Angus Fletcher on Inventions in Literature

self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m

Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Angus Fletcher, a professor of story science at Ohio States Project Narrative, the world's leading academic think tank for the study of stories. He has dual degrees in neuroscience and literature and received his PhD from Yale. He also taught Shakespeare at Stanford and has published two dozen books and dozens of peer reviewed academic articles on the scientific workings

of novels, poetry, film, and theater. His new book is wonder Works, Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature. Hi Angus, Welcome to the show. Hi Eric, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to have you on. We're going to discuss your book called wonder Works, The Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature. This book was really fun for me to read. I've been a fan of reading for so long. It's interesting to

reflect on what reading does in our lives. And we'll get into that in a moment, but let's start like we always do with the Wolf parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,

which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins, and the grandfather says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well. I have to start off by confessing that I think about life in exactly

the opposite way from the parable. So maybe the number one thing I would say is that my own belief in life is that anything that empowers you you should use to empower yourself. So to the extent that you find power in this parable, you should follow it to the extent that you think that maybe there's more to life. I think slightly differently, and maybe the place to start is I don't think that there are bad wolves inside us. I think everything inside us is a good wolf, including

things like fear and anger and things like that. And I think that really life comes down to not judging ourselves, not judging the things inside ourselves, but knowing what time is right to let which wolf out. Yes, I tend to agree with you, even though I do love the parable. I'm curious as I was reading it to you, I thought Angus is a professor of literature. I don't think that's exactly how you describe yourself, but you know a lot about it. Is that actually a parable? I refer

to it as a parable. Oh no, it's absolutely a parable. The reason it's a parable, ultimately is because it's an attempt to give us a moral It's an attempt to take a narrative and tell us what is right and what is wrong. And so we find those parables throughout philosophical and religious literature. And the reason I'm a little bit different is because I don't take a moral view of life. I take a medical view of life. And in a medical view of life, you don't judge things

as being right or wrong. You just identify moments where there is pain and suffering, and you say, what is the best way to alleviate this pain in this suffering. So, for example, if you do something wrong, I would never judge you and say you're a bad person. I would say, okay, well what do we do to correct that behavior. You don't necessarily need to be punished for doing something wrong, but let's just kind of figure out the way to

fix that behavior. And in the case of something like fear, I think fear is not a bad wolf because I think there's a lot of times in life when it's appropriate to be afraid. I mean, if we weren't afraid, we can never have courage, and fear can be a useful guide if you're in a dangerous situation, to encourage

you to get out of that situation. So, for me, a parable is an approach to life which suggests there's a right and a wrong, And my view of life is essentially there's a good way of life and there's a better way of life. Yeah, I've often said Buddha is and being one of my primary orientations in life, Buddhism. I've liked the way they use the word skillful and unskillful as a way of thinking about our behavior. And I've joked that a skillful and an unskillful wolf just

doesn't quite have the same ring to it. No, it doesn't, Although I do like the idea that secretly out there in nature there are wolves practicing being more wolfish. And in a way, that's really what we have as humans have done. We've taken all these kinds of natural things in ourselves and we've practiced them, sometimes with good results and sometimes with less good results. And I think you know, at the end of the day, life really is about

achieving mastery with our nature. Each of us has our own nature, and figuring out how we can become more skilled being ourselves, being the person that we are, being the most trained wolf. To me, that's kind of the goal of everything. Yeah, So let's start with the title of the book. You talk about the most powerful inventions in the history of literature. So how are you using the term invention in literature because that's obviously a slightly

different way than most of us would think of an invention. Yes. Well, first of all, you're being kind. Everything in the book is exactly the opposite of what pretty much everybody thinks. So I should perhaps start out by being honest and saying, even though I am currently employed as a professor of literature in a literature department, my background is in neuroscience, and so I think about everything from the perspective of

the human brain and how human brains work. And that's one of the reasons why the book is so different, because mostly what I'm interested in in the book is how literature has evolved and been developed over history to help us get the most out of our brains, by which I mean both healing our brains, I mean our Our brains are filled with all sorts of things that can cause us grief and that can cause us pain in moments, can be trauma in our brains which literature

gonna help us heal. But our brains are also just feel with enormous amounts of untapped potential in terms of courage, in terms of love, in terms of empathy, in terms of creativity, in terms of problem solving power. And so what an invention is is an invention is a breakthrough that was made historically that created a device in literature that activates or helps grow some part of our brain.

And the remarkable thing about these inventions is you don't need to know how they work or even that they're there for them to give you benefits. I mean, it's the same way that almost none of us understand how a computer or an iPhone works, yet we still use them successfully. But once you do know about them, that empowers you in all sorts of exciting ways. Mean, the more you know about a computer, the better you can use it. The more you know about the phone, the

more you can use it. And also what it allows you to do is realize that most of us approach literature is though it's all kind of the same thing, that it's all kind of doing the same work. But really literature is filled with many different inventions that are doing many different things. So in the same way that if you went to a text store and you know you wanted to make toast, you wouldn't go by a stereo. That wouldn't make you toast, And if you wanted to

listen to music, you wouldn't buy a toaster. And so knowing what different works of literature can do and knowing what the inventions are that are inside them empowers you to get what actually you want out of literature. So if you want more love out of literature, there's a blueprint and you can identify quickly which works are going to give you more love. If you want more courage, if you want more curiosity, if you want more spirituality, if you want the to kind of activate the spiritual

zones of your brain. Literature, as far as we know, is the first technology that humans invented for spirituality, and you can get it in all kinds of ways that even replicate the effects of LSD and other types of of kind of intense experience. So the idea behind the invention is basically to reveal that literature is a series of tools. Once you understand what those tools are, you can find them more quickly on your bookshelf. You can

find just the tool you're looking for. Us you're using a hammer instead of us all and you can then use it better to make your brain to be more the brain that you wanted to be. One of the things that you talk about is that the way we are taught literature these days is not very helpful for helping us to utilize it in the ways that you're talking about. But nor is just reading it as entertainment. And so those are maybe the two edges of the

extreme right. I read it in a very analytical way or I read it in a I'm just looking for entertainment kind of way. What are ways that we read it in between? And I know that's a lot of what you talk about in the book, but if you're going to say in general, a way of reading, because what I noticed is that a lot of times I'll read something and I might have a mild positive negative thing to it, but then when I hear somebody else describe what they got out of it. And this happened

to me over and over in your book. You know, it's like the lights are going off. I'm like, oh my god. You know, I just interviewed George Sanders the other day and he's got a great book now about what these great Russian short stories teach us about writing. And I'm reading it like, well, that's okay. I guess it's okay, and then he starts going through it and I'm like, it's like my mind is completely open, and so I'm kind of curious. How do you recommend people

use literature? First of all, I should say that there's nothing wrong with using literature to have fun, anymore than there's wrong with eating chocolate or candy, you know, or ice cream. Fun is an important part of life, and we should all just preserve some time for having fun, including with your favorite movies or your favorite music or anything like that. I mean, fun entertainment is fine. But of course, if all we do in our lives is have fun, it starts to feel very empty, very very quickly,

and we want something more substantive. And that's why we have evolved this system in school that's supposed to give us that substance. But instead, what happens at schools we all know is you go maybe you love a novel, maybe you love a poem or whatever, and you go

in school. Instead of talking about how that poem fired your imagination or inspired your hearts, or made you fall in love with the characters, whatever, Instead of talk talking about those immediate, obvious human responses, we instead spend all this time talking about themes. We spend a nurse amount of time analyzing the words. We then write these argumentative papers, which are all about what the author is saying. And those tools are actually literally imported from the Middle Ages.

They were used to interpret the Bible. They're known as semiotic interpretation and the ideas to somehow extract truth from literature. But what I suggest instead is that what you should do is lean, first of all, into more of your own primary responses. If you like a character, you should chase that. If you feel an emotion, you should chase that. And then over time what you can start to do is you can start to learn how to get more of that natural stuff that our brain is naturally processing

from literature out of literature. Well, how do you do that? Well, the first most simple thing you can do is not try and be distant from the work lean into the work, and in particular, try and listen to the voice of the world. Think of it as a story that's being told to you by someone. Try and listen to that person's voice. Try and connect with that person in this same wingy that you connect with another human. I mean,

this is just basic advice in life. I mean, if you hang out on the margins of society and are constantly judging or analyzing people, how many friends are you gonna have and how much of the benefits of friendship are you going to enjoy? Not very much. But if you lean in, you listen to people, you care about people, um, you open yourself up to forming a new friend, you'll start to benefit in all these unexpected ways from other people's company. And it's the same thing with literature, just

starting to kind of lean in in those ways. More probably what I talked about in the book is that once you know what you want to get from literature, of which I say, you know, they're you know these kind of twenty five things I talked about in the book, and they're literally hundreds. I mean, the only reason there's twenty five in the book is because the publisher told me that they didn't want the book to be any longer.

But you know, there's all these things you can do, and once you know that, then the simple thing is identify the blueprint in the book and then just start to practice using that blueprint in the same way. You know, like if you just found a bicycle somewhere you didn't know how to write it, you'd kind of get on the bicycle. You might coast down a hill on it.

You might think this is kind of fun. I don't know what's going on, and then someone points out to you the pedals and they say, you know, push on these pedals in this way, and you'll go a lot faster. It's the same thing with the book, and it's the same thing with literature. When someone starts to show you where the pedals are, it becomes very quickly intuitive and natural and just kind of speeds up the natural process

you have. But you know, just like anything in life, I mean, you kind of have to be taught by someone who has wisdom. Wisdom is having done something that you haven't done yet. I mean, that's what our teachers are supposed to have. They're supposed to say, hey, I made a boat, let me teach you how to make a boat faster. You know, hey, I made a meal. Let me teach you how to make a meal faster. And so the book is basically just kind of giving you that wisdom, saying here so you don't have to

reinvent the wheel yourselves. Here's different ways you can get more of the stuff you want out of literature. The inventions have the best titles. I mean, I'm just gonna read a couple of these so listeners get a flavor of them. Feed your creativity. Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland and The Invention of the Anarchy Rhymer. As an old punk rock lover, I like to hear about anarchy, uh banished to spare John Dunne songs, and the Invention

of the Mind eye Opener. And I wish I could get listeners to vote on the one of these they most want to hear about, But I'm just gonna have to choose. I want to go with one that I know is dear to you because I've heard you talk about how much my Angelou means to you, and it's the belief in yourself. Maya Angelou's I know why the cage bird sings and the invention of choose your own accomplice. Yeah, so this might be my favorite. I mean, my Angelou really is my hero. And the reason I admire her

so much is because she is so much herself. She lived the most extraordinary life. I encourage anyone um who just wants to be inspired about the possibilities of being a human being on this planet. Well, first of all,

just read her Wikipedia page. You just see. I mean, she just did everything you can imagine, from being the first black female cable car operator in San Francisco to organizing for Martin Luther King, to running a newspaper in Egypt, to being on Broadway, to being a for instance, professor, to being just about everything, and every year of her life she seemed to kind of transform as somebody else. And the question is, how do you have such a rich life, how do you have such a full life?

How are you so empowered to bloom in all these ways? And her memoir contains a literary technology for helping you get that out of your life. And it's not a technology she completely invented. It's once, she refined from earlier writers, going all the way back to the ancient Egyptians. But Basically, the simple neural trick here is to go back from an outside perspective and validates the core person who you are,

validate your core self. And so you know, for example, um, a lot of us when we're younger, my angel talks about at the beginning of her memoir, a lot of us are filled with various types of joy and rebellion, and we do things that you know, might get us scolded and might get other people to tell us, don't do that, that's wrong, so on and so forth. You know, and we learn a time to kind of judge ourselves

and censor ourselves and reign in ourselves. What the technology in her book does, and there's a complicated way that she does that. It basically means that she alternates between being her previous self, her younger self in the past tense, and then jumping into the present tense and validating that self. But your brain goes through this process of being there and then being in the future, and then being there

and being in the future and constantly validating itself. And what happens over the course of that process of self validation is you learn to trust yourself and you stop judging yourself and thinking that you're doing something wrong, and that allows you to grow and be your best self. It's a it's a technique that psychologists called self self affirmation.

And what happens in the story is that as she's telling her story and your experience this as you read it, you start to actually hear your own story more in your head. You actually start to hear your own biography. You start to reflect on your own life reading her life, and you start to feel more positive about your own life as you read about her life. And so really her memoir is actually your memoir. So that technology that's one of the kind of more modern technologies, is one

of the more complicated technologies. But again, if you just want to experience it, just read My Angelou and then you immediately start to get it. Then you can look in the book here are the pedals, and start to press them a little bit harder and harder and harder. And then the more you read of My Angelou while pressing the pedals, the more you'll get of that experience. There's a bunch of things in that chapter that I

think are very interesting. One is you talk about how, particularly as parents, we have this dilemma which is that we really want to give advice and wisdom to our children. Or when you get to be my age fifty, everybody, you know, you're the elder to most people. You know, you you're like, oh, I've got all this wisdom to teach you. And yet you talk about how important it is for young people to believe in their own self

belief right, their own ability to handle things. And so if they take the advice of older people, it diminishes their belief in their own ability to handle things, you know, both the parent and the child. Or in this quandary, and you go on to say that you know, a wise parent discovered a third option. Can you tell us kind of what that third option would be? Yes, So the third option is to validate the child's attempt at the same time as you correct their method or the

way that they're doing it. And we've all noticed this when we um when we try and help our kids or help you know, I'm a teacher. So when we try and help students, the more we help them, the more actually hesitant they become, and the more they start to look to us for affirmation, you know, and we're

actually eroding their self belief. And this is very hard because as as a parent, you want your kids to succeed, and so you're always interfering and being like, oh, you should do this way, or don't make the mistake that I made, and all this kind of stuff. But then the more you do that, the more you trigger this kind of primal anxiety in them, and they start to rely more and more on you and less and less on themselves. And so what you have to do is you have to figure out a way to empower your

kids to learn for themselves. But how do you empower them to learn for themselves at the same time still teaching them? And again, this is what maya Angelos memoir does. But the basic technique the psychologists have discovered is that you do a kind of two hander. On the one hand, you affirm the deep reason that your child is trying to do the thing that they're trying to do. So you might say, I admire your bravery, you know, or I admire you trying to do it your own way.

I admire your creativity. Whatever it is that you see in your child is a kind of deep roots of what's causing them to leap forward. And then you say, but you know, it might be even braver to do it this way, or it might be even more creative to do it this way. And so you provide that little tweaks at the same time as you're affirming the kind of root emotional drive, you're just shifting the behavior.

And you know, this is the same basic thing that psychologists have really learned over the past twenty or thirty years, the importance of emotional affirmation while providing a kind of shift in behavior. For example, you know, I mean, if if you yourself are doing something that's making other people uncomfortable, or you have a behavior that you'd like to change, it's not effective to shame yourself or say, oh, this

behavior is coming from a bad place. So, for example, I mean a simple one if if you're the kind of person like me who can't control himself around chocolate cake, you know, it's not helpful to say, angus, you're a pig, Angus, you're greedy, and there's something wrong with you. Instead, you should say, angus, how amazing that you have such joy for life, How amazing that when you have something you

always want more of it. That is so wonderful. But if you really want more life, you're probably gonna eat a little less chocolate cake because the more chocolate cake you eat, ultimately, the less chances you really have to be fun because you're always dealing with this stummying or whatever.

So you see how that works, where you affirm the underlying emotional drive while at the same time shifting the behavior, and the more you do that, the more you make the person feel positive about themselves while giving them the tool that they need to act in the world. You use this term self affirmation in here, and it's used in a slightly different way than we often think of. Right. The parody of self affirmation is the Stewart Smalley Saturday

Night Live guy looking in the mirror. And so affirmation is a really interesting psychological concept because in what cases does it work and what cases does it not work, because it wouldn't have gotten attraction it's gotten in lots of places if it didn't have some sort of benefit. But you talk very much about affirming something very different than my beauty or how much people like me. You talk about affirming my values. Yeah, and that's exactly right.

I mean, we think in this world that there's something dangerous we would call it self love, and we think that people who have too much self love or ridiculous or vain or dangerous to themselves in the community, and the people who spend too much time on Instagram looking at themselves and all these kinds of external things, and that is ultimately a bad thing, not because it makes bad people, but just because it makes you unhappy. I mean, the more you focus on external things, the less happy

you get, the less joyful you get. And you know, the less joyful you are. That doesn't just take away your joy in life, It takes away your ability to give joy to everyone else. It takes away your strength and all these important ways in which you can support and nurtured people around you. So the real reason that it's not good to be superficial is it just ultimately makes everyone else less joyful. So what's the alternative, Well, how do you affirm yourself in a positive way? Well,

first of all, you don't affirm superficial things. And by superficial things, I don't just mean beauty, but I mean anything that is external to you. For example, a behavior, a lifestyle, a thing you own, a career, a way you have of playing tennis. I mean literally anything that is external to your hearts. Those things are all things you can change, because that's growth. Growth in life is

changing the external things around you. For those of us who are getting older, growth means our hair turning white, you know, or face getting more wrinkled, and that's something we should embrace as growth. Well what you affirm them? As you said, our values and values are things that each of us choose for ourselves. So you know, a value might be love. And if at the bottom of our heart we really believe that the reason we're on this earth is to love other people, then we should

affirm that part about ourselves. We should say that is what makes you good? Is your ability to give and receive love. Do that and everything you can do. Or maybe our core value is family, or maybe our core value is courage. Maybe we say, you know, I think really the reason that I'm alive is to be brave and to dare to do things, to face my fears and to encourage to other people to face their fears. We affirm that. Maybe it's creativity. Maybe you're someone who

wants to create something new, we affirm that. And you know, if you're someone who's creative, we don't affirm whether or not you wrote a best selling novel, or whether or not you're painting made you this much money, or whether you know those are all superficial things. What we do is we affirm the fact you get up every morning

and commit to doing something creative. And the more we feed that part of ourselves, the more the growth will happen, and the more will end up in the life that we always wanted to have but just never knew was there. And you'll just wake up one morning and used to be like, I'm so happy that I have this life. This isn't the life I planned. But it's like a plant that grows into its place in the sun. You will grow into your place in the sun by nurturing

those deep things in your heart. And because each of us has our own thing things in that heart, we will all grow in different directions. And that's what makes the garden of life. So we don't go around judging other people because they're not like us. We go around celebrating ourselves because we're lucky enough to be who we are. That's beautiful. I love that. I think values are so important. You know, we talk on this show a lot in

a couple of different ways. One is I've been very inspired by acceptance and commitment therapy, right, and you know, it's basic thing is focus on what you value, you know, don't focus on how you feel so much, focus on what you value and then committing to those values. It's really a way through, at least for me, and I think for a lot of people have some pretty rocky emotional territory to commit to trying to live according to

certain values. Oh absolutely, And you know, commitment is the ultimate act of courage, but also the most important thing we can do as humans, because I mean, the thing about commitment is you have to do it in the face of uncertainty. We are tiny humans and the world is huge, in the future is unknown, and to commit is so audacious to say I'm gonna do this thing. You know, I'm gonna I'm gonna stand my ground. But everything good in life comes out of a commitment to something.

This is one of these hard things to grapple with. But one of the reasons that our emotions are so volatile is just because that's kind of the way that our brain is. Our brain is not perfect, and you know, our brain can get caught in cycles that are not helpful to it. And you know, in general, our brain also has evolved never to be that happy and also

to be filled with anxiety. Why is our brain evolved this way, Well, because you know, we evolved in a very unstable environment where if you relax that could be dangerous. And so the ancestors of ours who survived tended to be very nervous ones who are just always kind of looking out all the time. And you know that's not helpful in our current world to be anxious all the time. And so to a certain extent, you have to say to yourself, it's not weird or assigned that there's something

wrong with me that I'm anxious. This is just how I am. Or you know, if I feel grief, that's real. I feel grief, I feel loss, I feel my own vulnerability, I feel fear, I fear a loss of meaning. I feel all these things, you know, but at the end

of the day, those aren't what defined me. You know, what defines me is the ability to make a commitment to something bigger than myself and hold onto that thing and then watches that commitment that I make makes me bigger than myself, transforms me, grows me, and it's never going to get rid of all these emotions. I mean, I don't care how successful you are, even on your own terms. You're always gonna have grief, You're always gonna have anxiety. But just understanding that those things, at the

end of the day aren't the most important things. And they will come and they will go, but what will remain is your courage and your commitments. Yeah, there's so many things you just said in there that I'd love to touch on, but I'm going to use this as an opportunity to hop back to a quote from the book that I was hoping to find a way to put in here. I'm just gonna read it back to. It's it's a couple of sentences, but I think it sums up so much of what you just said and

so much of what this book is about. You're talking about having a brain, and you say, a brain fueled by emotions that propel us forward, but that also causes to crave things that harm, and to fear things that don't exist, and to rage against age and death and other parts of our nature that can't be escaped. So deep, so sprawling, and so intangible is this problem that it can seem beyond the grip of any technology. That, in brief is why literature was invented and what it was

invented to do. It was a narrative, emotional technology that helped our ancestors cope with the psychological challenges posed by human biology. It was an invention for overcoming the doubt and the pain of just being us. I love that, and I love that last line for so many reasons. But the biggest part is that it just normalizes, like you just did in in what you were saying before,

you normalize the fact like, yeah, being humans difficult. It might be the hardest thing on earth because we have this most extraordinary thing in our head, which we all know it's is this brain, which is capable of just so many miraculous things. I mean, you know, you only have to look out at the great you know, works of arts, um, the great works of technology and science

and humans cree. I mean the awe that we feel around each other, and you can just look all the day, and I mean, I'm just stunned by my own children, by other people's children every day, the brilliant, beautiful, courageous things that they say and they do. But at the same time, this enormously powerful thing we have in our head is constantly getting ahead of itself. For some reason, this is the thing we always like to talk about, least in school. I mean, school is always built about

reason and logic and all these kinds of things. But emotion is the huge driver of life, and it's so powerful and without passion, nothing would ever happen. I mean we know this. If you think that something is right, you won't do it, But if you feel that something is right, you'll do it every time. That's how powerful passion is. But at the same time, passion is also, as we all know, the thing that gets into more

trouble than anything else. At the same time, our ability to ask questions is one of the great beautiful things about the human mind, because it's what allows us to free ourselves and to free other people and to change things. But also the ability to ask questions is terrifying because we can ask questions that we can never really answer, and the propel us into these states of doubt and fear and anxiety. What's gonna happen to us when we die,

what happens to our loved ones in the future. All these questions we can answer that can be just absolutely crippling. And that's why I think literature is the most powerful technology that humans have invented, because from the beginning, literature helped deal with regulating our emotions when we needed them regulated. So calming our fears, building our courage, building our love, calming our anger, building our empathy, doing all this just

kind of basic work. Healing our grief, healing our trauma, all this kind of basic work, just like getting up and brushing your teeth in the morning, you know, just kind of basic maintenance work to be a human, and also provided us with a sense of purpose and structure. That's what a story is. A story is a sense of we are going somewhere, We're going on a journey. Well where are we going? You don't need to know, I mean, that's the wonderful thing about a story and

a journey. You don't need to know where you're going to embrace the journey. And that's what makes a story different from say truth. Truth is often beyond us, but the story never is, and the story can give us the same solidity and comfort and direction as truth. And so those basic things or why I think literature is the most important thing that humans have ever invented, and

why you'll see literature in all your favorite philosophers. All your favorite philosophers are constantly resorting to stories or using therapeutic techniques that come to us from literature. All our favorite spiritual guides are constantly using stories, myths. In fact, the original meaning of literature is scripture. They mean the same thing. They mean that which is writs, and that just gives you a sense of how revered it was

from the very beginning. And it's a tragedy to me that in our modern world we just don't realize how powerful literature is anymore and how easy it is to use. And you know, we spend so much of our time just kind of looking for other stuff to give us meaning, and it's right there. I mean, many of the books you read as children, If you go back to them today and just read some of your favorite children's books, you'll feel healing, you'll feel hope, you'll feel joy, you'll

feel creativity, and it's just there on your bookshelf. And then sharing those books with your kids or volunteering to read to other kids, you know, those kinds of activities can bring you just so much fulfillment and so much healing, and our ancestors knew that, and for some reason we've forgotten it. I love that idea of going back to the books you read as a child. I don't know why I haven't thought of that. Was one of my

primary activities as a child was was reading. I love to do and I did it all the time, and I've never really thought of going back to some of those books. Well, you know, I think one reason that we don't often think about it is we often think

of life is kind of a relentless moving forward. I mean, this is one of these weird things about the modern world, as we're all conditioned to think that everything is better in the future, and that we just have to get to the future faster, and that the faster we get to the future, somehow, the better everything will be. I'm not here to to bash the future. I mean, I hope the future is great, you know, and I'm not a dystopian thinker. But at the end of the day,

life is about an organic process of growth. It's not about a kind of machine leap ahead. And to experience organic growth, you need to constantly plug back into who you are. Who are you, what is your special heart, what are your feelings? What is you? And and you find that record in your early childhood literature, because that's a moment when you're not afraid of being judged. That's not a moment when you have anxiety about what book should I read, what books are good for me, what

books will help me? Instead, you just naturally are drawn to certain stories, is to certain characters, to certain worlds, and those help reinforce and develop and strengthen who you are. And I can almost guarantee anyone that if they go back and read their favorite books that they read when they were a child, they will feel renewed and strengthened in themselves. And it's important to keep some of those books around. And that's not to say that, of course,

you should only ever read your childhood books. But if you're at a moment of grief or loss or despair or trauma or tragedy, I would say the number one thing you can do in terms of helping yourself is go back and read something from your past that gave you pleasure, that gave you strength, And it will give you strength, and it will give you pleasure, it will give you courage again, and don't be afraid to read

and reread and reread it or rewatch it. I mean, if you had a favorite TV show when you were in high school, go back and watch that now Three's Company, right, No, exactly? Yeah, well, I mean I'm not sure that's gonna well, I guess I could give it a shot. The thing is, one of the things I talked about in the book is we have an insistent desire to divide high literature from

low literature. So, you know, we think a lot oh well, you know, there's like, you know, there's like a serious literature, and then there's just kind of stuff that was on TV when I was a kid. You know. The reality is there is no dividing line, because what makes literature literature is the effect it has on your brain, not what it is on itself. So if a work of literature is giving you healing or giving you growth, it's

good literature. If you go back and watch stre His Company and it's just not that inspiring to you, don't watch it again, you know. But in my case, I mean, I remember, you know, when I was a kid, I I used to love reading. You know, these weird French comics like Asterix and obelix Um. You know, I used to like watching actually the A Team on TV things like that, and if I go back and watch them now, I will feel I mean, to me, the A Team

is great. It's about a bunch of weirdos who change the world, and when you watch it, you feel like anything can happen. This is totally nuts, but I love it and I can be friends with anyone and we can do anything. It's really inspiring on an emotional level to me. And I think if you are at a moment of grief or loss or hesitation or I don't know what to do with my life right now, that's not going backwards, that's going forwards. That's reconnecting with your

kind of emotional core. That emotional strength is the most powerful thing. That's what gives you resilience. So it gives you strength, which that gives you for momentum, and reconnecting with that is absolutely incredibly therapeutic, incredibly positive. That may be the best review the A Team has ever had. I absolutely loved it too. All right, let's pick a different invention here. I can't resist one that is the serenity Elevator float above her Asop's fables, Plato's is It

Mano Mino, and the invention of the serenity elevator. It's quite a jumping off point. Yeah, well, this one drew my fascination. Sort of. The origin story for this is famous Greek philosopher Socrates at the end of his life, he's condemned to death for challenging the traditional gods of Athens, and he's sentenced to death by drinking hemlock, which is this incredibly painful, awful poison, And we have an account of it that was left behind to us ultimately by

by Plato. Plato is not actually there. It's a kind of secondhand account. And what happens is is Socrates kind of does his thing, does his philosophy. Then he drinks the hemlock, which is just known to cause people to scream and cry out in pain, and they just calmly lies down and closes his eyes and lays there for a little bit and dies gently. And so the riddle

left by this moment is what did he do? How is he able to face both the most excruciating physical pain that at the time the Greeks knew and also the most excruciating mental and psychic pain, which is you're you're about to die. You're dying, you know, and how do they do this so calmly? And you know, the

answer he always gave was, you know, my philosophy. And then you sort of ask him what his philosophy is, and he says, oh, my philosophy is I know that I know nothing, which is famously a paradox or riddle. I mean doesn't mean, I mean, how can you know that you know nothing? I mean, like you know, I mean, that's a contradiction. So what's going on. And what I talk about in that chapter is that he gives you a clue before he dies. He talks about ASoP and

um how he spent his last hour's imitating ASoP. And ASoP was a satirist. We don't think of Asup as a satirist now we think of him as a moralist, but he was a satirist. And what satirist is someone who kind of pokes fun gently at human folly, And so all of Asop's fables, like sour Grapes and the rest of it are him kind of poking fun at the way that humans behave and saying, don't you think

maybe you should behave differently from those humans. And when I talk about in that chapters that Socrates identified a whole bunch of very powerful tools from satire, and I won't go through all of them now, and one of the obvious ones is irony. And then what he did is he did something that ASoP didn't do, and that was revolutionary. And instead of applying those tools to other people to make himself feel superior to other people, he applied those tools to himself. He felt ironic about himself.

And when you do that, when you feel ironic about yourself, it lifts you out of yourself, It lifts your mind out of your body. And we can actually demonstrate this has an analgesic effect. It numbs pain. That's why people in who are doctors, who work in the RS, or soldiers often have these kinds of self ironic modes, you know what, are very ironic about themselves in the situation

because it has this kind of numbing, analgesic effect. And if you follow the other techniques of satire and laugh at yourself essentially make fun of yourself, that becomes an enormous gift to yourself in terms of relieving pain and also making you feel bigger than yourself and above your problems. And this is something most supposed to forget to do when something bad happens to us, I mean, most of us are something bad happens to us, what do we do?

We get angry, and then usually we blame someone else, or we blame ourselves. We say, oh, this awful person, you know, and then when we blame that other person, we get angry, we get stressed. That has also some horrendous psychological effects, getting angry and getting stressed. Blaming yourself is probably even worse, having self judgment terrible. But if you laugh at yourself, if you say, oh my goodness, what what was I expecting to do? What? You know?

I mean, what did I ever think? I mean, just look at me, you know, I'm just like tiny, ridiculous little human running around in this giant world. What did I ever think was gonna happen? Of course it was going to be a disaster. Of course. Everything I do

is to tell it. When you start to laugh at yourself, that way you release the pain, you release the stress, you release everything, And that is ultimately the key to getting rid of most of both your kind of psychological pain and even quite a bit of your physical pain. I don't want to encourage your listeners to drink hemlock. I just want to be clear about that. I am not saying that if you have a good sense of humor about yourself and you drink hemlock, you won't experience pain.

But I do think that at the end of the day, um having that sense of humor about yourself and learning to do that through literature, and learning to see yourself in ridiculous people in literature and then laugh at yourself, which is what happens in me. No, that is giving yourself the gift of serenity. Well, it's interesting. Two thoughts came to mind there. One is I can vouch for this method because when I tried rollerblading, it's just not my mind. Because I was just telling it to my

friend Chris the other day. I was saying it was funny because I fell violently and often, and when I would fall, my initial reaction was second of anger followed by usually laughter, and it was some version of what you just said, Like, what did I think was going to happen? Like just knowing me and I was bad at roller skating, I knew all that and then I also have this tendency to be like, well, I'll just go really fast. It just makes me laugh to think

of roller blading. But the other thing that you just said there that popped into my mind was when I hear the word serenity, I almost immediately jumped to the serenity prayer. And I almost immediately jumped to the serenity of prayer because A I think it's one of the wisest things ever, but B because I was in a A for so long, and we use the serenity prayer in a A uh so much. And A is a place that is so great because people are laughing at themselves all the time. It's one of the ways that

is used to deal with alcoholism. And as you said, I think it's really important. If you blame yourself too much, that's not really helpful. If you blame others, that's not helpful. It's finding this place where blame sort of drops away. And that's done very much by this laughter at ourselves and at the ridiculous things we did. I mean, that's so brilliant and so beautiful and absolutely I mean, because you know, the key to healing and growing is to

acknowledge our own frailty. And if you acknowledge your own frailty in a serious mode, it becomes alarming and terrifying and horrifying. But if you acknowledge your own frailty with a sense of humor um, it becomes joyful. And you know, I mean, of course, I mean it's like, I mean, I've done the same thing, by the way, with that with roller skates, it's like, I mean, I have no coordination, and like you and I have no common sense. And also what kind of person puts wheels on their feet?

I mean, you've gotta be nuts, you know. But if you do that joyfully, it becomes fun and and you laugh and you grow and you realize that you know, the mistakes that you've made in your life aren't a sign that you did something wrong with that other people are terrible. It's just a sign of the fact that you know there was more for you to learn, and

that you're not perfect. And that is a fun and exciting thing as opposed to a terriful, terrifying and awful thing, And it brings peace of mind, and peace of mind really is just the kind of deepest gift I think we can give ourselves just that sense of flow in the world, just that sense of calm after the storm, and that is to me the experience of wisdom. I don't know if wisdom has contents in it. I don't know if wisdom is, you know, do this or do that,

or do this other thing. But wisdom is definitely a state of mind. Wisdom is definitely a being able to having, after lived a hard life and a rough life, and a life that didn't go exactly maybe the way you thought it was gonna go when you were a kid, being able to look back over that life with peace and serenity and a sense of perspective. I mean that feeling is wisdom. And that absolutely is what I think

you get from the Surending prayer. It's what you get from Socrates, and it's what you get from roller skating with a sense of humor exactly. All right, let's hit one more of these before we head out. I'm gonna give you last chance to pick as a when you love to talk about that's on your mind based on what we've talked about so far, or do you want me to choose. Well, you've you've picked you that we haven't talked about you've talked about the anarchy rhymer and

the Mind's eye opener. I mean, are the either of those ones you'd like? Or if you like, we can talk if you want to talk about spiritual experience. All right, We're gonna do anarchy rhymer now, and we'll do spiritual experience in the post show conversation because anarchy rhymer has something in it that I really wanted to pick your brain on given your neuroscience background. This one is called feed your Creativity. Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland and

the invention of the anarchy rhymer. We were just talking about children's literature, and the wonderful thing about children's literature is how creative it makes your children. You know, how it stimulates their imagination, how it fires your imagination. And you know, being an old person like myself, I thought, well, maybe it would be good to be a little more creative and be a little more maggative. I should spend some time with children's literature and see what's going on.

And the answer is that child's that are contains this amazing invention which goes back to the nursery rhyme for activating a part of our brain called the default mode network, which is possibly the most boringly named part of human brain, the default mode network, but it's the most exciting part of the human brain. It's this secret part of the brain that goes active whenever we're not working and it plays. It's this place of spontaneous creativity, of just mucking about.

And it was discovered accidentally by UH psychologists when they first developed brain scanners, and they put people in these brain scanners and they told them to stop thinking. And as soon as people stopped thinking, this huge network exploded in their minds. And the psychologists kept saying, well, no, no no, no, stop that stuff. We don't want this next. We don't want this network to be active, you know, we want

you to relax and stop thinking. And the more they stopped thinking again, the more powerfully this network came active. And they later called that the default mode network. And what it does is it creates anarchy, It creates play, spontaneity, creativity, randomness. We experienced it normally as what's called mind wandering. So pretty much for me, this is most of my day when you're supposed to be doing work and instead your mind is drifting. And when your mind is drifting, it's

drifting about possibilities, things that could happen. And most of us, as we get older, those possibilities get caught in ruts. We're always thinking of the same possibilities over and over and over again, and we're not as creative as we are when we're a child. When we're a child, it's like we could be a dragon, we could be a platypus, you know, we could be anything. But as we could order, it's less and less of that. I'm going to interrupt there before we go into that part. This is where

my question was. It was about the default mode network, because I've heard the default mode network talked about in two different ways, although I don't think they're necessarily different, but and I think this is kind of where you're driving at. But one is the way you described it. It's what happens when our brain isn't doing something else, and it's it's wonderful day dreaming and it's putting together creative possibilities and it's doing all this good stuff. Right.

And then also I've also heard the default mode network described the same thing, same mechanism of action. You're not doing anything else, the default mode network kicks on. But it's the place of deep rumination. It's the place of worrying about self, it's the place of selfing. There's a famous scientific paper by Daniel Gilbert. It concludes a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Um. And so I wanted to sort of talk about these two sort of experiences

of the default mode network. One sounds really positive and good and the other which doesn't sound so good. So first is is your understanding that both those things are correct? And is it really about what you're about to talk about, which is how you know rut the default mode network gets You're exactly right. So what happens with the default mode network is it's basically just a place of mind wandering. But that's not necessarily fun. You can mind wander all

sorts of things which are not fun. And the way that roughly speaking, it works is it works in connection with our prefrontal cortex and other parts of our brain, which which kind of focus it a little bit. And if you're in an anxious mood, then that wandering can be coming up with all sorts of terrible negative thoughts. If you're in a self doubting mood that wandering can be all sorts of self dislike and concerns about yourself and who you are. It's the same way that when

children play, it's not necessarily intrinsically good. Children can play in dangerous ways, children can play in mean ways. Um. But but the point of it is is that it's anarchic and it's random, and it's spontaneous. And that's why anarchy has both good and bad connotations to most people. I mean, anarchy seems kind of fun when you think about it as a bunch of people chilling out on the beach with no rules, and then it seems bad when it's like, you know, the city is on fire

and there's no cops. So yes, it is just play randomness, spontaneous anarchy. And the question is, well, how do we have that in a kind of positive framework. How do we kind of lightly focus that around possibility and the outward world as opposed to our inner ruminations. And that's where children's stories and children's literature comes in, because there's a balance in them between parts of the literature that

is anarchic and random like um. For example, I use in the book the example of the nursery rhyme, Hey, Diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, a cow jumping over the moon, and a dish running away with a spoon, all these completely random things within a structure of music. And so the question is how do we kind of create this interplay between the structured nous and the randomness. And most children's literature does so by thinking about possibilities and by

thinking about the outside world. So, what are the possibilities for doing things like jumping over the moon or being a cat playing with a fiddle, things like that. And when you go back and you read, say Winnie the Pooh, Winnie the Pooh creates a safe space to play and mess around and explore because it creates a universe in which nothing really bad can happen to you. It's a safe space. And that's the important thing about play is

that it takes place in a safe place. When play takes place in a dangerous place, that's sort of your brain constantly thinking what can I do to get out of this dangerous place? What am I doing wrong? Um? What about this place is dangerous? That's not helpful. But when you create a place that is just full of nothing that can hurt you, and openness. Then the play turns around and so again you're absolutely right. I mean, nothing in nature is intrinsically good or bad. Play is

not intrinsically good or bad. But there are books like Winnie the Pooh, and I hope we've all had this experience reading WINNI the Pool or The Cat in the Hat is another one I talked about in the chapter. Those you will immediately feel as you read them the good kind of play happening. You will not worry about yourself reading The Cat in the Hat. Um, you will not worry about yourself reading Winnie the Pooh. You instead think, oh, my goodness, there are so many ridiculous fun things I

can do today. Yeah, it's funny. I had not read Hey, Diddle Diddle in a long time, and just reading it, I had a just a brief flash of I think, similar to what you were saying about if you go back and read something from you know, when you were younger. I mean, I don't know how long it's been since I've heard that, but it gave me just a moment

of sort of a playful feeling. Yeah, and the extort anything about that, It just shows you that anyone can invent literature because hey, Diddle Diddle, as far as we know, was invented by a mom as she was nursing her kid and was trying to sing the kid to sleep, and she just kind of comes up with this funny, spontaneous rhyme that catches on, and to me, it's an invitation to all of us to maybe play a little

with our kids today. Most wonderful children's literature comes out of adults playing with their kids, messing out with their kids,

telling stories to their kids. My favorite story when I was a child, was wread to me by my father when I was about four or five, is this really wacky book called Watership Down, which is about a bunch of rabbits who have like psychic abilla, favorite of mine, and that was just invented by a dad telling the story, just making up because his daughters just want to hear

about rabbits all the time. And so a big part of that chapter is just to encourage you to play with your kids, to read to your kids, and to think up stories. You know, when your kid comes up with something wacky, don't be like, oh, that could never happen, and don't worry that they're never going to get a job if they think that way. Engage in the play with them. Get out of your worries, get out of your anxieties, join in their sense of possibility, make a

story together. That's the opportunity created by not just Sooners literature, but that kind of whole mode of storytelling. That's awesome. Yeah. I love Watership Down, one of my favorite books of all time. That's the one I'm gonna go back and read. Oh absolutely, Well. Look, if there's one thing I could do in this podcast is to encourage everyone to go back and read Worship Down. It's totally wacky, totally wonderful, totally extraordinary, and it's just an indication. I mean, it's like,

as humans we can do anything. I mean, when you read that book, your mind will just be blown and how imaginative and how strange and the potential inside us to do something that no one else would ever think. And we all have that potential inside us to do that completely unique new thing. And for me, Worship Down is one of those books that I Fristus Adams didn't write it, no one was going to write it, and all of our lives are that way too. If you don't live your life, no one else is gonna live it.

No one else is going to do that beautiful, extraordinary, unique thing that you're gonna do. And I love literature that just breaks every mold and reminds us of just how unique our own lives can be. Well, I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up. If you don't live your own life, no one else will. It's a wonderful parting message. You and I are going to talk in the post show conversation about literature and spiritual experience.

I'm looking forward to that. Listeners, if you'd like to get access to the post show conversation, all our other post show conversations, add free episodes and a special episode I do each week called a teaching Song and a Poem, you can go to One you Feed dot net slash join angus. Thank you so much. This has really been fun. Honestly, Eric, this has been the most joyful part of my day and I'm just absolutely thrilled that I got a chance to come on and share with you. Thanks so much.

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