Jonathan Gottschall > Quotes

“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape.”
― Jonathan Gottschall

“Literature offers feelings for which we don’t have to pay. It allows us to love, condemn, condone, hope, dread, and hate without any of the risks those feelings ordinarily involve.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Memories are often pruned and shaped by an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“There is a paradox in fiction that was first noticed by Aristotle in the Poetics. We are drawn to fiction because fiction gives us pleasure. But most of what is actually in fiction is deeply unpleasant: threat, death, despair, anxiety, Sturm und Drang.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Commentators frequently blame MMORPGs for an increasing sense of isolation in modern life. But virtual worlds are less a cause of that isolation than a response to it. Virtual worlds give back what has been scooped out of modern life. The virtual world is in important ways more authentically human than the real world. It gives us back community, a feeling of competence, and a sense of being an important person whom people depend on.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Story, in other words, continues to fulfill its ancient function of binding society by reinforcing a set of common values and strengthening the ties of common culture. Story enculturates the youth. It defines the people. It tells us what is laudable and what is contemptible. It subtly and constantly encourages us to be decent instead of decadent. Story is the grease and glue of society: by encouraging us to behave well, story reduces social friction while uniting people around common values. Story homogenizes us; it makes us one. This is part of what Marshall McLuhan had in mind with his idea of the global village. Technology has saturated widely dispersed people with the same media and made them into citizens of a village that spans the world.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Story = Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence, authors trick readers into doing most of the imaginative work.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“fiction writers are fully ten times more likely to be bipolar than the general population, and poets are an amazing forty times more likely to struggle with the disorder. Based on statistics like these, psychologist Daniel Nettle writes, “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that most of the canon of Western culture was produced by people with a touch of madness.” Essayist Brooke Allen does Nettle one better: “The Western literary tradition, it seems, has been dominated by a sorry collection of alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, manic-depressives, sexual predators, and various unfortunate combinations of two, three, or even all of the above.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“As the video game designer and writer James Wallis puts it, “Human beings like stories. Our brains have a natural affinity not only for enjoying narratives and learning from them but also for creating them. In the same way that your mind sees an abstract pattern and resolves it into a face, your imagination sees a pattern of events and resolves it into a story.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Most people think of fiction as a wildly creative art form. But this just shows how much creativity is possible inside a prison.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“The idea that stories slavishly obey deep structural patterns seems at first vaguely depressing. But it shouldn’t be. Think of the human face. The fact that all faces are very much alike doesn’t make the face boring or mean that particular faces can’t startle us with their beauty or distinctiveness.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“At my local big-box bookstore, the gun nut, muscle head, and martial arts magazines are all shelved together in what I call the “masculine anxiety” section.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch

“When we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to leave us defenseless.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Fiction is usually seen as escapist entertainment...But it's hard to reconcile the escapist theory of fiction with the deep patterns we find in the art of storytelling... Our various fictional worlds are-- on the whole-- horrorscapes. Fiction may temporarily free us from our troubles, but it does so by ensnaring us in new sets of troubles-- in imaginary worlds of struggle and stress and mortal woe.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Studies show that when ordinary people do something wrong—break a promise, commit a murder—they usually fold it into a narrative that denies or at least diminishes their guilt.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Fiction is an ancient virtual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Like a flight simulator, fiction projects us into intense simulations of problems that run parallel to those we face in reality. And like a flight simulator, the main virtue of fiction is that we have a rich experience and don’t die at the end.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Sherlock Holmes is a literary figment. He lives in Neverland, so he always gets to be right. But if he tried to ply his trade as a “consulting detective” in the real world, he would be a dangerously incompetent boob—more like The Pink Panther’s Inspector Clouseau than the genius who lives with his friend Watson at 221b Baker Street.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Why do stories cluster around a few big themes, and why do they hew so closely to problem structure? Why are stories this way instead of all the other ways they could be? I think that problem structure reveals a major function of storytelling. It suggests that the human mind was shaped for story, so that it could be shaped by story.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“When we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to leave us defenseless.  ”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Don't despair for story's future or turn curmudgeonly over the rise of video games or reality TV. The way we experience story will evolve, but as storytelling animals, we will no more give it up than start walking on all fours.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Paley’s book Boys and Girls is about the year she spent trying to get her pupils to behave in a more unisex way. And it is a chronicle of spectacular and amusing failure. None of Paley’s tricks or bribes or clever manipulations worked. For instance, she tried forcing the boys to play in the doll corner and the girls to play in the block corner. The boys proceeded to turn the doll corner into the cockpit of a starship, and the girls built a house out of blocks and resumed their domestic fantasies. Paley’s experiment culminated in her declaration of surrender to the deep structures of gender. She decided to let the girls be girls. She admits, with real self-reproach, that this wasn’t that hard for her: Paley always approved more of the girls’ relatively calm and prosocial play. It was harder to let the boys be boys, but she did. “Let the boys be robbers,” Paley concluded, “or tough guys in space. It is the natural, universal, and essential play of little boys.” I’ve been arguing that children’s pretend play is relentlessly focused on trouble. And it is. But as Melvin Konner demonstrates in his monumental book The Evolution of Childhood, there are reliable sex differences in how boys and girls play that have been found around the world. Dozens of studies across five decades and a multitude of cultures have found essentially what Paley found in her midwestern classroom: boys and girls spontaneously segregate themselves by sex; boys engage in much more rough-and-tumble play; fantasy play is more frequent in girls, more sophisticated, and more focused on pretend parenting; boys are generally more aggressive and less nurturing than girls, with the differences being present and measurable by the seventeenth month of life. The psychologists Dorothy and Jerome Singer sum up this research: “Most of the time we see clear-cut differences in the way children play. Generally, boys are more vigorous in their activities, choosing games of adventure, daring, and conflict, while girls tend to choose games that foster nurturance and affiliation.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“I think the literary scholar Brian Boyd is right to wonder if overconsuming in a world awash with junk story could lead to something like a “mental diabetes epidemic.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Story—sacred and profane—is perhaps the main cohering force in human life. A society is composed of fractious people with different personalities, goals, and agendas. What connects us beyond our kinship ties? Story. As John Gardner puts it, fiction “is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy.” Story is the counterforce to social disorder, the tendency of things to fall apart. Story is the center without which the rest cannot hold.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Watching this little scene makes my throat ache. It seems an apt metaphor for the role most men play--even in egalitarian modern marriages--as quasi-outsiders in their own families. Of course, men have always contributed importantly to the family, and our wives and children would miss us if we were gone. But there's also a tacit understanding that we are the expendable ones: if something evil comes through the front door, everyone knows whose job it is to die guarding the family's retreat out the back. Men are a little on the periphery of family life, cut off from the biologically precious mother and children as though by an invisible pane of glass.”
― Jonathan Gottschall

“Conspiracy theories—feverishly creative, lovingly plotted—are in fact fictional stories that some people believe. Conspiracy theorists connect real data points and imagined data points into a coherent, emotionally satisfying version of reality. Conspiracy theories exert a powerful hold on the human imagination—yes, perhaps even your imagination—not despite structural parallels with fiction, but in large part because of them. They fascinate us because they are ripping good yarns, showcasing classic problem structure and sharply defined good guys and villains. They offer vivid, lurid plots that translate with telling ease into wildly popular entertainment.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human