The Gods Must Be Counterintuitive

rich lady. Uh the end you have you have missed some key elements, but I bet you could do it. Come on, you you know the story of Cinderella. Yeah, okay, So there's some magic mice in there that that talk and have engaged in some some comic mischief with a cat. Uh. There's an evil stepmother. Uh, they're evil step sisters. And I believe in the more uh, you know, classic versions of the tale and non Disney versions, there's a little

bit of like nasty uh torture revenge at the end. Yeah, there's a lot of foot cutting and stuff like that in the In the classic versions, as told by like the Brothers Grim and Charles Perrault. Uh. These old classic folk tales that were collected hundreds of years ago often had very strong, bloody, uh sadistic elements to them, but they're also intensely memorable. Yeah. But at the same time, it's you know, you get down to its roots. I

feel like it's a deeply unpleasant story. And then even in the Disney version, like Nobody Nobody turns into a dragon, there are no monsters. There's you know, a little bit of magic, but it's it has it has a lot to compete with with when it comes to other like major Uh. You know, you know tent poles, fairy tales. Well, Robert, you are a spoil sport for my examples today. Uh, come on, you you know the story of Cinderella. You definitely know the story of Rapunzel. That's got some good

to eye gouging and all kinds of weirdness. Uh. But what I bet you don't know is the story of the Donkey Cabbage is a k a. The Donkey Lettuce. This is true. I was not familiar with this tale prior to this recording. Also a story recounted by the brothers Grim. It's a classic folk tale that that has been put into these collections of folk tales, and I think maybe I'm going to do the horrible, horrible act of trying to tell it from memory. Stop me if

this is getting unbearable, Okay, donkey cabbages. So you've got a young huntsman. He goes out one day into the forest and he comes across an old crone in the forest, and the old crone is begging for alms. So he takes pity on her and he gives her what he can afford. And she likes this. She's like, Wow, you took pity on me. So I'm gonna give you some advice. Up ahead in the forest, you're gonna come across a tree that has nine birds in it, and those birds

are gonna be tearing at a cloak. Now, what you need to do is shoot those birds and then one of them will fall dead, and you need to take it's hard out and eat it. And when you eat the heart, every time, every time you wake up, after you eat that bird's heart, you will have a piece of gold under your pillow. And also hang onto that cloak, because by putting it on, you can wish yourself into any place and magically appear there. So the young huntsman

walks a little bit further into the forest. Sure enough, he comes across the birds. He shoots into the flock of birds, one of them falls dead. He takes the cloak from the birds, and he cuts the heart out of the dead bird and he eats it. So then he goes home. He goes to sleep next day. Sure enough, there's gold under his pillow, and so he waits a while accumulating the wealth right, the sleep wealth, until he's got a good collection of gold, and now he thinks

time to go explore the world. Right, I'm I'm young, I've got a magic transportation cloak, and I've got gold under my pillow every night, So he goes roman all over the place and eventually ends up at a castle. At the castle, he sees another ugly old crone, but not the original crone. This is a different crone who is in fact a witch. And he sees a beautiful young woman, and so he asks to be let into the castle where there is a witch who knows about

his magical items and wants to take them. And so the witch gets her beautiful young daughter to seduce the huntsman so that they can steal his magical items. And so, first of all, the young daughter gets him to drink and poisonous draft that the witch has created, uh that will cause him to vomit up the bird heart that he ate. And so she gets him to drink that he vomits up the bird heart, she takes it and she eats it, so now she can get the Now

she can get the gold under the pillow. Second thing, the young the young beautiful daughter takes him up on the mountains one day by saying, oh, I wish you could use that cloak of transportation to take me where we can gather some gyms up in the mountains. So they travel there together with the use of the magic cloak, and then while he is drowsy on the mountain, she

steals the cloak from him and leaves him there. He comes across some giants on the mountain, and the giants they discuss whether or not they should kill him, but eventually they decide, now we'll just leave him here because eventually the clouds will carry him away. So the young huntsman gets carried away by the clouds. He ends up getting deposited in a field of cabbage is. He's hungry, and so he eats some of the cabbage. This cabbage

transforms him into a donkey. He doesn't really like being transformed into a donkey, but he eats some other cabbage from a nearby field and transforms back into a human. He realizes that each of these fields grows cabbage. One type of cabbage transforms people into donkeys, the other type transforms donkeys into people. So he takes cabbages of both kinds and he goes back to the castle. He goes to the old witch and tricks her into eating some of the bad cabbage that turns you into a donkey.

The old witch turns into a donkey. He also accidentally tricks the maid servant and the young daughter who are at the castle also into eating the donkey cabbage, and they turn into donkeys. Then he takes the donkeys to a miller and he tells the miller too, basically tells them to mistreat the old donkey and to be nicer to the young donkeys. The miller comes back to him a little while after that and says, well, your old donkey died, and the other two they're not going to

hang on much longer. But then the huntsman he relents from his revenge and he says, you know what, I'll transform those donkeys back into people. So he gives them the good cabbage that transformed back into humans. And then the the the witch's daughter and he get married and they live happily ever after. Well, that is quite a story, Joe. If it were, I would say it was. It would

be pretty great if it were. If this was a summary of kind of like a freewheeling like randomly generated like dungeons and dragons in a series of encounters, you know, because it has that kind of vibe to it, like there's just kind of a seeming randomness to it. The magic it feels convoluted, the characters are confusing. The moral message of the piece is uh is equally lost on me. Yeah, um, now, I certainly. Well it's sort of a weird revenge story. Yeah,

but it it really takes its time getting there. It's kind of it does kind of feel like a winding goat trail to nowhere. Uh, it's shaggy dog story. Yeah. But but at the same time, it does remind me of some of I mean, I've had this experience with other folk tales before, where you start reading it and it seems to be kind of going in circles and it's making nonsensical choices. But then I often end up reminding myself, well, I'm not encountering this story in its

original language. I am not a part of the culture that that it was the intended, uh you know, listener to the to the tale. Like I've had a similar situation watching some of the old Russo Finish fairytale epics. Oh, like Jack Frost, the one they did on Mystery Science Theater three thousand, which is just the best. Yeah, it's one of my favorite episode. It's tremendous in the movie itself,

that's father measure. I mean, the movie is beautiful. I mean that if you challenge anyone who has only seen that MST three k episode to to look online and find a more pristine, uh copy of it, because the footage is just beautiful. It's this is a high budget

film at the time. But the story, yeah, for for for non Russo finished viewers, I guess it it is confusing and you you kind of lose track of like what magical piece of magic is in play and what's the what's the morality of the character turning in like having his head turned into the head of a bear and then he he loses the head of a bear just for promising to be good to the outsider. That story just feels like the hell you go to if you get killed in the tiger by a gnome. But

it reminds me a bit of Donkey Cabbages. Well, yeah, so I guess that the big question that we're we've we've led ourselves to at this point is like, what is what is ultimately the difference? What what makes one story Cinderella and one story a donkey Cabbages? And why to Cinderella stick with us? Whereas donkey Cabbages is just it's just leaking through your fingers almost immediately upon grasping it. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, one thing is that Cinderella is not just the the sort of European tradition grim fairy tale Cinderella. They're Cinderella type stories all over the world. This is almost one of those those or stories you know that seems to have an ancient prototype that filters into cultures all around the world or maybe has parallel development because it's themes are so basic. Um, Cinderella is a widely known,

widely distributed, ineradicable myth. Meanwhile, donkey cabbages is it feels like donkey cabbages could disappear from the earth and we would all be poorer for having lost donkey cabbages because I kind of love donkey cabbages, but nobody not that many people would notice it was missing, right, Um, it has not penetrated the culture in the same way that the Cinderella archetype near rative has. And so the question

is why are some narratives more successful than others? Like you're saying, what makes one story, uh, the the the narrative equivalent of a highly successful insect species, and the other one and endangered species? Why is donkey cabbage is endangered while Cinderella is thriving. It would be a shame if we lost donkey cabbages forever, But it seems like that's much more plausible of an outcome than losing Cinderella. Right, Okay,

Well we'll come back to this question in just a minute. First, let's explore a related question and see how these two subjects come together. This question is why do religions emerge and what makes one religion more successful than another in the same way that one narrative can be more successful than another. You know, we've talked before on the show about all of the various psychological and biological explanations that

people think may exist for the emergence of religions. I think I think it's safe to say this is not a subject where there is a settled, known answer, But there are some answers that seem more plausible than others, right, And I mean, you have some answers, are certainly models for how it could occur, and I am often inclined to think, well, it's probably multiple different models at once. Of course, it's it's hard to just say that, like,

this is the equation for religion in human culture. Yeah, there's probably not one cause of the emergence of religion. But what are the dominant physical, biological, psychological factors that make a religion a thing that exists? Why did how did we get this way? Now some of you might be wondering what you were talking about fairy tales, now you're talking about about religion. You know, what is the connection between Cinderella and the great religions of the modern world,

of the ancient world or the ancient world. I mean, obviously one of the big ones is that there is any religion you look at, there is going to be some sort of narrative or narratives that they're at the heart of its sacred narratives upon which it is based. Yeah, there are almost no successful religions that don't have at least some strong narrative component in them. And uh, and so obviously narrative might might be the common thread between

the success of folklore and the success of a religion. Yeah, religions tend to have heroes. They didn't have villains. They they they are stories that have just taken on a grander cultural and personal meaning. So as far as the emergence of religion explanation goes that, there are a lot of ideas that have been put forward by scholars over

the years. I know, actually recently, Robert, you talked a little bit to Barbara J. King about this at the World Science Festival, like what psychological drives and biological drives play into the emergence of religion? And I know part of her answer had to do with with social cohesion and stuff, right, Yeah, And in grieving and bereavement and sort of the the precursors to grieving and bereavement that they can arguably be identified in uh in certain animals,

such as some of our closer primate relatives exactly. Another very common explanation from evolutionary psychology is the idea of the hyperactive agency detection. And we've talked about this on the show before, but the basic idea here is that there's going to be an evolutionary selection pressure in favor of people who are over sensitive about the possibility of detecting agents, meaning beings with intentions like animals or other people from ambiguous data. So the classic example, as you

imagine two different scenarios. One is you hear a twig breaking in the forest at night and you think it's a tiger or you know it's my nemesis, Jeffrey and he's come for his revenge, and then you raise your guard and try to get yourself out of the situation safely. The other scenario is you hear a twig breaking in the forest at night and you think it's probably nothing. You just keep collecting firewood and then I don't know,

maybe break some other horror movie sins. You split up, You drink some beer, you do all the bad stuff. Those are the very people who either are either eaten by tigers are killed by Jeffrey. Right. So the people in the latter scenario are probably going to be correct more often right. More often. It's probably nothing, but there's

a relatively small benefit to being correct. The person in the first situation who's afraid hyper aware of what might be an animal or a person, some kind of intentional agent. They might waste some time and energy being overly cautious, but they're less likely to get killed in the off

chance that they're correct about detecting an agent. And so, because this person survives more often the genes that put them on the hyperactive lookout for people or for animals, these intentional agents, those genes proliferate in the gene pool, and this causes us to read intentions into our environment

at an unusual rate just to be safe. And this reading of intentions into all kinds of random phenomena lead us to the belief that there actually our minds controlling events that we don't understand, in essence to the idea of God's So that's one interesting possible explanation. There's also like the meme obedience duality, which basically says there's a selection advantage for children with brains that tend to tell

them to believe what adults tell them. You know, if you are warned that it's dangerous to leave the campfire at night, more children who believe that warning and accepted

are going to survive to adulthood. And then pigging backing on this, you'd eventually have adults spreading religious memes by telling myths, stories, folk tales, and the beneficial belief in obedience mechanism that causes children to survive after a warning not to leave the firelight also causes them to take these stories very seriously to believe them to pay heed

to their values. But whatever the actual biological and psychological reasons for the emergence of religion, it leads to this question that we asked a minute ago of why some religions are more successful than others. I mean, there are tons of religions throughout human history that have been invented and now they're extinct, and very few people ever followed them. Right, So they wanted that the ancient Egyptian religion, why is it? Why is it not survived in a in a real

tangible sense in the modern age. Why did it not even travel well beyond Egypt in its own day? But even it was relatively successful at last time. I mean, think about all the variations on it, or all of the other types of mythologies that got started but never really went anywhere. I think of all the cults that emerge that we know relatively little about. I think of all the heresies that were that were squashed out before they could be really take on a name beyond heresy exactly.

I think because you think about how we refer to them, we don't even refer to them as religions. They were just upstarts that were destroyed by the more popular and

powerful models of belief exactly. So the question we want to look at today is could the variable success of new religions have anything to do with the question we were asking a minute ago why some folk tales and legends are more successful than others, Because Robert, as you mentioned a minute ago, what religions and and folklore have in common is narrative. Almost all of the world's religions past and present have major narrative elements. They're based on stories.

Um So even though there are other components to religions. We know there's metaphysical incentives, a sense of meaning, social inclusion, and all that stuff. Since the narrative element is so common, wouldn't it be reasonable to guess that part of what makes a successful religion is containing successful stories, Right, the right kind of stories that you know, made me feel a little bit good and also makes me feel a little bit bad and just the right way. Right, a

good religious narrative, it hurts so good. Uh So this this could be wrong. I mean, maybe narrative is not actually a major element, but I think it's a very reasonable starting assumption. And if this is the case that the success of a narrative plays into the success of a religion, what makes a story that leads to a successful faith? Maybe we should take a quick break and then explore more when we come back. Thank alright, we're back.

So we've asked the question what sort of narrative of what kind of story is going to make a religion successful? Or just make a story of a fairy tale successful? In general? Like, what what are the elements that are going to get guaranteed that it resonates and remains in human culture? Yeah, I guess maybe it makes sense to start with narratives and then see how this applies to religions. Um, so it's time to explore. Basically, I would say, the key idea of this episode the idea of what's come

to be known as minimally counterintuitive elements of belief. Now, we can't know for sure what makes one religion or one story more successful than another, and it's probably due to multiple factors rather than just one. But this minimally counterintuitive elements paradigm, I think, is a really clever answer, offering what I guess is an important part of the picture of the comparative success of stories, narratives, and belief structures.

There have been a ton of papers investigating this over the years, a lot of studies, but I thought we should examine the issue through one one important study from the two thousand six and that's a paper published in Cognitive Science by Aura norn Zion's got A Tran, Jason Faulkner, and Mark Schaller called Memory and Mystery the Cultural selection

of minimally counterintuitive Narratives. So I want to read a quote from their introduction starts to set the scene for why memory would be a relevant issue here the author's right quote. Of the many ecological and psychological factors that influence the extent to which any such narrative achieves cultural success,

mnemonic resilience maybe one of the most important. Memorability places necessary constraints on the cultural transmission of narratives and ideas in oral traditions that characterize most of human cultures throughout history. A narrative cannot be transmitted and achieve cultural success unless it stands the test of memory. So, in other words, in the telephone game of belief, you've got to have a core story that is going to remain more or

less intact with each retelling and each embellishment. Yeah, and I mean part of the problem is that most of human history, most people have not had access to any recording method for narratives. Most people throughout the history of the world have been illiterate and have transmitted stories orally by hearing them told and then retelling them to others.

So if a story cannot be accurately remembered, that story doesn't really have much of a chance of survival, right right, I mean, I'm reminded, I want to one of our recent episodes that dealt with writing. I want to say there was one description that UH discussed writing as an ability to like freeze thought or too in some way you have to to to to freeze thought in time, And that's exactly what it's doing when otherwise have these

stories would be perpetually changing. Yeah, and of course I think there there is plenty of evidence that stories do change through transmission in in oral cultures, right, I mean this happens all the time. Every time you tell the story, you make little changes to it, and over time those

changes accumulate. But how does a story become resilient? How do its key elements become set well enough that it can survive the sort of changing landscape, of of forcing, of of being stored in human minds alone and being transmitted through human retelling alone. Well, there's the old quote, right, it don't mean a thing of it if it ain't got that swing, right, if this is what you know, there's gotta be this that, there's gotta be that element

that just really stands out right, it makes it stick. Um. And I think that probably seems like a no brainer on the surface, right, Memorable stories are going to resonate and survive. I can't help but think of the modern elevator pitch idea and all of this. You know, like you you're in the elevator, You've got you got two sentences sell me on your script. You gotta you gotta phrase it in a memorable way. Yeah, so what do you say? Say jaws with pause? And they're like, that's brilliant.

What does that mean? It's like kujo, I guess you know about you took this saying that I was familiar with. It's just become mundane in my my world of cinema. But you put a twist on it. You put this there's there's this new idea and that's what's standing out in my mind. Plus it rhymes well. I would certainly not discount the power of rhyming. Rhyming poetry might be selected not just because it sounds good, but because it's a memory ating device, right, And this can certainly be

a factor. You know we're talking about sometimes the fairy tale loses something in translation. Sometimes it just loses the rhyme, like these are the connections between words that make a fanciful story makes sense? But anyway, that the broader point here is that the contents of our narratives, our folk tales, and our religions are influenced by the underlying capabilities and

biases of our brains. So just one crazy example of this, all other things being equal, you probably would not expect a religion that offered a reward in the afterlife for good behavior of being thrown into a notion of spiders. And there's a reason for that. People have enough of a natural dislike of spiders that this type of religion

would not be successful. The human brain is not fertile soil in which to grow that myth, right, It just naturally grows some types of content better than others based on natural predispositions, capabilities, and biases of the brain. So the authors are pushing a hypothesis in this paper about one possible relationship between memory cognition and the success of

narratives like religious myths. They write, quote, we hypothesize that narratives combining mostly intuitive concepts with a minority of counterintuitive ones enjoy a memory advantage and as a result, achieve cultural success. Such a m c I template. An m c I stands for minimally counterintuitive, a little bit counterintuitive,

not totally counterintuitive. Such an MCI template. Maybe no accident. Indeed, we propose that it may be a recipe for cultural success us compared to narratives that fit other templates, for example, no counterintuitive concepts at all, or many counterintuitive concepts, those that are minimally counterintuitive, maybe especially memorable, and therefore more

likely to achieve cultural stability. Alright, So it's not a situation where it's like going to the movie, right, the movie is not just an accurate depiction of real life that would be so boring, right, But it's also not just so bonkers that it's just complete surrealism, which granted can be great, give but but but it's that middle ground that's where you're gonna find the really successful films. Right. It's where every most everything is pretty mundane, but there's

there's some element that's out of out of whack. There's a mysterious stranger that's not what they seem, you know. I often think about how there are there are versions of this that work at various levels of narrative that contribute to their how aesthetically pleasing they are. One thing I think about is the realism of dialogue character. Sometimes people say I love the way that characters in this movie talk how people really talk. The characters in that

movie did not talk how people really talk. If they actually talked how people really talked, you would be so bored you would think the movie was terrible. People do not talk in deliverable dialogue that drives a plot. What you probably mean is they talked in an unnatural way that was just barely unnatural enough to be interesting, but not so unnatural that it felt false, the way bad

dialogue in a movie often does. And of course it's easy to to just to to go to examples that have like a speculative element that's thrown in like everything is normal except one character's magic. But but it can also work in other ways to right where there's an inversion of of character, like the you know, the village priest is actually evil as opposed to good, and you know, whatever the expectation might be like that the character that is that is expected to behave in one way morally

behaves another way. Yeah, get aesthetically pleasing narratives are surprising enough, but they can't be too surprising otherwise you just stop being able to appreciate them as narratives. You want to keep with It's like they say, you want to keep one foot on the ground, right, you don't want to keep both feet on the ground. And likewise you don't want both feet just floating free. So but in this uh, we've been using the idea loosely here for a moment.

What in the literature itself makes a concept intuitive or counterintuitive? And so the author's right quote. As several psychologists and anthropologists have noted, the key is whether the concept is consistent with or violates ontological assumptions about the properties of ordinary objects. So they're going with this idea of ontologies,

and all that means is how things normally work, right. Um. The one trope I'm instantly reminded of is just the the with a heart of gold trope, you know, because there's she's a prostitute with a of gold, he's a prostitute with a heart of gold. Their assassins with hearts of gold. Uh, you know that's the you see that spend time and time again, right um? Or one of my favorite recent ones, even though I never actually watched the show. I just really love the trailers. He's not

just a pope, he's a young pope. Popes aren't supposed to be young. I know, and I want to find out just how young is this pope. He's a baby, baby Pope. I'd watch baby Pope. Actually that's not a bad idea. They had Boss Baby. Um what does boss Baby? I don't I don't know. I just know it exists. Um, you have that movie where the horse played professional football. I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, yeah, like

was it like Airbud he was? Yeah, basically the Airbud trope, but this was a horse that was, due to some sort of loophole and the rules, was able to play professional football, and maybe was college football. So this is not exactly what the author there talking about, but it's pretty close. So they're basically a few different types of intuitive ontologies that govern our basic understanding of the world at several levels, and the author's list for example, our

intuitive theory of physics. This is the ontology of our basic understanding of how objects and energy work. Uh, this is the intuitive theory you used to conclude that a brick will sink in water and not float, or to conclude that a falling snowflake won't land with enough forced to pierce a hole in your skull. Right, then you've got the intuitive theory of biology, and this is our

basic understanding of life forms. This one will intuitively tell you that trees do not speak French, and sharks can't walk up onto the beach and bite you off your towel, and snails don't live to be thirty seven million years old.

And then you've got your theory of mind. And this ontology tells you that, for example, other people can have both true and false beliefs, and they can't read your mind, but they can see where you're looking with your eyes, and they can imagine what you're thinking based on external clues. And if you write any of these theories, you you instantly find yourself when dealing with narrative elements right now, Yeah, you break physics, theory of physics, and then you have superpowers,

you have miracles. You you you break the theory of biology and you get magical creatures and immortal bodies, and you break theory of mind and you get things like psychics. Yeah, it's almost it's kind of telling, isn't it That anytime you come up with an idea of breaking one of these intuitive ontologies, you instantly have what sounds like a

concept for a story. Isn't that odd? Now? The author is right that there are some minor cultural differences in how these ontologies work, like different cultures sometimes have slightly

different beliefs about theory of mind or biology. But then again, some bottom level elements of these theories appears so early in development and are found in so many different cultures that it looks like they might be more sort of hard coded instincts from primitive parts of the brain, more so than culturally conditioned belief And the examples that the authors give or studies that have found evidence that babies as young as four months old already show expectations based

on some core aspects of our theory of physics. For example, they've got the idea of a solid object, and they clearly do not expect one solid object to be able to pass through another solid object, and they also do not expect that a solid object can be in more than one place at a time. Yeah, I mean children have an innate number, since each one is a natural Euclidean born to navigate a three dimensional world of fixed and movable objects. In other words, we start utilizing geometry

before we can even name things. We don't understand wall or cat, but we already can think in geometric terms. For instance, kids will use geometric clues to navigate through rooms, uh and uh. And given all the means of navigating their environment, they're most likely to use lengths of walls in a room to remember where a toy is hidden, rather than color or decoration. We're also born within anate understanding of basic physical laws. Only adults believe in magic. Well,

toddler will see right through all of the supernatural. There was actually an m T study that even found out that young children understand it teleportation is not feasible. Yeah, I mean it makes you wonder how much of our understanding about the world, like our coded our coded knowledge about how things work is actually instinctual, like a kid

would know it without ever having to observe anything. Yeah, like just sort of the basics of gravity, you know, I mean, that is the environment that we have evolved to thrive it. Yeah, that's going to be an interesting study when for the first time, when children are brought up in space in microgravity environments. Though actually that might be a really bad idea because that could disrupt development

and everything like that. But just assuming it were to happen somehow, you'd wonder would those kids have an intuitive understanding of how gravity worked back on Earth? Would it be that built in? Also, the authors of this paper right that preschool aged kids in most cultures already have

a common set of biological intuitions. For example, they know that making superficial alterations to an animal doesn't alter what kind of species it is, So they know that you can't just like put a put a care it on a horse's head and make it a unicorn. It's still a horse. Also, children from preschool age typically have a basic theory of mind. The classic example is understanding that other people can have false beliefs. Kind of a profound

thing to realize. Do you remember realizing that, Robert? I mean it might have come from having younger siblings, you know. I feel like that that might be the area where those those kind of ideas are initially introduced, you know, where you're you're told you're younger sibling does not know not to touch this hot surface, you know, and then therefore there might be some false belief baked into their

understanding of their immediate surroundings. Yeah, I wonder, well, anyway, so the authors observed that despite how universal or near universal these beliefs are, our folk tales and religious mythologies are full of stories and images that violate these ontologies. We were just talking about this. Anytime you you just say something that violates the ontology, immediately it sounds like a story and not just like a concept. But you

want to tell a story about it. Frogs that can talk, people that can pass through walls like ghosts, or people who can read minds or otherwise have knowledge of that they couldn't access. Uh, nasty old Richmond who are capable of change from Christmas, I can't. I kept thinking of that one in the research. You know, Christmas Carol and Scrooge Oh I'm kind of a Christmas Carol lover. Actually, Oh, I mean, you can't help but love it. But I

did kep keep thinking of it. You know, It's like, ultimately, is is it just this story where the the the one area of inversion, the one area that is um that's counterintuitive is that Scrooge was capable of turning his life around and changing, whereas I in many cases, reality would seem to indicate that it's the opposite. With old, nasty rich people I'm just throwing that out there. I'll probably come back to that idea again. Well, let's let's

get there. I mean, so, the question is, why do so many popular narratives like mythology, folk tales and so forth, why do they always violate our on tall jeez? Why is that just intuitive to us at this point that oh, if you say a frog that can talk, that's a story. And why do almost all of our most popular stories do stuff like that? The idea of realistic narratives is

actually kind of an unusual thing. And in the history of successful folk tales and narratives, yeah, I mean I remember in uh, in creative writing classes where the you know, they would drive home just because it really happened doesn't mean it's interesting, right, which which is is true. But I think one of the most obvious answers would be novelty, right.

I mean, we we we we create the idea of the black swan even before we know what it acts, that it actually exists, um and and and mentioning that I'm touching on NASA Nicholas Taleb's black Swan theory, um, the idea that major black Swan events are the norm.

Uh and uh and and also the problem of induction induction here, So I wonder if we're drawn to these novel ideas because human existence kind of demands that we both move forward with expectations based on the known world, but with an openness to the possible inversions that shake everything up. So, you know, it basically comes back to the tiger in the grass and the high grass and when and how we're going to judge the sound of

a snapping twig. Oh, I didn't expect us to come back and make a connection between minimally counterintuitive ideas and UH and the hyperactive agency detection. But I can see a through line there, and I also can't you know, I can't help it, but think about the the idea

that inversions end up highlighting the reality. Right, So by having a story in which Scrooge is able to turn his life around, it just kind of also drives home that most people don't, you know, by having somebody that acts heroically, like truly heroically, it's kind of reminded that, well, most people are not heroes and would not do this. It's not how you see how things could be otherwise that you recognize how things are. Yeah, but you have

another possible answer here. Oh well, yeah, So the authors here are drawing on a bunch of research over the years. It's indicated a couple of things. First of all, there is the indications that sometimes it appears that people are better able to remember counterintuitive ideas than intuitive ideas. So you tell somebody a frog that talks, they'll remember that item better than you saying a frog that jumps, right.

A frog that jumps is not memorable. Right. But then again, in recent years before the study, other research has made it clear that there there's some pressure coming from the other side that while some counterintuitive content makes ideas and narratives more transmissible and easier to remember, there's also a

limit to this benefit. So some examples of this balance, like ghosts and spirits are one of the most popular narrative subjects in history, but they've basically got the properties of a person except somewhat counterintuitive, like ghosts have the powers that humans do not have, like moving through wall, but otherwise they behave is quote, ordinary intentional agents. Well, with ghosts, you guys, you can make the argument that uh, any of like the ghostly details like that's all just fluff.

The basic mechanics are just it is a person without physical substance. Yeah, exactly. Another example the author's site of how people tend to limit the counterintuitive features of of things they believe in is that research by Barrett and Kyle in nineteen found quote people spontaneously anthropomorphize God in their reasoning, even if doing so contradicts their stated theological beliefs. So while they don't, you know, they don't think that

God is like a normal person. When they don't remember to limit themselves from doing so, they tend to think of God as a normal person, but just with great supernatural powers. And these types of limits on the wildness of supernatural elements also seem to be present in existing

cultural narratives. Just one example, an existing study of its metamorphosis from Kelly and Kyle in nineteen eighty five found that even though there were a lot of magic transformations of people and things, it was much more common to transform a person into, say, an animal, than it was to transform them into an an inanimate object. That was sort of less of a violation of their ontology. But this reminds me of the children's books Sylvester and the

Magic Pebble. I wish I may have mentioned on the show before. Um, it's an award winning children's book about a donkey who obtains the magic pebble, and the magic pebble allows you to grants your wishes essentially, and the donkey ends up being turned into a stone, and then the pebble falls and rolls away from him and he stuck as the stone. Oh yeah, it's and it's it's

kind of a traumatic story to read. It's really good, but I remember reading it to my son when he was he was really young, and I feel like it was difficult to get across this idea that a donkey turned into rock, not not a rock that looks like a donkey, just a rock that looks like a rock. Whereas stories of people turning into animals, donkey cabbages. Yeah, yeah, those make I feel like those were more easily transferred to him, you know, like he was able to buy

into those stories a lot easier. Where this idea of the pebble turning the donkey into just a rock and then somehow the rock was still conscious of everything it was it was kind of a confusing magic to try and relate to him. Yeah, I mean, I'm there with you, like turning into a donkey that makes sense, turning into

a rock, I don't know. Uh. So the authors write how Barrett and Niehoff in two thousand one tested how well people could remember and retell stories, and these stories were broken down by how much they contained objects or ideas in three different categories. So you've got intuitive, normal stuff, intuitive but bizarre, this is weird stuff that doesn't violate ontologies,

and then counterintuitive stuff that does violate ontologies. And they found that after retelling the story through three generations of transmission, people remembered and passed on counterintuitive ideas better than simple intuitive ones. And after three months, participants could still recall minimally counterintuitive elements better than other elements. And this delay is an important part because how do stories get passed

on in the wild. Right when you retell a story to somebody, you don't usually tell it right after you heard it. Right, You've had some time to ruminate on it and embellish it, both intentionally but also just through the the flaws of our memory systems. Yeah, memory mechanisms. I mean, we've talked recently in uh for example, the Illusory Truth episodes about the ways that we edit our memories just by remembering them, right, and these are memories

of things that actually happened as opposed to stories. I'm reminded of Carl Sagan writing about how how quickly an historical account became a tale of ancient high magic, like while the actual historic individuals were still alive. Oh yeah, yeah, that came up in the story. I don't remember it was. I think it was a European uh account, I don't remember. We went into this in I think Our Ancient Aliens episodes.

But he was talking about just how unreliable of many of these folk tales or fairy tales and legends could be in trying to find some nugget of the fantastic, because they could very well just be completely embellished from a very mundane incident just in the course of a

decade or or thereabouts. Right, So, given what seemed to be the case from the existing literature, where people are more likely to remember things that are somewhat counterintuitive than they are to remember just totally mundane intuitive things, and at the same time are seem less likely to retell stories that are just full of counterintuitive stuff, you know, crammed to the gills with it. Is it the case that there's a cognitive selection pressure in favor of m

C I are minimally counterintuitive elements and stories? Are we more likely to remember and transmit ideas that violate our intologies a little bit but don't violate them too much? Is there a sweet spot for the kind of narrative that makes it through our brains to the next generation of retelling and gets retold. Now, one thing that the author's wonder about, and you've got to wonder about, is if the hypothesis is correct that people are more likely

to remember minimally counterintuitive things. Why don't minimally counterintuitive elements just dominate successful cultural narratives even more than they do, Like many popular myths, legends, and folk tales contain these elements, but they're outnumbered by mundane intuitive concepts. I mean, think about,

for example, stories in the Bible. Stories in the Bible are actually mostly mundane if you read them, they're they're you know, long mundane narratives with occasional punctuations of counterintuitive elements and magic and stuff like that. Now, of course, there are a few books and passages in the Bible such as you know, revelations. Apocalypse is various prophetic visions that are sort of crammed with bizarre and counterintuitive imagery and stuff, but most of the time the basic stories

are mostly mundane. Yeah. Though, though even with something like the Book of Revelation, we we do have to stop and you know, pause and wondered, like, just how counterintuitive

is it really? Because certain on face value, yeah, I mean on face value for the the average modern day individual picking up Book of Revelation, Yeah, it just seems like crazy town, right, But we do have to remember the Book of Revelation is a symbolic work from the first century CE, and it's a work of apocalyptic literature.

So uh, it would have followed particular conventions of this style, conventions that would have been better known and understood by the intended reader, and the intended reader in this situation would have been very much an insider as opposed to just your average Joe Christian. And we touched on this the same situation with the highly symbolic work of Hieronymous Bosh Before. You know, if you look at it and you think, well, this is just bizarre, this is crazy.

Clearly this artist was just on drugs. But the closer you look, you realize, well, okay, maybe some of that is true, but but on the other hand, you do have a lot of of symbols that are speaking to a different viewer, and you were not the intended audience totally.

So even in some of these cases, it might be that if you could, if you could sort of decode the meaning of of all of these revelations, that it might actually sort of key out to a more mundane kind of message that has some minimally counterintuitive suggestions in it, even though the face value imagery is pretty off the wall. But of course, another example would be standard folk tales, like the stories of the brothers Graham. A little red

riding Hood is actually a mostly mundane narrative. There are only two really counterinto developments. You've got a talking wolf and then you've got a person who can survive being eaten alive by a wolf and come out of the

stomach alive. Those are the two magic parts. The rest of it is a normal story with intuitive elements, and so the authors of the study think that maybe we should think of each narrative as something like a single unit of transmission, rather than looking at individual elements within the story to see how many counter i counterintuitive ideas the story elements contain. You think about how many does the story as a whole contain. Because you don't usually

tell part of a story. Maybe the point of a story is to get transmitted as a whole, and so the optimal level of counterintuitiveness might function at the level of the whole narrative rather than individual ideas within it. So it's possible that the narrative itself as a whole might need to be minimally counterintuitive, not just stuff within it being minimally counterintuitive. It needs to violate our ontologies

a little bit. But it can't contain too many of these things, or maybe then it becomes the donkey cabbages. And you know, once you start piling up all the donkey cabbages stuff, I mean, who gives a dang like it? Just it's sort of makes you stop caring, right, Right, it just become too many fantastic elements and there's nothing I can relate to, Right, So how do you test to see whether this is true? Well, the authors put

together a couple of studies. The first study was to look at lists of minimally counterintuitive ideas compared with intuitive ideas and to see how those lists fared in recall, and then the second one. The second study was to look at existing folk tales and to see how well comparatively minimally counterintuitive folk tales did. So, the researchers put together lists of two word ideas, some of which were intuitive, some of which were minimally counterintuitive. Here's an example, closing door.

How do you like that? That's pretty normal, right, thirsty cat, four legged table, confused student. These are all you know, this is the right world, right, everything's okay. How about thirsty door. Oh now it's getting a little poetic, confused table, mischievous coat, impatient fist, contrived dog. Yes, these are minimally

counterintuitive for sure. And so the researchers tested how well group of ninety four students could remember stories like this, uh in immediate recall three minutes after studying a list, and then also in um and then also in a later test after a week, and the results were that in immediate recall three minutes after studying, the lists of entirely intuitive items were actually remembered best just kind of strange, like the ones that were just all normal concepts were

remembered the best of all, but delayed recall was a different story. After a week, there was massive overall degradation of memory, but the lists that people could recall the best were the ones that had a minimal number of minimally counterintuitive elements in them. So after a week, if the list was all intuitive ideas, people remembered it less. If the list contained equal numbers of intuitive and counterintuitive ideas,

or contained all counterintuitive ideas, people remembered it less. Us what people remembered best after one week where lists that had a minority of weird monster concepts in them but were otherwise unremarkable. And note that this is for lists, not individual concepts. And this seems to partially back up the idea that this works at the function of a of a narrative as a whole instead of just individual ideas that you would remember as a single concept or

object or word phrase. And then in the second study, they tested a survey of folk tales from the collections of the brothers Grimm, and they counted numbers of counterintuitive elements that they contained and compared that to how successful and well known these folk tales were. So like if you count all the stuff in the Donkey Cabbages, you'll get a pretty big number, Versus if you count all

the stuff in Cinderella, you'll get a smaller number. And so they made a chart basically of all these stories and compared how successful the story was as measured by how familiar test subjects were with them and how many Internet hits they got about the stories versus how many counterintuitive elements were in the stories, and they got the same kind of result. They found that for the less memorable folk tales, as measured by familiarity and the Internet results,

there was a pretty flat distribution. Uh, there were MCI tales tales that were highly intuitive, tales that were as bonkers as the Donkey Cabbages or worse. But for the more memorable tales, the really successful ones, there was a clustering around a small number of counterintuitive elements. And that means that the m c I narrative template seems somewhat validated.

Those that had penetrated the culture more deeply on average were the ones that had a small number of counterintuitive elements, And in their discussion, the authors proposed that mc I narratives are more successful partially because they're easier to remember as a whole, and they write quote these deviations involve evocative, minimal counterintuitions that are quote relevant mysteries. They are closely connected to back around knowledge, but do not admit to

a final interpretation. As a result, they are attention arresting and inferentially rich, and therefore encourage further cognitive processing and multiple interpretations over time that facilitate the cognitive stabilization of narratives.

And I thought that was interesting because it made me think of a discussion we were having in the episode about finite and infinite games and the religious scholarly work by James P. Cars about the idea of of mythology and um whether a mythology can survive if it is made finite, or if a mythology is is only kept alive by sort of like the the unending tendency to change it and and keep working on it, to keep

asking questions. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, I think that is how that is how the stories stay relevant without having to just like bend and break your interpretation of them.

I mean it. I think they may be onto something here with the idea that stories are can only be properly mysterious and arresting to us and keep prodding our brains if they have the right balance of mundane content and confusing content, right, I mean, like, if if something is just totally unfamiliar and unrelatable, then you you don't even have a context in which to frame questions or which in questions can feel like they mean something. But if a story is totally mundane, you don't end up

asking questions. All right, don't not know. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Thank you, thank you. All right, we're back. So, if the authors of the study we just looked at are correct that minimally counterintuitive narratives narratives that have some weird, counterintuitive content,

but not too much. If those types of narratives are key to the success of folk tales and mythology that spread throughout oral cultures that have to be remembered and transmitted, is it also true that modern literate societies, or even ancient literate society societies in which stories can be written down before they're transmitted, that those societies make room for more highly counterintuitive narratives or for more mundane totally intuitive narratives.

Does that make sense what I'm asking like, if if that's the sweet spot for oral culture transmission, does writing change what type of mythology becomes salient? Well, we come back to this idea that writing frees his thought, right, and nothing frees his thought. And this goes back to some of the ideas of James P. Cars as well. Nothing is going to freeze thought like sacred literature. Yeah, and I actually found out a wonderful paper on some

of this UH. It is titled UH An Alternative Account of the Minimal Counterintuitives Effect, and it was by by cognitive scientist Muhammad Afzala Upal and this was published in two thousand ten in Cognitive Systems Research. And he argues that that essentially we have WE WE WE. You can look at m c I in two different ways. You have concept based m c I and that's where just the concept itself is resonating, right, because it's it's a it's a donkey that talks, etcetera. Right. But then you

can also look at it as context based. And he makes the case that counterintuitive concepts lose their advantages as they become widely accepted. In part of the culture. Oh. Interesting, So if I introduce to you a new counterintuitive concept, you might be more likely to remember that than if I just say, like a ghost, which is a counterintuitive concept, but you're familiar with it, right, or a vampire. You know,

it's like, I know that I'm bored with vampires. Give me something with a little more jazz to it, right, But if I say a turtle that drinks human blood, people are probably going to remember that. Yeah. Therefore, he argues that ideas with enhanced counterintuitiveness obtain transmission advantages, and this results in a ratcheting up of counterintuitiveness that may help explain cultural and evayation and dynamism. Interesting, So this would be bigger than just religions. This would be for

ideas in general and narratives in general. Right, though he is particularly interested in religion. That's like one of his uh, That's one of of Upaul's areas of expertise is cognitive science of religion, and he he says that quote it also allows us to account for the development and spread of complex cultural ideas, such as the overly counterintuitive religious concepts, including the Judeo Christian Islamic conceptions of God. Does that

mean like overly counterintuitive because not anthropomorphic enough? Um? Yeah, and just I mean I think part of it also comes back to examples like revelation. You know, you have just to to a modern readers, just completely counterintuitive. What does it mean? Why is it there? What is it supposed to be saying to me? Part of the problem is that it's sacred, right, it's it's it's it's frozen

in time. It's no longer speaking to the people. Uh, the specific individuals who would have who would have understood it without a bunch of you know, the a lotical dissection. Interesting, uh So, Paul writes. The context based view posits that religious concepts such as God's ghost, angels, and devil have become maximally counterintuitive in the Barret and Boyer sense because they have had to survive in the minds of an adaptive and innovative population of human beings over a long

period of time. In light of the model we develop here, one should not be surprised to see maximally counterintuitive concepts to form a significant part of religious beliefs. Indeed, it would be surprising if they did not maximally counterintuitive. So stuff that um, because it's hard to get your counterintuitive juices flowing anymore because you've been so exposed to ideas like spirits and ghosts that they want to offer you visions that that tell you like, you're not going to

get a weirder idea than this. Yeah, I mean you get into areas uh. And this this is me commenting on his material. He didn't make the specific point, but you know, stuff like the transfiguration of Christ and though the Holy Trinity and these kind of complex ideas of of what what is the nature of God? You know right is it's it's built into it. That's that it's

a mystery and you can't understand it right. And then add into that too that you have you know, these ancient religions are I often use this analogy for for Hinduism, Like, Hinduism is not this one product. It is this well of time and culture with all of these varying ideas and different interpretations of God's that are then uh spun around and used in different ways. And you do see that in Christian traditions as well. Hinduism is a world

of belief and layer upon layers. It's like an archaeological dig but then of course that raises the question of modern religions, right yeah, And so I would wonder if the m c I hypothesis is correct as an explanation for the success of religious narratives. Shouldn't it be that we see unusual religions emerging in a most literate world where things get written down a lot, and those religions

have more permission to be the donkey cabbages of religion. Right? Well, I mean it, if you can write it down, you can make it sacred, and you can say nobody touched this. Uh. And and one of the one of the points that

Topa makes about this, he compares it to emergent religions. Uh. And how you have You have new religions that have emerged, and they generally have an uphill battle because they're they're having to go up against the established religions that have in you know, in many cases, centuries upon centuries, thousands of years of history, all these sacred texts. And somebody is saying, you don't alter this. This is the text and uh, and this is the accepted interpretation of it.

And if you tweak it in any way, well that's heresy. And we will punish that. Uh, and but then he points out what you end up with with something like say, the Church of Scientology emerging getting enough power, and what what do they turn around and do they kind of they make their own sacred text. They say, you can't mess with this, you can't take these that don't be a squirrel and turn these concepts around and try and market them off into your own heretical religion. Is squirrel

part of their whole thing? I I wouldn't aware of squirrels? Yes, uh oop al rites quote. For instance, the founder of Scientology, Ron Hubbard, is reported to have referred to those who modify as techniques as squirrels who should be harassed in any possible way. Weapons used to discourage any change in religious doctrine and practice include ridicule, expulsion, and harassment. Continuity and religious doctrine is explained to the extent that such

thought control techniques are successful. So it's kind of a it feels like a struggle between the uh, the the oral stories and the written stories, right, the one that wants to live and change and the other that we're trying to artificially set in stone. Here's a question I have, and I think it is to some degree addressed by this literature, but I not sure if there is a settled answer on it. What is the stronger tendency them

the counterintuitive element adding tendency or the subtraction tendency. Do stories over time tend to undergo more adding of Donkey Cabbages style elements or more subtraction of donkey Cabbages style elements? Well, I I like the like Coopo's argument that there's a there's a dynamism in place that you're gonna have You're gonna have it come in waves. To think of it this way, right, you have alien, it's just about a person, you know, a crew on a ship against one alien,

and then things get crazy. You get aliens, and you've got multiple aliens, you get new kinds of aliens, and it's a it's a it's a fiesta but aliens. I would say it's minimally counterintuitive. I mean it is a mostly mundane narratives like one thing, which is that there are these horrible monsters. But but there's a ratcheting up. So think of it like one one alien is one

m C I and then multiple aliens. That's a bunch of MC eyes and then Alien three comes around or what alien cubed Sometimes it's display does and that when they're like, all right, let's boil it back down. Just one m c I Alien in play and then four

things get crazy again and you see this back and forth. Right, um but I feel like that's probably the tendency, right, is that you'll ratchet things up more and more um m CIEs are added, and then it kind of goes in reverse, fewer and fewer, sort of getting back to the it becomes more relatable as it is it is. It is a transferred from user to user. Yeah, this is all real interesting. But now I'm I'm I'm undercutting myself because I'm thinking about the difference, uh, of there

being both kinds of narratives going way back. So if you go back six years ago, think about the difference between the basically emergent Catholic Christian story compared to the narratives you find of Gnostic Christian texts. At the same time, the Gnostic Christian texts are wonderful, they are worth reading, and they're so interesting, but they're cosmology narratives or they're they're off the you know, they're outlandish, they're super counterintuitive.

They're barely tethered to any kind of understandable or mundane earthly story. You get the Pleroma and y'all, the Oath. It's just not it's not as earthly and tethered and relatable as most mythologies that you're used to. It's yeah, this is where you have like their ideas, like the first creation and the secondary, the dimmi urge, the different levels of creation, the beings of light and all this stuff. I mean, it's not stuff that's easy to picture. It

doesn't work like a normal human story. It's very abstract and removed from from grounded reality. It seems too counterintuitive to be successful. But then again, I guess historically it was not successful, true, But maybe it was only it can only be successful in a time and which this uh, and say that the Catholic narrative, it's just so widespread and so dominant that it it kind of took on

the trappings of the physical laws of the of life. Yeah, And I guess it also happened within a broader Christian context. So many of the people who practiced Gnostic Christianity would think of it as a sort of like an extra helping. It's like the secret add on mythology that you take in addition to your regular Catholic mythology. So in a sense, Catholicism was roller skates and then uh and then a NaSTA.

The gnostic Polie system was was roller blades. Maybe, I mean it'd be like roller skates with an extra rocket booster or something or Robert. This has been fun I feel like this is a really compelling explanation for the dynamics of of narratives and memory and human culture. I I don't think i'd fully tried to put all this together before, but once funny enough, it is very intuitive once you hear it. Yeah, yeah, I agree, it doesn't It makes you rethink everything from your you know, your

favorite books and movies to major world religions. Uh, and I do think it is. It is getting at the it's some of the truth of what's going on, but maybe a minimal part of the truth. Well, we shall see. There's always a lot of pizza pie left over all. Right, Well, there you go. If you want to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head on over

to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is where you will find all the episodes, including the various episodes we've done on religious and narrative topics over the years. UH and if you want to support the show really, as I've said before, rate and review us wherever you have the ability to do so. That helps us out immensely big thanks as always for wonderful audio producers Alex

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