The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human - Jonathan Gottschall

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ISBN: 978-0-547-391407

Verdict:👍👍👍

What a great way to start the new year , finishing this great read which gave me great pleasure with its little antidotes wrapped around brief stories, explaining how we as humans create stories to connect, justify and ‘how authors trick readers into doing most of the imaginative work’.

 

Some amazing nuggets (Sherlock Holmes, Hitler etc) within this book that make one ponder on actions of others that creep into our lives spinning yarns of lies through our journeys- here are a few;

  • You’ll recall a few key characters and the basic gist: sadly, almost all of the granular detail will be lost in an amnesiac fog       (p64)
  • Everyone poops, but this is not the point of eating. Defecation is a side effect of our need to eat. In the same way-according to Flanigan and many other researchers – a dream is just brain waste        (p73) 
  • In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories, when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t       (p103)
  • But studies show that if you give people random, unpatterned information, they have a very limited ability not to weave it into a story.      (p105)
  • From Carr – “people remember what they can live with more often than how they lived” (p158)
and my favourite : 
  • 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 – p170.

For me this was a very pleasant and enjoyable read – I would recommend it.

 

Location: London, UK

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