The storytelling animal: Jonathan Gottschall at TEDxFurmanU
Washington & Jefferson College Distinguished Research Fellow Jonathan Gottschall is a leading figure in a new movement to bridge the divide between the cultures of the sciences and the humanities. His most recent work, "The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human," draws on the latest research in neuroscience, psychology and biology to explain storytelling's evolution as a fundamental human instinct. The book was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize.
While Gottschall earned his Ph.D. in English, his main dissertation adviser was the prominent evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, and he splits his academic writing between scientific and literary journals. His work also appears with regularity in the popular press in such outlets as New Scientist, The Boston Globe, Seed Magazine, The Huffington Post, NPR and BBC Radio, and the blogs of The Wall Street Journal and Fast Company. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Nature, Scientific American, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and NPR's "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered." The author or editor of six books, including Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, Gottschall blogs about the mysteries of storytelling at Psychology Today.
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“human beings live inside a storm of stories, we live in stories all day long, we dream in stories all night long, stories are how we communicate with each other, its how we connect with each other, how we learn, how we think; and without story to organise your experience on earth youd experience your life as a blooming buzzing confusion it would be all sound and fury it would signify nothing story is ubiquitous story is powerful nothing in human experience rivets attention hooks human attention holds human attention like a story” “so story is so powerful for us at least in part because at a neurological level whatever is happening on the page or on the stage isn’t just happening to them it’s happening to us as well we know its fake but that doesn’t stop unconscious parts of the brain from processing what we’re seeing as though its real”
@Gr33nPhoenix
5 ай бұрын
Io
My phylosophy: We tell stories to not be surprised by our emotions. It helps us understand how we should deal with them and which emotions we have. That's why love is such an undrainable source of stories: our entire lives are based around love and finding love.
Story telling is not restricted to just fiction. Politicians are elected on thier story telling ability and scientists seek confirmation stories of their own stories. People love all stories. Hence everyone owns a tv and phone because its how we are all wired deply into stories
I really enjoyed this talk. You made it easy to connect stories to our emotions. Great job.
The most important part of this: The stories we consume shape us profoundly. They shape our attitudes, our beliefs, our behaviors. Just one piece of evidence from this rather large research program: if you get a bunch of people in a psych lab and you show them episodes of a TV show like Will and Grace, a TV show that treats homosexuals and homosexuality in a non-judgemental way, you can measure peoples’ attitudes and they reliably move in the same non-judgemental direction. And if a lot of us watch shows with likable gay characters, shows like Modern Family and Will and Grace and Glee and so on and so forth, then you can have a mover of massive social change. So American attitudes towards homosexuality have been liberalizing with dizzying speed, and social scientists give TV a lot of the credit. They even have a name for the liberalizing trend; it’s been called “The Will and Grace Effect.”
This is a way better method to say "there’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story" than wasting my time for 8 seasons of television.
Maybe stories evolved from the migration routes animals have to take. Animals have to memorize different paths to different destinations, and each path has a beginning, a middle (with its unique landmarks), and an end. We even use words like journey to describe both voyages and stories. There is this mnemonic technique in which, to memorize some objects, we mentally place them along a path we are familiar. We were nomads, and we grew up having to travel long distances throughout the year.
@ltotheop7512
2 жыл бұрын
Stories are likely more connected with time perception than space perception.
I have to read this book for a class and I was surprised to actually really enjoy it. Great talk and great book.
@psychee1
9 ай бұрын
5:40 I think this is a pretty profound quote that explains a lot.
Great book and great talk
This is a wonderful book for a Book Club to discuss. It helps parents deal more sympathetically with their children who are so wrapped up in video games.
great talk!
Great story telling and loved the ending. Kept me interested and engaged the entire time.
People don’t want truth, people want stories
@raquelpastorescritora
6 күн бұрын
Wow, that explains a lot of what is happening in the world right now.
Excellent!!
Great content!! I wish I could know more about storytelling for business.
@bhavyasharma8091
7 ай бұрын
Sales and advertising is story telling. For a sales person, people buy based on the story the tell themselves, about you, about the product or service, about the company, about the timing…about something. Your job is to make sure the stories they tell themselves convince them to buy the product.
Where can I find the experiments Jonathon is speaking about, on 'the brain on stories'?
As I watch this, I understand why our current election is so stressful for many of us. It's chaotic in nature, many of us find no structure, no logical narrative; we find primary characters making choices which lack meaning or are outright vicious. We see a heroic character few can root for yet he has been assigned with the role anyway. It's a poorly written story that we have to read day after day. I state this not for argument's sake but because other liberal-minded people might understand why this election has been more frustrating than most.
Nice.
The ego LOVES stories!
People watching this may be interested in others doing research in this area with qualitative methods Neighborhood Bridges (US - www.childrenstheatre.org/education/neighborhood-bridges) and Emma Parfitt (UK - exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/exchanges/article/view/25).
@callofduty4702
8 жыл бұрын
thank you
Someone knows the name of the video with the triangles and circle?
Couldn't we just say that "Storytelling" is just another "Intellectual Device" that is used to generate Intellectual activity in others ?
He sounds like chris pratt
@pgaquigz1125
6 жыл бұрын
Jix Marley two years later and you didn’t get one like. Lolzie
@luah3146
4 жыл бұрын
like a combination between chris pratt and kermit the frog
@ava1513
10 ай бұрын
@@pgaquigz1125 5 years later, hopefully you matured and got a life.
Absolutely HATED when he showed that horror film in the presentation. Why did he have to do that???! He could’ve used something else
Facts tell, Stories SELL :)
One thing I got from all the blaberring is we are what we consume. ktnxbye