The Universal Grammar of Story Telling

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A story is the natural way that human beings take raw information and process it into meaning. But there's a problem here, a that this universal way of constructing stories tends to distort meaning in reliable ways. A stories are so obsessed with trouble, problems, pain, struggle, that they tend to lead us to believe that the world is a much worse place than it actually is. Stories also, secondly, over represent agency and under represent chance. So shit never just happens in stories. It does sometimes bea coincidence early on in the story, asom some role of luck. But especially in the resolution, where meeting is really established, there's very little roll for luck, forf shit

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?”