A Story a Day Keeps the Doctor Away...Storytelling and Humanity

Jonathan Gottschall sets out to show how humans are tied to stories and fiction in his nonfiction work “The Storytelling Animal: How stories make us human”. They are essential to everyday life, play, and mental attitude. You may be thinking, well that’s just silly! I don’t tell stories and I don’t hear storytellers, or even read all that often. Well, Gottschall will tell you you’re not looking at a wide enough angle.

Storytelling is everywhere. Through the thousands of years human beings have been on this earth, we have made stories essential. If, as some claim, fiction and stories are wasteful and unnecessary, then why did they not evolve out? No we might not all sit around listening to our parents recite Sleeping Beauty for the hundredth time, but we function on a daily basis in the realm of the story. 

As Gottschall explains, the mind is a storyteller. We dream nightly, even if we don’t remember, creating events in our head. Dreams help us work out life situations and see the endings to different scenarios. One argument that Gottschall presents for why we dream is because we need to practice. Dreaming gives us the chance to see the endings to different scenarios, feel what it’s like to punch that person you hate without the ramifications of so doing. Then there are daydreams. Living in our heads and telling ourselves fictions about what we want and how we get it. 

When we are unable to explain our world, we fabricate stories. We find explanations because the human mind does not respond well to having no answer. Our minds are created to lie, to fib, to tell stories. In split brain patients, when the left (reasoning, speech center) side of the brain saw an image, then picked the object that was associated with said image and explained why they picked that object. However, when the right (creative) brain saw an image and picked the object associated with the scene, the left side of the brain could not explain why that object was chosen because the brain was not connected to the other side, and the left (communication) side was unable to comprehend what the right side saw. Instead of saying ‘I don’t know’ the patient’s brain made up an explanation. 

Humans are supposed to tell stories about themselves. We need to alter our memories to be more favorable to ourselves, make us be the protagonist of our own story. Gottschall says, “A healthy mind tells itself flattering lies. And if it does not lie to itself, it is not healthy…positive illusions keep us from yielding to despair.”

In the end, Gottschall talks about the future of fiction and how many say it is dying. Quite the opposite is happening in his opinion. People crave story more than ever. Movies, TV show, videogames, even books. He cautions the reader that the problem in the future isn’t losing our stories and wandering away from fiction, it’s getting lost in it and forgetting to live in reality. Virtual realities, MMORPGs, LARP are already popular, but think about when we get better technology, when we can nearly live inside of these worlds with our senses intact there. As Gottschall says, when you’re playing God, why would you ever want to stop?

Jonathan Gottschall gives a fascinating, well researched, convincing look into how storytelling is not dead, and is essential to humans. This was an easy book to consume and a very interesting subject, at least to me. His writing style flows from paragraph to paragraph and he links his ideas throughout the book. In the end, his conclusions draw the book together and give a description of where we are heading. I recommend this book for writers, storytellers, readers, psychologists, and homo sapiens.