The Storytelling Animal
On The Storytelling Animal
In his book The Storytelling Animal, American author and literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall seeks to provide a unified theory of storytelling.
In the preamble, Jonathan writes:
Gottschall wants to understand why are humans addicted to stories? How did humans become the storytelling animal?
It is worth mentioning that the title of the Gottschall’s book comes from the following passage of Graham Swift’s 1983 novel Waterland
The storytelling animal!
Political scientist and author Brian Klaas borrows the notion of the Storytelling Animal in his 2024 book Fluke.
The main thesis in Fluke is about how small chance events can divert our lives and change everything.
In chapter-7 “The Storytelling Animal”, Klaas provides a captivating description of our narrative-addicted minds.
At the end of page 135, Brian writes:
Aha! the key word: story
And the main question:
To answer that question, Klaas quotes neuroscientist Antonio Damasio:
Storytelling!
Of course.
A few lines later, Brian continues:
Our brains crave for narrative! We are wired to form and create stories even when there are none.
Later on, in the same page, Brian quotes Barbara Hardy:
Basically, we are narrative-driven creatures; whether it is talking to others or to ourselves, or also listening to others or to our inner voice; whether it is while we are awake or also while we sleep.
And finally, Brian Klaas cites Jonathan Gottschall and his famous storytelling animal
That’s what we are.
In essence, that’s what makes us humans.
at a particular point in space-time,
your mind is always free
to ramble in lands of make-believe.
is the storytelling animal.
Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind
not a chaotic wake, not an empty space,
but the comforting maker buoys
and trail signs of stories.
Graham Swift
when ideas are put into a story.
Generation after generation,
from our earliest days,
humans accumulated wisdom
to make sense of the world.
But how could that wisdom
reverberate between generations?
all this wisdom understandable,
transmittable, persuasive, enforceable
—of how to make it stick—
was faced and a solution found.
Storytelling was the solution.”
Antonio Damasio
that we will connect the dots into a story
even when the dots aren’t connected,
which is called narrative bias.
When we are given a snippet
of incomplete information,
the pattern-processing networks
within our skulls fill in the gaps.
daydream in narrative,
remember, anticipate,
hope, despair,
believe, doubt,
plan, revise,
criticize, construct,
gossip, learn,
hate and live by narrative.”
Barbara Hardy
“The storytelling mind
is allergic to uncertainty,
randomness, and coincidence.
It is addicted to meaning.”