The Last Six Seasons of Lost

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This is America. That's why I love this country We can you can look at a piece of poop on the side of the road that your dog just let out of its rear end and we can think it's wonderful because it came from your cute dog. There's people like me go sit there and look at poop and say that's a big pile of poop. The date May 23rd 2010 and this is one of thousands of videos that trickled into YouTube describing the hatred the Iyer the sickening feeling that came over so many people who have been following a television show called lost for six seasons.

In this episode we discuss the power of narratives to affect our beliefs and behaviors with Melanie C. Green, a psychologist who studies the persuasive power of fiction.

According to Nielsen, the TV ratings company, the average person in the United States watches about 34 hours of television a week. That’s 73 days a year. Over the course of a lifetime, the average American can expect to spend a full decade lost in the trance spell that only powerful narratives can cast over the human mind.

What is the power of all the stories we consume through television? What about movies and books and comics and video games and everything else? How does it affect our beliefs and behaviors?

We discuss all of that and more with Melanie C. Green who is a social psychologist who developed the transportation into a narrative worlds theory that helps explain total story immersion and how it translates into influence over our real-world behaviors. Green is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. You can find her on Twitter using the handle @NarrProf or her website.

After the interview I eat some chocolate orange cherry cookies sent in by Elliot Jones and then discuss how photographs can either enhance or dampen your memory depending on how you use them.

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