Against Narrative: Are stories bad for us? Part 2

to that. It's where we first discussed what got us interested in this topic and general thoughts about ways that though Robert, you and I we both love narratives, love stories, love fiction, that stories might not always be great for human civilization. Yeah, it's it's a it's a weird thing to think about. But but then again, like part of it is because I look back, especially on certain times in my life where like a prize narrative above anything that was happening in real life. You know, like a

great book was an escape. A fictional book, Yeah, great, great fictional book was an escape. They were great. Unfiction book can also be a tremendous escape too, But I specifically remember escaping into into various novels, and it was

there was something so comforting about that. But then there's a similar there's there's something similar occurring when we have these negative examples of people escaping into narrative, though it might not be the pure alternate narrative of say, life on another planet or in an imagined age, but just a a different version of reality in which things are simplified and made more story shaped, with more key with with with clearer villains and heroes, and some sort of

of eventual come upance and uh and redemption. So we should brief recap. In the last episode, we talked about this idea that maybe stories aren't so great for us.

That we were inspired to talk about this because I read a read an interview with a Duke University professor and philosopher of science named Alex Rosenberg, who has written a book about How How Well Number One, about how we're wired to prefer stories over other types of receiving information, and then also about how stories cloud our our views of history and that a lot of times we don't appreciate what actually happened in the past because we read

a sort of personal narrative about history that has characters with motivations, and we think we identify with those characters, and we you know, we engage in theory of mind. We put our brain inside their brain, and we think we understand history in this way, but in fact it just leads to a lot of misunderstanding and false certainty about why things happened in the past, right, and then sometimes about what's happening in the present and in the future.

Because he specifically points to the science of global warming and how there's a tendency to to for for the science of global warming to to lose out to the narrative of global warming. And this wouldn't be an issue if the narratives were closely aligned with the science, but as we see can sadly continue to see, the problem is that some of the narratives about global warming run counter to what the science is telling us and have

a have a different agenda. Right. I mean, of course, the clear scientific consensus is global warm warming is absolutely real. It's going on right now. It's it is primarily driven by human behavior, and that behavior is primarily the emission of greenhouse gasses, and that if we want to do something to stop it, we should stop the emission of greenhouse gasses and maybe even at this point try to find a way to remove them from the atmosphere, if

that's even possible. But you know, there there are lots of very fun narratives that tell you something else, that tell you it's a Chinese hoax, or that tell you, you know, there's some evil cabal of globalists who want to do X, Y and Z, and they're using this scam to you know, I don't you know, keep up with all what all that stuff is. But you know where you can go to find it YouTube predominantly, Uh, you know, but part of it. But a lot of

this is it's out, Rosenberg describes. You know, a lot of it comes down to the fact that we're we're

using old tricks. Uh. These are basically sort of shortcuts in our perception of reality and that all of you know, the reality that we have is not like pure objective reality like of course, you know, one of the like fun little I'll go and go ahead and even call it a mind blower that he drops in that ideas with Paul Kennedy episode was that you know that that we live in a world that doesn't actually have odors

or colors. That's just our sense world, that's our way, that's the way that our our bodies in our minds, uh, interpret the stimula. Yeah, there is actually light, and there are actually volatile molecules, but the idea of color is something that happens only in the brain. Right. We constantly air in this perception of the world because it's adaptive. Uh. And it's certainly not maladaptive, but you can see how it stands in the way of a proper understanding of

objective reality. If it mattered, like if I don't know, if some fantastic scenario presented itself, say there was an alien invasion, that's generally a good one to go for, and the key to defeating the aliens was a perception of reality that did not, uh, did not rely on an understanding of reality in which odors and colors exist. You know, we're doomed. Yeah, we would. We would be doomed because we have this this built in handicap that

has never been maladaptive up until now. And so one of the things he's arguing is that is that storytelling was adaptive early on, but then is perhaps increasingly maladaptive as we as as civilization becomes more complicated. Oh yeah, I mean, this is one of the clear things that we've discovered through you know, the recent decades of psychology

and neuroscience focusing on bias and misperception. You know that that's been been a key to to what we've learned about the brain in the past few decades, is that we we have just all kinds of ways of getting reality wrong, and a lot of this is based on heuristics, you know, simple, quick, fast, dirty rules that the mind uses to try to come up with an answer without doing too much work. And in fact, you can more often get a more accurate answer by using a slow,

laborious mechanical process of figuring out what's true. But usually it doesn't make sense to do that in real life because you just don't have the time and the energy. So we use heuristics and we get maybe sometimes roughly right answers, maybe sometimes really wrong answers, but in most scenarios it doesn't matter enough for us to actually change our behavior. And story based thinking about reality, I think,

is one of these heuristics. Yeah, you know, one one thing that came to my mind was how like some of my earliest memories, some of them are definitely memories, but other things are not so much memories, but me remembering stories about something that happened when I was very young. And those become a sort of memory. They become a

kind of false memory of something that that happened. But to what degree it happened, like the story, I'm not sure, because we do this all the time right where we take we oftentimes will take an external story or just like the general shape of a story, use that to interpret something that happened to us, and then that becomes the memory. We are remembering the story that we came up with about the thing that happened, as opposed to

any anything like a purely objective understanding of what occurred. Right, And so a classic example of this that I was just thinking about is when you sort events into a structure of rising tension. You know, it's how like you could you could, like take a number of events that happened over a course of different days or even different weeks,

and we're really not all that related. But you're telling a story maybe about how you started, you know, why you're feeling down right now, and you you introduce like one thing that went wrong and then another thing that went wrong at a different time, and you you escale the tension on the story like you would if you're showing the increasingly dangerous obstacles that a hero almost face

in their journey. Right, Sometimes the things that we pick out to put into that story to be like the set pieces of the story might not be the real causes and effects of what we're trying to explain with the story. Why you're actually feeling down now, You don't necessarily know why you're feeling down now. Yeah, there are a number of reasons we've discussed in the show that that are not related to um so much to something going on in the mind, that's something going on and

say with your gut, bacteria, etcetera. And of course we've also discussed on the show how even an outright lie can impact how we think about something. Um uh, you know, and something that's not even presented as a possible truth, if we hear it enough times, it can become part of our understanding of reality. Yeah, the illusory truth effect. You hear something enough, you start to kind of think

it's true, even if you should know better. And so like that situation as well, is just this sort of holding our life up to other examples, be it little biographies or myths or motion pictures that we've seen. Um. It reminds me a bit of something that's discussed in Mercelles Eliades The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos in History, the book I've I've talked about on the show before. It's kind of a you know, an important text in religious studies, and in this the author discusses

how humans uh would have situated themselves within cyclical time. Uh. The idea here being that that ancient people thought of time is more as cyclical as opposed to linear, not something that has a beginning and an end that ultimately follows sort of the the ups and downs of a narrative plot, but is more of just a continual cycle. I guess more like a sitcom in that respect, right, Uh,

as a as sitcom rather than blockbuster. And so the idea here is that ancient people would have viewed time as cyclical and that all important acts in life were ultimately things that were revealed by the gods, and that all humans did was engaged in acts and rituals of repetition. So, I don't know, there's something that might define you in life, like say, something that is associated with with being a parent, or being a warrior, or being a uh, you know,

a craftsman and artisan. What have you like these things are only important because a god did them or some sort of divine figure did them, and then you were just repeating those things. Um a quote from the book An object or act becomes real only in so far as it imitates or repeats an archetype. But then again, the move to linear time or one way time allows for a different sort of narrative structure to emerge um and to take root in life, myth and religion, tales

of fall and ultimately redemption and ultimate justice. Yeah. And this is, in in Lad's estimation, negative in that it allows for the terror of history, the realization that we keep falling and failing and suffering not because of divine acts or something set in motion by the gods for repetition,

but because of our own failings. So we've abandoned mythical thought, he argues, and are confronted with this modern terror, these modern anxieties because of this way that we view time and and ultimately kind of place it in a narrative structure in our understanding of what has come before does color what comes comes comes later. I mean, the whole go back to the idea of you know, those who

who who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Um also reminds me of quote from soreign h Crcy Guard from repetition, and I actually I encountered this quote for the first time in the intro to uh Alan robe Gerlay's novel Repetition. But it goes like this, repetition and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions. For what is recollected has been it is repeated backwards, whereas repetition,

properly so called, is recollected forward. Well, that does tend to suggest, I mean, another way of thinking about the possible effects of narrative on our lives is that if you tell a certain kind of story about yourself, do you make it more likely that you do a similar kind of story in the future. Right? Is it a story about what I was or who I am or who I will be? And I didn't think that can be instructive to a certain extent, Right, Like I am a good person, I am a moral person, and therefore

I have acted morally and I will act morally. That sort of thing. But another thing that I think is really important about the psychology of storytelling is just the power that stories now when you're not even talking about self narrative. You're just talking about narrative, external narratives, fictional stories, narratives like we were talking about with global warming. Uh, somebody wants to tell a story about an evil conspiracy to push this hoax on people. That kind of story

can be incredibly persuasive and powerful. Stories have the power to persuade for good and evil, And this can be a really frightening power because they often seem so much more persuasive than good evidence. Like if you're a lawyer, I mean, it's a truism among lawyers, right that if you if you're doing a court case and the evidence is against you, if you tell a good enough story,

you still might win the jury over that. Often, like presenting a case to a jury is about telling a believable story, and how believable the story is might not always correlate to how good the evidence is. And so there's plenty of evidence that stories have persuasive power that you know that they A lot of this is applied like within the business world. You know, you've probably seen people doing business presentations or giving ted talks or something like that, and they go up and the first thing

they do is they tell a story. I want to tell you a story about a young man who had a dream, and that man was me. And you know, but they tell you a story and it's got a narrative arc, it's got obstacles that the character must face. They've got desires, they've got emotions. You you seek to have emotional engagement between the audience and the character, and that supposedly helps people pay more attention to what you're

talking about. It helps people retain more information from what you said, and it helps you persuade people to your point of view, which I guess is all contingent on, you know, whether the ultimate point of what you're saying is good or not. I mean, you can use this for good and you can use it for quite evil purposes. Yeah.

For instance, on the idea of narrative for good, we we've touched on some of the positives of telling stories already, but you know, it's worth noting that narrative is sometimes part of, you know, of an actual like clinical healing practice,

such as narrative expressive writing. For instance of May two thousand seventeen study in Psychosomatic Medicine, Journal of Bio Behavioral Medicine found that the writing about their emotions and creating a meaningful narrative of their experience UH may reduce the harmful cardiovascular effects of stress related to marital separation and patients. UM. But you know, more specifically, like just the idea that engaging and narrative can be used in but they're they're

apew process UM. I also ran across some notes on the pros and cons of storytelling from Ethics of Storytelling, Narrative, Hermoneutics, History and the Possible by Hannah Maritosa, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku in Finland, and she points out that the narrative gives us a sense of what is possible within a culture and what could be possible, and this is all good. You know, we see empowering stories and we think that could be me, or you know,

I can do something like that. You know, I'm maybe I'm not going to go and engage in a boxing match, but this boxing movie has shown me that if I have the eye of the tiger, then nothing can UM. And then also it shapes what we think a good life is, what gender norms are, what success is, and this can be positive or negative. I mean, it really can run run run the gamut here. Yeah, I think

we tend to. Some research shows that we tend to identify with characters in narrow It is much the same way we would end up identifying with people in the world. And you know, when you see people in the world acting a certain way, their values can be contagious, their cultural values, their moral values. And I think the same

can be true and narrative absolutely. She She also points to the Nazi regime is giving us a good example of what can happen when a strong narrative is developed to embolden one people but at the expense of others. Nazism was a story. It was a storytelling exercise, you know. It was telling a story about a great people, you know, who who had once been great and who were now being attacked by a conspiracy and parasitized by people who were unworthy, and that they would rise from this and

become great once again. It was, in a way, it was kind of like a catastrophic reboot project of a culture. Yeah you know, um, yeah sou but also attempting to achieve what they this story, they this mythology they had about past greatness exactly. Yeah, But speaking of the Nazis, she also points out that we have to be careful not to demonize evil doers too much in our narrative understanding of past horrors in order to quote properly engage

with the conditions that made the atrocities possible. Well, this is getting back to Alex Rosenberg, right, I mean like that, often thinking of history as a narrative and seeing you know, villains and heroes and stuff in history causes us to fail to appreciate some material conditions that brought brought about events.

You know, when you think about history as stories of characters who succeed against all odds, all that and all that, and you and you get into that, you you engage in theory of mind and you think about what they were thinking. You stop thinking about what the price of bread was this week and how that influenced what was

possible within a polity. Absolutely, and you know, with with the Nazis particularly, you know, it's interesting to look at your cinema, right and and certainly we have we have so many examples, even very entertaining examples of just like pure storybook Nazis, the rates of the Lost Ark is a great example of this, Like the Nazis are just straight up cardboard villains, and within the context of Raiders

the Lost Art, it's arguably okay. But then how do you treat characters like this in other works, because you you know, to to her point here, you want to make sure that there is that human element there, that people are realizing that these are not demons, these are

people and therefore their errors are our potential errors. Yes, I think that's very important to see them as people so you can realize, like this could happen again, other people could become like this, Right, So, like, say you look at a character, say like Joseph Mangela, and you want to be able to say he was not a monster. He you know, not an inhuman monster. He was a human who did monstrous things. And let's look at how that came to be. Um, you know, how as not

to create more of them? Right? But then but then also I guess you do kind of run the risk of like making the characters like this to relate, Like you don't want to make them too sympathetic either, right, well, right, I mean you don't want to make it'm like, hey, you know, wouldn't be so bad to be like, you

don't want to lose the object lessons the experience. So yeah, I think that's just one example of how how complicated choosing the form of narrative to place over history or individuals, how how problematic it can be, even with something that is relatively straightforward, by making sure that mass murderers and uh and you know, xenophobic individuals are are properly vilified, but vilified to the appropriate degree and in specifically the

appropriate way. I mean, yes, uh yeah. Coming up with stories is it's a it's a task on which you have great responsibility on your shoulders, and people take it so lightly. I mean, you notice the almost it's almost

like the level of responsibility goes exactly backwards. I tend to notice when people are talking about history in terms of uh, you know, minute fact matter about history, the you know, the weekly price of bread and a place throughout history, that they tend to exercise a lot more caution than people who are talking about history in a

way that tells a narrative story. I mean, I guess you're always going to have people doing both, but it seems like the person who's putting together a narrative that reads like a story with characters. They should be exercising ten times as much caution as the person just collecting, you know, factual minutia about history. We've got it exactly backwards. The way people sling narratives about history is sometimes just breathtaking. Yeah.

Like one example, not not not to discuss this film in too much detail, but uh, the the adaptation of three hundred Oh yeah, well, I mean I was thinking more about just like you know, the dude shooting his mouth off about what the Nazis were really about, you know. But but but what you're saying is correct to like that's a film that is I don't know, there's like

three different ways of looking at it. I guess like like one is that like this is clearly a case where you took a you took an historical, uh military engagement, and then you just made one side like the opra ultra masculine heroes, and the other side you made into like actual mutated debas demons, and then and then said that they were the Persians, you know, an entire culture and entire people, and that there is a that that's inherently reckless to do that, and then it's I've seen

it defended by saying, well, the whole story is as told by this individual, and therefore it's supposed to be because it's ultimately about the distortions of storytelling. I don't know to what extent that truly holds up. I mean, I can see the role for that kind of story that's told by an unreliable narrator, but I don't remember that really coming through. I don't think I don't remember that either. I remember at the time initially kind of

like naively experiencing it. I think the same way that it was perhaps intended, like here's just a crazy story where we made history more like Lord of the Rings, you know, and a goblins and demons and oh that's that and muscles and and and muscle abs for miles. I significantly doubt that I would have that same experience today.

I think I would feel very conflicted about it. I mean, in a way, it's I feel it's going to be hard to go through life not spinning occasionally, at least spinning tidy, bold narratives about history that you have not really properly thought through the implications of, because that's that's just how we tend to think about past events, and we get caught up in story, We get caught up in the power of narrative. I was just thinking, I've probably sort of even though I've been trying to be careful,

I've probably sort of done that today already. I mean, so,

I try not to create heroes and villains unnecessarily. But one of the problems with creating heroes and villains in h in history is especially like when you go try to create a hero in history, is you almost inevitably find out stuff that like complicates your your idea of them as a hero, like, oh, this was the good guy at some point in his story, and then you read into their biography and it's like, oh, yeah, I did some stuff that you wouldn't you wouldn't write a

hero doing. And your standard uncomplicated adventure movie right or just in the like looking up the personal getting to too acquainted with the personal history of say contemporary heroes. Yeah, we're like, oh, I really like this particular artist or actor or a musician. You're doomed. Don't look it up like you're you're ultimately it seems like you're sometimes it seems like often your best hope is that they just don't have a lot out there about their all right,

well let's take a break. When we come back, we will dive deeper into the world of narrative. Thank thank you, thank you. All Right, we're back. So I wanted to look at a bit at the idea of narrative and neuroscience. There's all kinds of evidence that the brain is fundamentally oriented towards producing stories, consuming stories, seeing the world in

terms of stories. Stories appear to have a kind of special purchase on our neurological architect Sure, So I just wanted to mention a few weird findings about how narratives work in the human brain. And so one thing I came across is the work of the Princeton University psychologist and neuroscientist Uri Hassan. And so Hassan has carried out brain imaging research to see exactly what happens in the human brain when we're engaged in various forms of communication.

So he studies communication broadly, but one of those types of communications that he's studied is what happens when we're being told a story, like a personal narrative, or even like a like a fictional story like an episode of

a TV show. So repeatedly, Hassan has found through f m R I that when people engage in successful verbal communication with one another, their brain activity tends to be to become physically aligned or coupled, meaning records of the physical activity of their brains show similarities or complementarity across

space and time. So, like your brain image to people who are having a conversation, and you will see this interesting kind of brain activity ping pong where their their brains are almost sort of locked in sync and reacting and kind interesting, revealing that the relationship between storyteller and the listener is more of a like a melding of minds in the same way to say, like people singing together engaging in a ritual, they're also kind of like

melding their their mental states. Yeah. Absolutely, So Hassen has argued that communication in general is quote a single act performed by two brains. I like that, but yeah, what so what happens when that communication takes the form of a story? Uh? And so I was reading an article

where where Hassan himself writes about his research on this. Uh. So he wrote, quote, in one experiment, we brought people to the f m r I scanner and scanned their brains while they were either telling or listening to real life stories. We started by comparing the similarity of neural responses across different steners in their auditory cortices, the part of the brain that processes the sounds coming from the ear.

When we looked at the responses before the experiment started, while our five listeners were at rest waiting for the storyteller to begin, we saw the responses were very different from each other and not in sync. And Robert, I've attached some images for you to see here. Uh, he continues. However, immediately as the story started, we saw something amazing happen. Suddenly we saw the neural responses in all of the subjects begin to lock together and go up and down

in a similar way. So you're seeing this synchronization of physical records of brain activity as the story starts. Now, when people's different brain responses become synchronized or locked in response to speech like I was talking about, that, this

is known as neural entrainment. In what Hassen's research found is that you could in train some parts of the brain without a coherent story So if you just play the audio of the story backwards and they did that to try to produce many of the same sounds as the story, but without any of the meaning, it entrains the auditory cortices, but nothing else. So that's just you know, the part for detecting sound. I'm just listening to noise.

And then when you play whole words but scramble them out of order, this entrains the auditory cortices and the quote early language areas, but nothing else. Then when you play whole sentences that makes sense individually but don't form a coherent narrative, you get entrainment in the previous areas plus areas associated with processing language and grammar, but nothing else.

But then finally, when you actually play a story that has narrative coherence, that has an arc, where you're actually telling a coherent story, you get similarities and alignments across listeners in areas of higher brain function like the frontal cortex and the parietal cortex. And as much as like Robert, you and I often talk about the particular powers of languages and how things can be lost in translation, it turns out that some important neurologically salient features of stories

are generally not lost in translation. So Hassan has also been involved in research that shows that if you take a real life story originally from a Russian speaker and you translate it into English and the authors specified quote we tried to preserve the content of the narrative while

reducing the structural similarities across languages unquote uh. They found that Russian speakers and English speakers also show aligned patterns of brain activation when listening to the story quote, beginning just outside early auditory areas and extending through temporal, parietal, and frontal cerebral cortices. So this means that it doesn't have anything to do with people sitting in a room

listening to English. You take a story in one language, translate it to a different language, and play it to people in those different languages, and you will still see this strange brain imaging alignment. So it's like we can pick up on the shape of story even if the the the the actual language is the one we don't we don't understand, yes, and so this research gets even weirder. So Hassan and colleagues have done if F M R I scanning on people watching TV shows like the BBC's Sherlock.

Did you watch someone, Robert, I've watched a few episodes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so uh you know it's it can be pretty engrossing. So they had people watched Sherlock while getting brain scan, and they later scanned subjects in a dark room retelling the story of what they had watched out loud. Then later they played back a recording of one of those subjects describing the story from the Sherlock episode to someone who hadn't seen the shows. And this was pretty interesting.

People in all three scenarios showed some alignment of higher order brain function that played out in similar ways seen by scene. Despite the fact that these three different that

they were doing these three totally different sensory tasks. Watching a TV show, remin remembering a show you've already watched, and then listening to somebody described the plot of a TV show to you, you'd still get, like when somebody describes a particular scene in the show, you'd get some alignment of brain activity that's similar to what happens when

people watch that scene. And I think this cross media alignment suggests that brain activity can be aligned by the content of the story itself, that it doesn't necessarily depend on whether you're watching with your eyes or listening or remembering. The brain seems to be, at least at some level

responding strongly to stories as stories. And this makes me think back to the idea of the story of narrative is being like just a basic survival adaptation, like the ability to to convene with other members of say your tribe, and and get info, get intel about what is happening in the immediate surroundings or in what may happen. Well, yeah, it seems like stories they like they suddenly they justness

our attention and we lock into them. And it's almost as if the brain has sort of built in story recognition functions that work different than just receiving verbal information of any other kind or watching somebody do something. If there's a character I to identify with and they're facing a plot, then something happens. All right, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Thank alright,

We're back all right now. When thinking about neurochemistry and and how stories work in the brain, one of the things that comes up the most on Internet searches about this is we're coming out of the lab of the neuroeconomist Paul J. Zach about narrative experience, attention, empathy, and UH, specifically the hormone oxytocin. Now, oxytocin, unfortunately is one of

those uh, one of those things. I think I mentioned this in the last episode where sometimes a story about neuroscience or a story about neurochemistry can become radically over simplified and misrepresented, especially in the popular press. You may have seen articles using the you know, the dreaded nicknames, the love drug, the cuttle chemical, the moral molecule. It turns out the truth about this, uh, this hormone is is much more complicated. There's still so much about it

we don't even know yet. It's a complicated story of what it's doing in our brains and in our bodies. But it did want to at least take a look at this angle since there's a lot of stuff out about it, a lot of stuff out there about it in in in science media. So what do we know about oxytocin from existing research? First of all, it's a molecule that's synthesized in the hypothalamus and mammal brains that has both physiological and psychological effects. Oxytocin levels can be

sampled in the blood. It does it's produced in the brain, but it does get into the bloodstream or by matt measuring patterns of stimulation in the vagus nerve. Classically, it's associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing, contributing to physiological coal effects such as uterine contractions before birth and the milk ejection reflects during nursing. It's also highly associated with mother

infant bonding. But the effects do appear to go beyond this, and this is where we get into some of the the more difficult territory. It does appear to play a vast and complicated role in human social behavior. Uh. Some of the earliest research on its social effects where that oxytocin is important in establishing trust and cooperation between humans. We appear to experience elevated levels of oxytocin when someone shows us that they trust us, or when somebody does

something kind for us. And these findings really shaped a lot of what people thought about oxytocin in the past twenty years. Yeah, but kind of it kind of big takes on this roll of like this kind of magical elixir wine that your body kind of squirts out when it's doing things that are aligned properly with sort of

you know, reproductive child rearing or social health. Yeah, exactly got this reputation of being you know, quote the moral molecule or something that or something that even could be given to people in doses that would make them more moral or something like that. And it turns out the

truth is much much more complicated than that. Right. But but of course we see why that narrative is is so appealing, right, I mean, Lord's got a hero, a hero, and we love a good narrative that involves, you know, a pill based solution to something, or in this case, I think it would be a nasal injection spray solution. This is even better than a pill. I do love a good nasal nasal injection solution in a narrative. Though.

I think actually the last thing I read about that was that there's actually some question about the extent to which nasal spray dosings of oxytocin really even take effect within the body, but they're used in a lot of studies. So uh. But anyway, this guy who's been behind a lot of the love drug moral molecule vision of oxytocin.

Is this neuroeconomist Paul Zach who's who's written on this subject a lot, and so his name pops up a lot when you read about story to helling and the brain and neurochemistry, and he has done some research on this, like he's been involved in or at least him and his colleagues and his lab have been involved in research about UH, say, subjecting people to narratives and testing blood oxytocin levels before and after they've they've experienced these narratives.

And what they claim to find is that when you watch a story that's got a narrative arc, classic example is like a story of a father talking about his son who's dying of cancer and and how to relate to his son, and it like it has building tension and gets to a climax and then he overcomes his problems. Narratives like this increase our blood oxytocin levels, and this

indicates that narratives cause oxytocin synthesis within the brain. And then he links this to all these ideas showing UH that oxytocin leads to cooperation, causes people to donate more money to charities, and and all these things like that, so and so, the general thrust is that narrative can be used to trigger these neurochemical reactions that cause us to experience more generosity, to experience more cooperation, to be more charitable, to trust more, to give of ourselves, and

that this happens naturally when we experience stories and and he frames this motivation to take a pro social, cooperative, self sacrificing action after a narrative. But I remember, after reading about some of this research, assuming the research holds up and this as we've been saying this, Uh, some of this research has had plenty of critics, especially in

how it's interpreted. But you know, I also started to wonder if the inverse would be true, Like if it is true that watching stories tends to cause these neurochemical cascades that uh, that do in fact make us more likely to cooperate or something. Would higher levels of oxytocin after watching a narrative also make you more motivated to go beat someone up if the story implied that you should.

I don't know, but I wonder, I mean, you could I can imagine what it would be the case if you had if you had a work of say, cinema that is ultimately inciting violence against some group, or clearly there have been there have been films of this caliber exactly right now. This guy writes also a lot about like their particular details he identifies as being most important, and narratives that are salient and the that are neurologically salient,

including having rising tensions. So like there's a dramatic arc where things keep getting you know, there's maybe a mystery or there's a problem to face, and the tension keeps getting ratcheted up and up. I'd say this correlates with conventional wisdom about what good good storytelling is, like you've

got to keep escalating the tension. Yet I do think it's fascinating that, like we know some of these things about storytelling, and yet so many professionally told stories are still so bad and like do not engage the audience emotionally at all, and do not escalate tension this way, Like so many movies are just awful stories, and yet the recipe is pretty simple. Yeah, I mean, it's sometimes just like a simple story of the simple story, the nice like trope filled story is just told semi adequately

at the heart of a film. It can make all the difference, be it be it like a really stylish film or a film like even like a b film like some of the a lot of the films that the you and I go for, like whether it is watchable or not, well, whether you know it's it's just it's at all. You know, a film you can engage with a lot of it hinges on there just being sort of a basic story structure that is in place, and of course many films managed to trip that up.

But but but yeah, as long as there's like the basic story there, you can you can forgive so much. There was a little turtle named Edna, and every day Edna swam out to the middle of the pond where she lived and met her friend, uh, the turtle ed. But one day she swam out to the middle of the pond and ed was not there. Where did ed go? You got a mystery. I don't want to brag, but I think I've already created more narrative tension than like

than half of the action movies that exist. Yeah, but anyway, coming back to this and and and questioning some of what we've been talking about. So from what I've read, Zach repeatedly stresses in public speeches and popular articles all the good things about this, I mean, assuming that this research is somewhat valid, that there are these links between you know, oxytocin synthesis in the brain and engaging in narratives that escalate tension and make you identify with the characters.

If there is something to that, he he stresses, this is a good thing, that it fosters cooperation and trust

and compassion and charity and all that. But as we mentioned earlier, it's really worth noting that some of this public messaging that's been going on about oxytocin has been criticized for oversimplifying the role of oxytocin and human life, especially in focusing too much or too exclusively on its role in positive emotions and pro social behaviors, and for overstating what the research allows us to conclude at this point.

Just one quick example, one of my favorite science writers, d Young, wrote at least a couple of really good articles on this subject, including one in the Atlantic, and and he points out that a more powerful emerging theory of the role of oxytocin in the brain that we still don't know a whole lot about it is that it increases the salience of social information. So it's not necessarily that it makes us trust or makes us love, or makes us cooperate. It increases our attention in response

to inputs that are socially relevant. Uh. And this might seem to cash out the fact that it has been linked to trust and all these other things, but it's also been linked to phenomena like outgroup prejudice, willingness to be dishonest if it would protect the in group, schaden freud, envy, boasting or boasting or gloating, I mean, all these things that we don't think of as very good positive social

emotions or behaviors. Yeah, I guess one of the things that keep him mind is that I think it's true you can you can take a read on on the human experience that we are chemicals and uh and a lot of what we do is governed by by chemical reactions. Right, But it's not just one chemical and it's not just one chemical reaction. Well, even when you focus on one chemical, it turns out that this one chemical has an extremely strange range of effects that are probably highly context dependent.

You know. Earlier and I think in the last episode, we were talking about the importance of context on when a story matters and and what its effects are. Context is probably very important on what the actual effects of oxytocina are. Again, I don't want to overstate what we know now about about this hormone. But if it is something like uh, like a neurochemical that increases the salience and increases our openness to and attention to socially relevant

incoming information, that could be very good or very bad. Right. It might help you pick up on cues that that allows you to cooperate with somebody, but it also might make you more socially paranoid and vulnerable to bullying and afraid that people hate you because of little signals you're picking up on. And that's just with this provisional idea that that's what it does. Ultimately, we don't know everything about what oxytocin does yet, so it is not just

a love drug. It's not a cuddle chemical. Instead, it seems that it's it's a hormone related to a suite of powerful socially salient emotions and motivations, So we should definitely blast it up our noses. This was saying, well, I mean, you know, it's great for research to continue, but don't conclude that, you know, you go out and dose all the dictators with with a nasal spray and

will cure all the world's ills. I absolutely think we should do solve the dictators of the world with a nasal spray, but we just have different thoughts about what is the appropriate substance. So given all those massive caveats, I'm not quite sure what to make of this last

line of evidence here. But if it is true that narratives increase levels of body oxytocin, and if it is true that knoxy that oxytocin increases the salience of socially relevant information, you can see how that would give narrative a lot of power as well. Essentially, it opens you up to being socially receptive to ideas and behaviors, to to trigger motivations for action, not necessarily good ones, so

maybe they could be good. I think it does bring us to you know, helps to just drive on the point that that narrative is something that's deeply ingrained in how we think, how we behave, and what it is

to be human. UH. To to go back to one of the UH the the experts that we mentioned in the first episode episode Carol McGranahan, I she I believe argues that that essentially, like our species is something like homo narrative or something to that effect, like that that that that's how like just ingrained in this this this need for narratives and this desire to to think about

narratives truly is we're Homo ds X mocking us. But you know, at the same time, it's kind of like language in that like if you try to imagine a human without language, if you engage in in the denial of language, you're talking about a severe abuse, or at least a severe negligence. And therefore, to to to deprive someone of of stories of narrative like it's it is equal parts unimaginable and monstrous, Like you would have to be like a diabolical, uh, you know, experiment in which

you've denied somebody that this basis of understanding the world. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, and I don't know what to do about this knowledge. I mean, I feel fairly convinced that Rosenberg is correct that narratives cloud our understanding of history, and I guess necessary necessarily of the present as well. Essentially, thinking of things in terms of stories prevents us from understanding what's really happening with causes and

effects and reality. I think that's absolutely correct. He's right about that. And yet I don't know what to do about it, because I don't think we can we can beat story impulses out of people. I don't know what to do other than to just say, like, hey, be aware of this. Maybe maybe that'll help you. I know it will help. I think. I think I think awareness

is is the key. And in in a way it's it's kind of beautiful in this simplicity, right, because this is ultimately the same thing that has been been been preached in in in a few different religions, particularly in Buddhism. You know, the idea that one that is a self awareness that has to take place, like you have to be aware that of these various influences on your perception

of of reality. And so if we're aware of the dangers of narrative as well as the benefits of narrative, then hopefully we can be in a better place to properly navigate uh these pitfalls. Here's one piece of practical advice actually that that does come out of this research. For me, is if you're worried that a narrative is working on you, is is working on your brain in a way that may actually prevent you from, say, understanding the truth or doing the right thing, or something like that.

You know, if you're worried about a narrative's power over you, break your attention that this is the most powerful thing we can do in reaction to a narrative, because the way the narrative maintains its grip on us is by holding our attention. If you just force yourself to look away and think about something else, it's often shocking suddenly how quickly the spell breaks. Have you ever noticed this, Like you're talking about focusing on something in your environment, Yeah,

it could be in your environment. I mean narratives take different forms. So it might be you're reading a book, it might be you're watching a video or a movie. It might be somebody's telling you something, whatever it is, a lot of the power of the narrative is in keeping your attention wrapped. You are there, and you always

have the power to break. To break that attention, right, you can look at something else, you can focus on something else, you can think about something else and see and see see what happens when you come back, see if it was worthy of your attention in the first place. But that reminds me of something Galen Strawson said about,

you know, consider the lilies of the field. I mean, he didn't say that he's quoting the Bible, but you know, like in order to go back to, you know, various meditative practices like focusing on breath, coming back to my breathing, coming back to something that is not this uh this, you know, this, this this storm of narratives about past and future and self and other and coming back to something as as basic and ultimately largely objective as what is my breath doing? Is it going in or is

it coming out? What am I watching that bird doing? You know? I mean that's one of the reasons it's so calming to to uh, you know, participate in nature, to to observe nature. I think that's a really good point.

And bringing it back to fictional narratives, do you ever notice You might not agree, but I feel like there's a counterintuitive process where I notice and understand the structure of movie plots better if I pay less close attention to the movie, Like if I'm sitting with somebody watching a movie and we're occasionally like commenting or chatting back and forth, and I'm breaking my attention on the film.

I actually have a clearer picture in my head of the shape of the story and where the beats are and all that. And I think that might be because I'm not I'm not just totally sucked in on the story and riding along with it. I'm being pulled out and I'm getting I'm getting a zoomed out view by

doing that. Interesting, I wonder if one could combat the potentially negative aspects of narrative by just anytime someone tells you a story, imagine Nicholas Cage in every role, you know, because uh, I feel like increasingly nothing, nothing brings me out of a film, like like a good Nicolas. And I know there's been kind of a Cage renaissance of late, but still, uh, you know, throw in something that kind of turns it nuts on its head. It makes it

less of a of of a narrative. I mean, maybe that's what we do when we say picture picture the eye's in their underwear, you know, like transformed the narrative of what's happening into something that is lower stakes. I don't know. Picture Nicolas Cage in his pyramid in New Orleans. Wait, no, what what? Oh? I was trying to think, what did I see him in? It was so great? Recently it was Mandy Oh, yeah, he was. He was great in that. But at the same time, um, he was inherently distracted,

you know. Um, I think that was maybe the right movie for him. But I'm gonna, I'm actually gonna maybe go against public opinion and say that I wonder if it might have been a better film with maybe a slightly more nuanced performance in that role. But I'm still perfectly happy with what I got, though, made me pull on my long chainsaw. Robert, All right, Well, there you

have it. I'm sure everyone has something to add on this one, because we all love stories, we all love different types stories, and then we're all dealing with with various forms of narrative and self narrative in our own lives. So we'd love to hear from you. In the meantime. If you to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where we find all the episodes.

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