
thinking of it. You know. It's like, ultimately, is is
it just this story where the the the one area
of inversion, the one area that is um that's counterintuitive
is that Scrooge was capable of turning his life around
and changing, whereas in many cases reality would seem to
indicate that it's the opposite with old, nasty, rich people.

(35:22):
I'm just throwing that out there. I'll probably come back
to that idea again. Well let's let's get there. I mean,
so the question is, why do so many popular narratives
like mythology, folk tales and so forth, why do they
always violate our ontologies? Why is that just intuitive to
us at this point that oh, if you say a
frog that can talk, that's a story. And why do

(35:43):
almost all of our most popular stories do stuff like that?
The idea of realistic narratives is actually kind of an
unusual thing. And in the history of successful folk tales
and narratives, Yeah, I mean I remember in uh, in
creative writing classes where you know they would drive home.
Would just because it really happened doesn't mean it's interesting, right,
which which is is true. But I think one of

(36:05):
the most obvious answers would be novelty, right. I mean,
we we we we create the idea of the black
swan even before we know what it acts, that it
actually exists, um and and and mentioning that I'm touching
on NASA Nicholas Talb's black Swan theory, UM, the idea
that major black Swan events are the norm uh and

(36:28):
uh and and also the problem of induction induction here.
So I wonder if we're drawn to these novel ideas
because human existence kind of demands that we both move
forward with expectations based on the known world, but with
an openness to the possible inversions that shake everything up. So,
you know, it basically comes back to the tiger in
the grass and the high grass and when and how

(36:48):
we're going to judge the sound of a snapping twig. Oh.
I didn't expect us to come back and make a
connection between minimally counterintuitive ideas and UH and the hyperactive
agency detection, but I can see a through line there
and I also can't you know, I can't help it,
but think about the the idea that inversions end up
highlighting the reality. Right, So by having a story in

(37:11):
which Scrooge is able to turn his life around, it
just kind of also drives home that most people don't,
you know, by having somebody that acts heroically, like truly heroically,
it's kind of a reminded that, well, most people are
not heroes and would not do this. It's not how
you see how things could be otherwise that you recognize
how things are. Yeah, but you have another possible answer here,

(37:31):
Oh well, yeah. So the authors here are drawing on
a bunch of research over the years that's indicated a
couple of things. First of all, there is the indications
that sometimes it appears that people are better able to
remember counterintuitive ideas than intuitive ideas. So you tell somebody
a frog that talks, they'll remember that item better than

(37:55):
you saying a frog that jumps, right. A frog that
jumps is not memorable. Right. But then again, in recent
years before the study, other research has made it clear
that there there's some pressure coming from the other side
that while some counterintuitive content makes ideas and narratives more
transmissible and easier to remember. There's also a limit to

(38:16):
this benefit. Uh So some examples of this balance, like
ghosts and spirits are one of the most popular narrative
subjects in history, but they've basically got the properties of
a person except somewhat counterintuitive, Like ghosts have the powers
that humans do not have, like moving through walls, but
otherwise they behave is quote ordinary intentional agents. Well with ghosts,

(38:40):
you guys, you can make the argument that, uh, any
of like the ghostly details, like that's all just fluff.
The basic mechanics are just it is a person without
physical substance. Yeah, exactly. Another example the author's site of
how people tend to limit the counterintuitive features of of
things they believe in is that research by Barrett and

(39:01):
Kyle in nineteen found quote people spontaneously anthropomorphize God in
their reasoning, even if doing so contradicts their stated theological beliefs.
So while they don't, you know, they don't think that
God is like a normal person, when they don't remember
to limit themselves from doing so, they tend to think

(39:21):
of God as a normal person, but just with great
supernatural powers. And these types of limits on the wildness
of supernatural elements also seemed to be present in existing
cultural narratives. Just one example, an existing study of Ovid's
metamorphosis from Kelly and Kyle in nineteen eighty five found
that even though there were a lot of magic transformations

(39:42):
of people and things, it was much more common to
transform a person into, say, an animal, than it was
to transform them into an an inanimate object. That was
sort of less of a violation of their ontology. But
this reminds me of the children's books Sylvester in the
Magic Pebble I wish I may have mentioned on the
show before. Um it's an award winning children's book about

(40:03):
a donkey who obtains the magic pebble, and the magic
pebble allows you to grants your wishes essentially, and the
donkey ends up being turned into a stone, and then
the pebble falls and rolls away from him and he
stuck as the stone. Yeah, it's and it's it's kind
of a traumatic story to read. It's really good, but

(40:24):
I remember reading it to my son when he was
he was really young, and I feel like it was
difficult to get across this idea that a donkey turned
into rock not not a rock that looks like a donkey,
but just a rock that looks like a rock. Whereas
stories of people turning into animals, donkey, cabbages, Yeah, yeah,
those make I feel like those were more easily transferred

(40:46):
to him, you know, like he was able to buy
into those stories a lot easier. Where this idea of
the pebble turning the donkey into just a rock, and
then somehow the rock was still conscious of everything it was.
It was kind of a confusing magic to try and
relate it to him. Yeah, I mean, I'm there with you.
Like turning into a donkey that makes sense. Turning into
a rock, I don't know. Uh So, The authors write

(41:08):
how Barrett and Niehoff in two thousand one tested how
well people could remember and retell stories, and these stories
were broken down by how much they contained objects or
ideas in three different categories. You've got intuitive, normal stuff,
intuitive but bizarre this is weird stuff that doesn't violate ontologies,
and then counterintuitive stuff that does violate ontologies. And they

(41:30):
found that after retelling the story through three generations of transmission,
people remembered and passed on counterintuitive ideas better than simple
intuitive ones, and after three months, participants could still recall
minimally counterintuitive elements better than other elements. And this delay
is an important part because how do stories get passed
on in the wild. Right When you retell a story

(41:53):
to somebody, you don't usually tell it right after you
heard it, Right, You've had some time to ruminate on
it and embellish it, both intentionally but also just through
the flaws of our memory systems. Yeah, memory mechanisms. I mean,
we've talked recently in UH, for example, the Illusory Truth episodes,
about the ways that we edit our memories just by

(42:13):
remembering them, right, And these are memories of things that
actually happened as opposed to stories. I'm reminded of Carl
Sagan writing about how how quickly an historical account became
a tale of ancient high magic, like while the actual
historic individuals were still alive. Yeah, that came up in

(42:33):
the story. I don't remember it was. I think it
was a European UH account. I don't remember. We went
into this in I think Our Ancient Aliens episodes. But
he was talking about just how unreliable of many of
these folk tales or fairy tales and legends could be
in trying to find some nugget of the fantastic, because

(42:54):
they could very well just be completely embellished from a
very mundane incident just in the course of a decade
or or thereabouts. Right So, given what seemed to be
the case from the existing literature, where people are more
likely to remember things that are somewhat counterintuitive than they
are to remember just totally mundane intuitive things, and at
the same time are seem less likely to retell stories

(43:18):
that are just full of counterintuitive stuff, you know, crammed
the gills with it. Is it the case that there's
a cognitive selection pressure in favor of m C I
are minimally counterintuitive elements and stories? Are we more likely
to remember and transmit ideas that violate our intologies a
little bit but don't violate them too much? Is there

(43:40):
a sweet spot for the kind of narrative that makes
it through our brains to the next generation of retelling
and gets retold. Now, one thing that the author's wonder about,
and you've got to wonder about, is if the hypothesis
is correct that people are more likely to remember minimally
counterintuitive things, Why don't minimally counterintuitive elements just dominate successful

(44:02):
cultural narratives even more than they do. Like many popular myths, legends,
and folk tales contain these elements, but they're outnumbered by
mundane intuitive concepts. I mean think about for example, stories
in the Bible. Stories in the Bible are actually mostly
mundane if you read them, they're they're you know, long,
mundane narratives with occasional punctuations of counterintuitive elements and magic

(44:27):
and stuff like that. Now, of course, there are a
few books and passages in the Bible, such as you know, Revelations,
Apocalypse is various prophetic visions that are sort of crammed
with bizarre and counterintuitive imagery and stuff. But most of
the time the basic stories are mostly mundane. Yeah. No, no,
even with something like the Book of Revelation, we we

(44:48):
do have to stop and you know, pause and wonders like,
just how counterintuitive is it really? Because at least on
face value, yeah, I mean face value for the the
average modern day individual picking up Book of Revelation, yeah,
it just seems like crazy town, right, But we do
have to remember the Book of Revelation is a symbolic
work from the first century CE, and it's a work
of apocalyptic literature. So uh, it would have followed particular

(45:12):
conventions of this style, conventions that would have been better
known and understood by the intended reader, and the intended
reader in this situation would have been very much an
insider as opposed to just your average Joe Christian. And
we touched on this. So the same situation with the
highly symbolic work of Hieronymous Bosh before. You know, if

(45:33):
you look at it and you think, well, this is
just bizarre, this is crazy. Clearly this artist was just
on drugs. But the closer you look, you realize, well, okay,
maybe some of that is true. But but on the
other hand, you do have a lot of of symbols
that are speaking to a different viewer, and you were
not the intended audience totally. So even in some of

(45:54):
these cases, it might be that if you could, if
you could sort of decode the meaning of all of
these revelations, that it might actually sort of key out
to a more mundane kind of message that has some
minimally counterintuitive suggestions in it, even though the face value
imagery is pretty off the wall. But of course, another

(46:14):
example would be standard folk tales like the stories of
the brothers Graham a Little Red Riding Hood is actually
a mostly mundane narrative. There are only two really counterintuitive elopments.
You've got a talking wolf and then you've got a
person who can survive being eaten alive by a wolf
and come out of the stomach alive. Those are the
two magic parts. The rest of it is a normal
story with intuitive elements, and so the authors of the

(46:37):
study think that maybe we should think of each narrative
as something like a single unit of transmission, rather than
looking at individual elements within the story to see how
many counteract counterintuitive ideas the story elements contain. You think
about how many does the story as a whole contain,
Because you don't usually tell part of a story. Maybe

(46:58):
the point of a story is to get transmitted as
a whole, and so the optimal level of counterintuitiveness might
function at the level of the whole narrative rather than
individual ideas within it. So it's possible that the narrative
itself as a whole might need to be minimally counterintuitive,
not just stuff within it being minimally counterintuitive. It needs

(47:19):
to violate our ontologies a little bit, but it can't
contain too many of these things, or maybe then it
becomes the donkey cabbages. And you know, once you start
piling up all the donkey cabbages stuff, I mean, who
gives a dang like it? Just it's sort of makes
you stop caring, right, Right, it just become too many
fantastic elements and there's nothing I can relate to, right,

(47:40):
So how do you test to see whether this is true? Well?
The authors put together a couple of studies. The first
study was to look at lists of minimally counterintuitive ideas
compared with intuitive ideas and to see how those lists
fared in recall, and then the second one. The second
study was to look at existing folk tales and to
see how well compared narratively minimally counterintuitive folk tales did. So,

(48:03):
the researchers put together lists of two word ideas, some
of which were intuitive, some of which were minimally counterintuitive.
Here's an example, closing door. How do you like that?
That's pretty normal? Right, thirsty cat, four legged table, confused student?
These are all you know? This is the right world, right,

(48:24):
Everything's okay? How about thirsty door? Oh now it's getting
a little poetic. Confused table, mischievous coat, impatient fist, contrived dog. Yes,
these are minimally counterintuitive for sure, And so the researchers
tested how well group of ninety four students could remember

(48:45):
stories like this uh in immediate recall three minutes after
studying a list, and then also in um and then
also in a later test after a week, and the
results were that in immediate recall three minutes after studying
the list of entirely intuitive items were actually remembered best,
just kind of strange like the ones that were just

(49:06):
all normal concepts were remembered the best of all. But
delayed recall was a different story. After a week, there
was massive overall degradation of memory, but the lists that
people could recall the best were the ones that had
a minimal number of minimally counterintuitive elements in them. So
after a week, if the list was all intuitive ideas,

(49:26):
people remembered it less. If the list contained equal numbers
of intuitive and counterintuitive ideas, or contained all counterintuitive ideas,
people remembered it less. What people remembered best after one
week where lists that had a minority of weird monster
concepts in them but were otherwise unremarkable. And note that
this is for lists, not individual concepts. And this seems

(49:48):
to partially back up the idea that this works at
the function of a of a narrative as a whole
instead of just individual ideas that you would remember as
a single concept or object or word phrase. And then
in the second study, they tested a survey of folk
tales from the collections of the brothers grim and they
counted numbers of counterintuitive elements that they contained and compared

(50:11):
that to how successful and well known these folk tales were.
So like, if you count all the stuff in the
Donkey Cabbages, you'll get a pretty big number, versus if
you count all the stuff in Cinderella, you'll get a
smaller number. And so they made a chart basically of
all these stories and compared how successful the story was
as measured by how familiar test subjects were with them

(50:33):
and how many Internet hits they got about these stories
versus how many counterintuitive elements were in the stories, and
they got the same kind of result. They found that
for the less memorable folk tales, as measured by familiarity
and the Internet results, there was a pretty flat distribution.
Uh there were mci tales, tales that were highly intuitive,
tales that were as bonkers as the donkey cabbages or worse.

(50:56):
But for the more memorable tales, the really successful ones,
there was a clustering around a small number of counterintuitive elements,
and that means that the m CI narrative template seems
somewhat validated. Those that had penetrated the culture more deeply,
on average were the ones that had a small number
of counterintuitive elements. And in their discussion, the authors proposed

(51:19):
that mc I narratives are more successful partially because they're
easier to remember as a whole, and they write, quote,
these deviations involve evocative, minimal counterintuitions that are quote relevant mysteries.
They are closely connected to background knowledge, but do not
admit to a final interpretation. As a result, they are

(51:40):
attention arresting and inferentially rich, and therefore encourage further cognitive
processing and multiple interpretations over time that facilitate the cognitive
stabilization of narratives. And I thought that was interesting because
it made me think of a discussion we were having
in the episode about finite and infinite games and the
religious scholarly work by James P. Carse about the idea

(52:03):
of of mythology and um, whether a mythology can survive
if it is made finite, or if a mythology is
is only kept alive by sort of like the the
unending tendency to change it and and keep working on it,
to keep asking questions. Yeah, I mean, ultimately I think
that is how that is how the stories stay relevant

(52:25):
without having to just like bend and break your interpretation
of them. I mean, I think they may be onto
something here with the idea that stories are can only
be properly mysterious and arresting to us and keep prodding
our brains if they have the right balance of mundane
content and confusing content, right, I mean, like, if if

(52:48):
something is just totally unfamiliar and unrelatable, then you you
don't even have a context in which to frame questions
or which in questions can feel like they mean something.
But if a story is totally mundane, you don't end
up asking questions. All right, don't not know. We're going
to take a quick break, but we'll be right back.
Thank thank you, thank you. All right, we're back. So,

(53:10):
if the authors of the study we just looked at
are correct, that minimally counterintuitive narratives, narratives that have some
weird counterintuitive content but not too much. If those types
of narratives are key to the success of folk tales
and mythology that spread throughout oral cultures that have to
be remembered and transmitted, is it also true that modern

(53:32):
literate societies, or even ancient literate society, societies in which
stories can be written down before they're transmitted, that those
societies make room for more highly counterintuitive narratives or for
more mundane, totally intuitive narratives. Does that make sense what
I'm asking like, if if that's the sweet spot for
oral culture transmission, does writing change what type of mythology

(53:56):
becomes salient? Well, we come back to this idea that
writing freezes thought right, and nothing frees his thought, And
this goes back to some of the ideas of James P.
Cars as well. Nothing is going to freeze thought like
sacred literature. Yeah, And I actually found out a wonderful
paper on some of this um It is titled uh

(54:17):
An Alternative Account of the Minimal Counterintuitives Effect, and it
was by by cognitive scientist Muhammad afzal Opal And this
was published in two thousand ten in cognitive systems Research,
and he argues that that essentially we have WE WE WE.
You can look at m c I in two different ways.
You have concept based m c I, and that's where

(54:40):
just the concept itself is resonating, right, because it's it's
a it's a donkey that talks, etcetera. Right. But then
you can also look at it as context based, and
he makes the case that counterintuitive concepts lose their advantages
as they become widely accepted in part of the culture.
Oh interesting, So if I introduce to you a new

(55:01):
counterintuitive concept, you might be more likely to remember that
than if I just say, like a ghost, which is
a counterintuitive concept, but you're familiar with it, right, Or
a vampire. You know, it's like, I know that I'm
bored with vampires. Give me something with a little more
jazz to it, right, But if I say a turtle
that drinks human blood, people are probably going to remember that. Yeah. Therefore,

(55:23):
he argues that ideas with enhanced counterintuitiveness obtain transmission advantages,
and this results in a ratcheting up of counterintuitiveness that
may help explain cultural innovation and dynamism. Interesting, So this
would be bigger than just religions. This would be for
ideas in general and narratives in general. Right, though he

(55:43):
is particularly interested in religion. That's like one of his Uh,
that's one of of Upaul's areas of expertise is cognitive
science of religion. And he he says that quote it
also allows us to account for the development and spread
of complex cultural ideas, such as the overly counter intuitive
religious concepts, including the Judeo Christian Islamic conceptions of God.

(56:05):
Does that mean like overly counterintuitive because not anthropomorphic enough? Um? Yeah?
And just I mean I think part of it also
comes back to examples like revelation. You know, you have
just to to a modern readers, just completely counterintuitive. What
does it mean? Why is it there? What is it
supposed to be saying to me? Part of the problem
is that it's sacred, right, it's it's it's it's frozen

(56:26):
in time. It's no longer speaking to the people. Uh,
the specific individuals who would have who would have understood
it without a bunch of you know, theological dissection. Interesting. Uh. So,
Paul writes the context based view posits that religious concepts
such as God's ghost, angels, and devil have become maximally

(56:47):
counterintuitive in the barn and Boyer sense because they have
had to survive in the minds of an adaptive and
innovative population of human beings over a long period of time.
In light of the model we develop here, one should
not be surprised to see maximally counterintuitive concepts to form
a significant part of religious beliefs. Indeed, it would be

(57:08):
surprising if they did not maximally counterintuitive. So stuff that, um,
because it's hard to get your counterintuitive juice is flowing
anymore because you've been so exposed to ideas like spirits
and ghosts that they want to offer you visions that
that tell you, like, you're not going to get a

(57:28):
weirder idea than this. Yeah, I mean you get into areas.
Uh and this this is me commenting on his material.
He didn't make the specific point, but you know, stuff
like the transfiguration of Christ and the Holy Trinity and
these kind of complex ideas of of what what is
the nature of God? You know, right is it's it's
built into it. That's that it's a mystery and you

(57:49):
can't understand it, right, and then added to that too
that you have you know, these ancient religions are I
often use this analogy for for Hinduism, Like, Hinduism is
not this one product. It is this well of time
and culture with all of these varying ideas and different
interpretations of gods that are then uh, spun around and
used in different ways. And you do see that in

(58:11):
Christian traditions as well. Hinduism is a world of belief
and layer upon layers. It's like an archaeological dig Yeah.
But then of course that raises the question of modern religions,
right yeah, And so I would wonder if the m
c I hypothesis is correct as an explanation for the
success of religious narratives. Shouldn't it be that we see

(58:32):
unusual religions emerging in a mostly literate world where things
get written down a lot, and those religions have more
permission to be the donkey cabbages of religion, Right? Well,
I mean it, if you can write it down, you
can make it sacred, and you can say nobody touched this. Uh.
And one of the one of the points that to
Paul makes about this, he compares it to emergent religions,

(58:55):
and how you have you have new religions that have emerged,
and they generally have an uphill battle because they're they're
having to go up against the established religions that have
in you know, in many cases centuries upon centuries, thousands
of years of history, all these sacred texts, and somebody saying,
you don't alter this. This is the text and uh,

(59:16):
and this is the accepted interpretation of it. And if
you tweak it in any way, well that's heresy and
we will punish that. Uh. And but then he points
out what you end up with with something like say,
the Church of Scientology emerging, getting enough power, and what
what do they turn around and do they kind of
they make their own sacred text and they say, you

(59:36):
can't mess with this, you can't take these don't be
a squirrel and turn these concepts around and try and
market them off into your own heretical religion? Is squirrel
part of their whole thing? I I wasn't aware of squirrels? Yes,
uh oop, al rightes quote. For instance, the founder of Scientology,
or On Hubbard, is reported to have referred to those

(59:57):
who modify as techniques as squirrels who should be harassed
asked in any possible way. Weapons used to discourage any
change in religious doctrine in practice include ridicule, expulsion, and harassment.
Continuity and religious doctrine is explained to the extent that
such thought control techniques are successful. So it's kind of
a it feels like a struggle between the uh, the

(01:00:20):
the oral stories and the written stories, right, the one
that wants to live and change, and the other that
we're trying to artificially set in stone. Here's a question
I have, and I think it is to some degree
addressed by this literature, but I'm not sure if there
is a settled answer on it. What is the stronger tendency,
the the counterintuitive element adding tendency or the subtraction tendency?

(01:00:47):
Do stories over time tend to undergo more adding of
donkey cabbages style elements are more subtraction of donkey cabbages
style elements? Well, I I like the like Coopa's argument
that there's a there's a dynamism in place that going
to have You're gonna have it come in waves. To
think of it this way, right, you have alien it's
just about a person you know, a crew on a

(01:01:08):
ship against one alien, and then things get crazy. You
get aliens, and you've got multiple aliens, You've got new
kinds of aliens, and it's a it's a it's a
fiesta but aliens. I would say it's minimally counterintuitive. I mean,
it is a mostly mundane narratives, like one thing, which
is that there are these horrible monsters. But but there's

(01:01:28):
a ratcheting up. So think of it like one one
alien is one m c I and then multiple aliens.
That's a bunch of m ciyes, and then Alien three
comes around or what alien cubed sometimes it's display does
and that when they're like, all right, let's boil it
back down. Just one m c I alien in play
and then four things get crazy again and you see

(01:01:50):
this back and forth. Right, um but I feel like
that's probably the tendency, right, is that you'll ratchet things
up more and more um M CIEs are added, and
then in it kind of goes in reverse, fewer and fewer,
sort of getting back to the it becomes more relatable
as it is it is. It is a transferred from
user to user. Yeah, this is all real interesting, but
now I'm I'm I'm undercutting myself because I'm thinking about

(01:02:15):
the difference, uh, of there being both kinds of narratives
going way back. So if you go back sixteen years ago, uh,
think about the difference between the basically emergent Catholic Christian
story compared to the narratives you find of Gnostic Christian texts.
At the same time, the Gnostic Christian texts are wonderful.

(01:02:35):
They they are worth reading, and they're so interesting, But
they're cosmology narratives are they're they're off the you know,
they're outlandish, they're super counterintuitive. They're barely tethered to any
kind of understandable or munday and earthly story. You've got
the Pleroma and YadA both. Uh, it's just not it's
not as earthly and tethered and relatable as most mythologies

(01:03:00):
that you're used to. It's, yeah, this is where you
have like the ideas like the first creation and the secondary,
the dimmi urge, the different levels of creation, the beings
of light and all this stuff. I mean, it's not
stuff that's easy to picture. It doesn't work like a
normal human story. It's very abstract and removed from from

(01:03:21):
grounded reality. It seems too counterintuitive to be successful. But
then again, I guess historically it was not successful, true,
but maybe it was only it can only be successful
in a time in which this uh, and say that
the Catholic narrative was just so widespread and so dominant
that it it kind of took on the trappings of
the physical laws of the of of life. Yeah, and

(01:03:43):
I guess it also happened within a broader Christian context,
so many of the people who practiced Gnostic Christianity would
think of it as a sort of like an extra
helping It's like the secret add on mythology that you
take in addition to your regular Catholic mythology. So in
a sense, Catholicism was roller skates and then uh and
then a NaSTA. The Gnostic Bulley system was was roller blades. Maybe,

(01:04:06):
I mean it'd be like roller skates with an extra
rocket booster or something or Robert. This has been fun
I feel like this is a really compelling explanation for
the dynamics of of narratives and memory and human culture.
I I don't think I'd fully tried to put all
this together before, but once funny enough, it is very
intuitive once you hear it. Yeah, yeah, I agree, it doesn't.

(01:04:29):
It makes you rethink everything from your you know, your
favorite books and movies to major world religions. Uh. And
I do think it is it is getting at the
at some of the truth of what's going on, but
maybe a minimal part of the truth. Well, we shall see.
There's always a lot of pizza pie left over all. Right, Well,

(01:04:50):
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