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 Lamb and Joe McCormick as they discuss the minimal counterintuitiveness effect. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.
This might be kind of a strange question, but if
I forced you to tell me the whole story of

(00:24):
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
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

(00:47):
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
of the tale and 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

(01:07):
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
they're also intensely memorable. Yeah. But at the same time,
it's you know, you get down to its roots. I

(01:28):
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,
you are a spoil sport for my examples today. Uh,

(01:50):
come on, you you know the story of Cinderella. You
definitely know the story of Rapunzel. That's got some good
to eye gouging and all kinds of weirdness. Uh. 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
brothers Grim. It's a classic folk tale that that has

(02:13):
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. Stop me if
this is getting unbearable, 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 in the forest,
and the old crone is begging for alms. So he

(02:35):
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 then one
of them will fall dead, and you need to take

(02:56):
it's hard 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 young huntsman

(03:17):
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, until he's

(03:40):
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 who
is in fact a witch. And he sees a beautiful

(04:02):
young woman, and so he asks to be let 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 to drink
and poisonous draft that the witch has created, uh that

(04:24):
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
the mountains one day by saying, oh, I wish you
could use that cloak of transportation to take me where

(04:45):
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 discuss whether or not they should kill him, but
eventually they decide, now we'll just leave him here because
eventually the clouds will carry him away. So the young

(05:08):
huntsman gets carried away by the clouds. He ends up
getting deposited in a 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 cabbage
from a nearby field and transforms back into a human.
He realizes that each of these fields grows cabbage. One

(05:30):
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.
The old witch turns into a donkey. He also accidentally
tricks the maid servant and the young daughter who are

(05:52):
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 too, basically tells
them to mistreat the old donkey and to be nicer
to the young donkeys. The miller comes back to him
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

(06:14):
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 the witch's daughter and he get married and
they live happily ever after. Well, that is quite a story, Joe.
If it were, I would say it was. It would
be pretty great if it were. If this was a

(06:36):
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 of the piece is uh is equally lost on me. Yeah, um, now,

(07:02):
I certainly. Well it's sort of a weird revenge story. Yeah,
but it it really takes its 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 does remind me
of some of I mean, I've had this experience with
other folk tales before, where you start reading it and

(07:25):
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 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,

(07:49):
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, 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

(08:12):
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 you kind of 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

(08:32):
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 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

(08:55):
is what is ultimately the difference? What what makes one
story Cinderella and one story a donkey Cabbages? And why
to Cinderella stick with us? Whereas donkey Cabbages is just
it's just leaking through your fingers almost immediately upon grasping it. Yeah, exactly.
I mean, one thing is that Cinderella is not just
the the sort of European tradition grim fairy tale Cinderella.

(09:17):
They're Cinderella type stories all over the world. This is
almost one of those those or 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, ineradicable myth. Meanwhile, donkey cabbages is it feels

(09:43):
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 archetype near rative has. And so the question
is why are some narratives more successful than others? Like

(10:05):
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 cabbage is
endangered while Cinderella is thriving. 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,

(10:29):
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 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

(10:51):
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, 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.

(11:13):
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 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

(11:34):
you're talking about about religion. You know, what is the
connection between Cinderella and the great religions of the modern world,
of 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 its sacred narratives upon which it is based. Yeah,
there are almost no successful religions that don't have at

(11:56):
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
grander cultural and personal meaning. So as far as the

(12:18):
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
of her answer had to do with with social cohesion

(12:40):
and stuff, right, Yeah, And in grieving and bereavement and
sort of the the precursors to grieving and bereavement that
they can arguably be identified in uh in certain animals,
such as some of our closer primate relatives exactly. Another
very common explanation from evolutionary psychology is the idea of

(13:00):
the 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

(13:22):
imagine two 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,

(13:43):
maybe 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

(14:04):
the 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 hyperactive lookout for people or for animals,

(14:26):
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

(14:47):
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 campfire
at night, more children who believe that warning and accepted

(15:09):
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 heed
to their values. But whatever the actual biological and psychological

(15:34):
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 followed them. Right,
So they wanted that the ancient Egyptian religion, why is it?

(15:54):
Why is 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 at last time. I mean,
think about all the variations on it, or all of
the other types of mythologies that got started but never
really went anywhere. I think of all the cults that

(16:15):
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 on 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 popular and
powerful models of belief exactly. So the question we want

(16:39):
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 folklore have
in common is narrative. Almost all of the world's religions

(17:01):
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 guess that part of what
makes a successful religion is containing successful stories, Right, the

(17:24):
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 narrative is not
actually a major element, but I think it's a very
reasonable starting assumption. And if this is the case that
the success of a narrative plays into the success of

(17:45):
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. Thank alright, we're back.
So we've asked the question what sort of narrative of
what kind of story is going to make a religion successful?
Or just make a story of a fairy tale successful?

(18:06):
In general? Like, what what are the elements that are
going to get guaranteed 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
key idea of this episode the idea of what's come
to be known as minimally counterintuitive elements of belief. Now,

(18:30):
we can't know for sure what makes one religion or
one story more successful than another, and it's probably due
to multiple factors rather than just one. But this minimally
counterintuitive elements paradigm, I think, is a really clever answer,
offering what I guess is an important part of the
picture of the comparative success of stories, narratives, and belief structures.

(18:51):
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 two thousand six and that's a paper published in
Cognitive Science by Aura norn Zion's got A Tran, Jason Faulkner,
and Mark Schaller called Memory and Mystery the Cultural selection

(19:12):
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 achieves cultural success,
mnemonic resilience maybe one of the most important. Memorability places

(19:36):
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 cultural success unless
it stands the test of memory. So, in other words,
in the telephone game of belief, you've got to have

(19:57):
a core story that is going to remain more or
less intact with each retelling and each embellishment. Yeah, and
I mean part of the problem is that most of
human history, most people have not had access to any
recording method for narratives. Most people throughout the history of
the world have been illiterate and have transmitted stories orally

(20:18):
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,
I mean, I'm reminded, I want to one of our
recent episodes that dealt with writing. I want to say
there was one description that UH discussed writing as an

(20:39):
ability to like freeze thought or too in some way
you have to to to to freeze thought in time,
And that's exactly what it's doing when otherwise have these
stories would be perpetually changing. Yeah, and of course I
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,

(21:01):
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,
of of being stored in human minds alone and being
transmitted through human retelling alone. Well, there's the old quote, right,

(21:23):
it don't mean a thing of it if it ain't
got that swing, right, if this is 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
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

(21:45):
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 kujo, I guess you
know about you took this saying that I was familiar with.
It's just become mundane in my my world of cinema.
But you put a twist on it. You put this

(22:06):
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
tale loses something in translation. Sometimes it just loses the rhyme,

(22:27):
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 crazy example of this,

(22:47):
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 a notion 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 brain is not fertile
soil in which to grow that myth, right, It just

(23:10):
naturally grows some types of content better than others based
on natural predispositions, capabilities, and biases of the brain. So
the authors are pushing a hypothesis in this paper about
one possible relationship between memory cognition and the success of
narratives like religious myths. They write, quote, we hypothesize that

(23:32):
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 m
c I stands for minimally counterintuitive, a little bit counterintuitive,
not totally counterintuitive. Such an MCI template. Maybe no accident. Indeed,

(23:56):
we propose that it may be a recipe for cultural
success us 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 achieve cultural stability. Alright, So it's not a

(24:17):
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 it's 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.
It's where every most everything is pretty mundane, but there's

(24:40):
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 character. Sometimes

(25:00):
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

(25:23):
that was just barely 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 speculative element that's thrown in like everything
is normal except one character's magic. But but it can
also work in other ways to right where there's an

(25:43):
inversion of of character, like the you know, the 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, get aesthetically pleasing narratives are surprising enough,

(26:04):
but they can't be too surprising otherwise you just stop
being able to appreciate them as narratives. You want to
keep with 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.

(26:26):
What in the literature itself makes a concept intuitive or counterintuitive?
And so the author's 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,

(26:47):
and all that means is how things normally work, right. Um.
The one trope 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 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

(27:07):
spend time and time again, right um? Or one of
my favorite recent ones, even though I never actually watched
the show. I just 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

(27:27):
bad idea. 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 where the horse played professional football.
I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, yeah, like
was it like Airbud he was? Yeah, basically the Airbud trope,
but this was a horse that was, due to some
sort of loophole and the rules, was able to play
professional football, and maybe was college football. So this is

(27:50):
not exactly what the author there talking about, but it's
pretty close. So 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. Uh, this

(28:12):
is the intuitive theory you used to conclude that a
brick will sink in water and not float, or to
conclude that a falling snowflake won't land with enough forced
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

(28:34):
walk up onto the beach and bite you off your towel,
and snails don't live to be 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.

(28:56):
And if you write any of these theories, you you
instantly find yourself when dealing with narrative elements right now, 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

(29:17):
you come up with an idea of breaking one of
these intuitive ontologies, you instantly have what sounds like a
concept 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

(29:39):
in development and are found in so many different cultures
that it looks like they might be more sort of
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,

(30:01):
they've got the idea of a solid object, and they
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, since each one is a natural
Euclidean born to navigate a three dimensional world of fixed

(30:22):
and movable objects. In other words, we start utilizing geometry
before we can even name things. We don't understand wall
or cat, 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

(30:42):
in a room to remember where a toy is hidden,
rather than color or decoration. We're also born within anate
understanding of basic physical laws. Only adults believe in magic. Well,
toddler will see right through all of the supernatural. There
was actually an m T study that even found out
that young children understand it teleportation is not feasible. Yeah,

(31:02):
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
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

(31:24):
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
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

(31:44):
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
kind of species it is, So they know that you
can't just like put a put a care it on
a horse's head and make it a unicorn. It's still
a horse. Also, children from preschool age typically have a

(32:06):
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 come from having younger siblings, you know.
I feel like that that might be the area where
those those kind of ideas are initially introduced, you know,

(32:26):
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 authors observed that despite how universal or near
universal these beliefs are, our folk tales and religious mythologies

(32:47):
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 that can pass through walls like ghosts, or people
who can read minds or otherwise have knowledge of that

(33:09):
they couldn't access. Uh, 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 kep keep thinking of it. You know, It's like, ultimately,
is is it just this story where the the the

(33:30):
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 I in many cases, reality
would seem to indicate that it's the opposite. With old,
nasty rich people I'm just throwing that out there. I'll
probably come back to that idea again. Well, let's let's

(33:51):
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 on tall jeez? 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 almost all of our most popular stories
do stuff like that? The idea of realistic narratives is

(34:13):
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 the you know,
they would drive home just because it really happened doesn't
mean it's interesting, right, which which is is true. But
I think one of the most obvious answers would be novelty, right.
I mean, we we we we create the idea of

(34:35):
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 Taleb's black Swan theory, um,
the idea that major black Swan events are the norm.
Uh and uh and and also the problem of induction
induction here, So I wonder if we're drawn to these

(34:57):
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 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

(35:21):
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 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

(35:42):
acts heroically, like truly heroically, it's kind of 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. Oh well, yeah, So the authors
here are drawing on a bunch of research over the years.
It's indicated a couple of things. First of all, there

(36:03):
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 you saying a frog that jumps, right.
A frog that jumps is not memorable. Right. But then again,

(36:27):
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 this benefit. So some examples of this balance,
like ghosts and spirits are one of the most popular

(36:47):
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 wall,
but otherwise they behave is quote, ordinary intentional agents. Well,
with ghosts, you guys, you can make the argument that uh,
any of like the ghostly details like that's all just fluff.

(37:10):
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
Kyle in nineteen found quote people spontaneously anthropomorphize God in

(37:31):
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
of God as a normal person, but just with great
supernatural powers. And these types of limits on the wildness

(37:52):
of supernatural elements also seem to be present in existing
cultural narratives. Just one example, an existing study of its
metamorphosis from Kelly and Kyle in nineteen eighty five found
that even though there were a lot of magic transformations
of people and things, it was much more common to
transform a person into, say, an animal, than it was

(38:13):
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 and the
Magic Pebble. I wish I may have mentioned on the
show before. Um, it's an award winning children's book about
a donkey who obtains the magic pebble, and the magic
pebble allows you to grants your wishes essentially, and the

(38:35):
donkey ends up being turned into a stone, and then
the pebble falls and rolls away from him and he
stuck as the stone. Oh yeah, it's and it's it's
kind of a traumatic story to read. It's really good,
but 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

(38:56):
turned into rock, not not a rock that looks like
a donkey, 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
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

(39:18):
then somehow the rock was still conscious of everything it
was it was kind of a confusing magic to try
and relate 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
how Barrett and Niehoff in two thousand one tested how
well people could remember and retell stories, and these stories

(39:39):
were broken down by how much they contained objects or
ideas in three different categories. So 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
found that after retelling the story through three generations of transmission,
people remembered and passed on counterintuitive ideas better than simple

(40:02):
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
to somebody, you don't usually tell it right after you
heard it. Right, You've had some time to ruminate on

(40:23):
it and embellish it, both intentionally but also just through
the 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 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

(40:48):
historical account became a tale of ancient high magic, like
while the actual historic individuals were still alive. Oh yeah, yeah,
that came up in 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.

(41:08):
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 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

(41:31):
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 that are just full of counterintuitive stuff, you know,
crammed to the gills with it. Is it the case
that there's a cognitive selection pressure in favor of m

(41:52):
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 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

(42:14):
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 cultural narratives even more than they do,
Like many popular myths, legends, and folk tales contain these elements,

(42:34):
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 and stuff like that. Now, of course,
there are a few books and passages in the Bible

(42:56):
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. Though, though even with something like
the Book of Revelation, we we do have to stop
and you know, pause and wondered, like, just how counterintuitive

(43:18):
is it really? Because certain on face value, yeah, I
mean on 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 conventions of this style,

(43:39):
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
the same situation with the highly symbolic work of Hieronymous
Bosh Before. You know, if you look at it and
you think, well, this is just bizarre, this is crazy.

(44:00):
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 these cases, it might be
that if you could, if you could sort of decode

(44:22):
the meaning of 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 example would be standard folk tales,
like the stories of the brothers Graham. A little red

(44:42):
riding Hood is actually a mostly mundane narrative. There are
only two really counterinto developments. 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 study think that maybe we

(45:02):
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 counter i 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 the point of a

(45:23):
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 to violate our ontologies

(45:44):
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, So how do you test

(46:05):
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
comparatively minimally counterintuitive folk tales did. So, the researchers put

(46:28):
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, everything's okay. How about

(46:49):
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 stories like this,

(47:11):
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 lists of
entirely intuitive items were actually remembered best just kind of strange,
like the ones that were just all normal concepts were

(47:31):
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, people remembered it less.

(47:52):
If the list contained equal numbers of intuitive and counterintuitive ideas,
or contained all counterintuitive ideas, people remembered it less. Us
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 to partially back up

(48:14):
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 Grimm, and they counted numbers of counterintuitive
elements that they contained and compared that to how successful

(48:37):
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 and how many

(48:58):
Internet hits they got about the 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. But for the

(49:21):
more memorable tales, the really successful ones, there was a
clustering around a small number of counterintuitive elements. And that
means that the m c I 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,

(49:41):
And in their discussion, the authors proposed 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 back around knowledge, but do not admit to

(50:01):
a final interpretation. As a result, they are 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

(50:25):
by James P. Cars about the idea 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

(50:46):
how that is how the stories stay relevant without having
to just like bend and break your interpretation of them.
I mean it. 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

(51:09):
and confusing content, right, I mean, like, if if 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 you,

(51:32):
thank you. All right, we're back. So, 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,

(51:54):
is it also true that modern 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

(52:14):
that's the sweet spot for oral culture transmission, does writing
change what type of mythology becomes salient? Well, we come
back to this idea that writing frees his 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,

(52:36):
and I actually found out a wonderful paper on some
of this UH. It is titled UH An Alternative Account
of the Minimal Counterintuitives Effect, and it was by by
cognitive scientist Muhammad Afzala Upal 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

(52:58):
look at m c I in two different ways. You
have concept based m c I and that's where 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

(53:19):
they become widely accepted. In part of the culture. Oh. Interesting,
So if I introduce to you a new 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,

(53:41):
But if I say a turtle that drinks human blood,
people are probably going to remember that. Yeah. Therefore, he
argues that ideas with enhanced counterintuitiveness obtain transmission advantages, and
this results in a ratcheting up of counterintuitiveness that may
help explain cultural and evayation and dynamism. Interesting, So this

(54:02):
would be bigger than just religions. This would be for
ideas in general and narratives in general. Right, though he
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 counterintuitive religious concepts,

(54:26):
including the Judeo Christian Islamic conceptions of God. 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

(54:48):
is that it's sacred, right, it's it's it's it's frozen
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, the a lotical dissection. Interesting,
uh So, Paul writes. The context based view posits that
religious concepts such as God's ghost, angels, and devil have

(55:10):
become maximally counterintuitive in the Barret 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

(55:31):
would be surprising if they did not maximally counterintuitive. So
stuff that um, because it's hard to get your counterintuitive
juices 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

(55:52):
get a 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 though
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

(56:12):
a mystery and you can't understand it right. And then
add into 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 God's that are then uh spun

(56:33):
around and used in different ways. And you do see
that in Christian traditions as well. Hinduism is a world
of belief and layer upon layers. It's like an archaeological
dig 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

(56:56):
we see unusual religions emerging in a most 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 and one of the one of the points that
Topa makes about this, he compares it to emergent religions. Uh.

(57:20):
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
is saying, you don't alter this. This is the text

(57:40):
and uh, 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. They say, you can't

(58:01):
mess with this, you can't take these that 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 wouldn't aware of squirrels? Yes,
uh oop al rites quote. For instance, the founder of Scientology,
Ron Hubbard, is reported to have referred to those who

(58:21):
modify as techniques as squirrels who should be harassed in
any possible way. Weapons used to discourage any change in
religious doctrine and 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 the

(58:45):
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 not sure if there is a
settled answer on it. What is the stronger tendency them

(59:05):
the counterintuitive element adding tendency or the subtraction tendency. Do
stories over time tend to undergo more adding of Donkey
Cabbages style elements or more subtraction of donkey Cabbages style elements? Well,
I I like the like Coopo's argument that there's a
there's a dynamism in place that you're gonna have You're

(59:25):
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 ship against one alien,
and then things get crazy. You get aliens, and you've
got multiple aliens, you get 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

(59:47):
mostly mundane narratives like one thing, which is that there
are these horrible monsters. But but there's 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 MC eyes and then Alien three comes around or
what alien cubed Sometimes it's display does and that when

(01:00:07):
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 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 it kind of goes
in reverse, fewer and fewer, sort of getting back to
the it becomes more relatable as it is it is.

(01:00:30):
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 the difference, uh, of there
being both kinds of narratives going way back. So if
you go back six years ago, think about the difference
between the basically emergent Catholic Christian story compared to the

(01:00:52):
narratives you find of Gnostic Christian texts. At the same time,
the Gnostic Christian texts are wonderful, they are worth reading,
and they're so interesting, but they're cosmology narratives or 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 mundane

(01:01:13):
earthly story. You get the Pleroma and y'all, the Oath.
It's just not it's not as earthly and tethered and
relatable as most mythologies that you're used to. It's yeah,
this is where you have like their ideas, like the
first creation and the secondary, the dimmi urge, the different
levels of creation, the beings of light and all this stuff.

(01:01:36):
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 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 and which this uh,

(01:01:58):
and say that the Catholic narrative, it's just so widespread
and so dominant that it it kind of took on
the trappings of the physical laws of the of life. Yeah,
And 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

(01:02:19):
in addition to your regular Catholic mythology. So in a sense,
Catholicism was roller skates and then uh and then a NaSTA.
The gnostic Polie system was was roller blades. Maybe, 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

(01:02:39):
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
It makes you rethink everything from your you know, your
favorite books and movies to major world religions. Uh, and

(01:03:02):
I do think it is. It is getting at the
it's 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,
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(01:03:23):
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(01:04:09):
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