Sceptic magazine and sceptic podcast are supported by donations. If you support the podcast, please go to sceptic dot com slash donnate. And here's our guest gotshaw, jonathan lloyd with his new book The paradox of story telling. It was a broken up technically, with some recording problems with the riverside system we use here. Hopefully it'll all be stitched together reasonably well, thanks to my crack engineer,. So i hope, i hope that all works out. Thanks for listening.
Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it.
In The Story Paradox, Gottschall explores how a broad consortium of psychologists, communications specialists, neuroscientists, and literary quants are using the scientific method to study how stories affect our brains.
In this conversation based on his new book, Gottschall reveals why our biggest asset has become our greatest threat, and what, if anything, can be done. It is a call to stop asking, “How we can change the world through stories?” and start asking, “How can we save the world from stories?”