All religions have it’s own myths, own stories, own set of values. And these are/were good stories, I mean, even though they are not true, they are certainly interesting. You won’t feel bored by it.
Harry Potter has the same effect on people, like, why should I take Harry Potter seriously, why do I care what happens after Dumbledore dances with Snape (won’t give actual spoilers :')
I mean, it doesn’t make sense to me. Why do I care so much about a soap opera that I am watching. Harry Potter is the product of just one brilliant woman’s imagination. It has no real value on my life. I have no real motivation to read that other than the fact that I like it and I want to know. Harry Potter is somewhat irrelevant to my life, than why does it or any other good story capture our imagination?
Why do I care what the next season of House M.D. entails? Why? What should I care if he dies or lives? Why :')?
I’m not a sociologist, but it’s worth noting that for many thousands of years, humans passed on knowledge by story telling. If you had zero interest in listening to elders telling stories, you were less likely to learn important stuff, and so less likely to survive. It seems likely that we’re naturally selected to be interested in stories.
But, in the same way that craving sweets used to drive people to eat fruit, but now that same urge drives us to eat candy, our inclination to listen to stories gets people to watch soap operas or marvel movies, which isn’t exactly improving our chance of survival.
thank you! that makes sense
No it doesn’t. Evolution is an explanation for species to adjust to the environment . This comment says “the environment was stories”. But how our ancestors developed the habit of story telling in the first place is still unexplained with this little piece of fiction.
But that doesn’t explain why stories were the form to convey information in the first place.
It sort of does. Groups who told stories and listened to stories survived better than other groups. It doesn’t matter that there might have been another way to pass on information, that one worked and helped the group thrive. Lots of different animals solve the same issue in different ways - evolution doesn’t care.
Sharing, and believing in, fictions is how distilled units of information are efficiently passed down generations and is one of the bedrocks of our development as a species. This is what allows us to have laws and corporations and agreeing to drive on particular side of the road.
Yuval Noah Harari covers this more eloquently in his book Sapiens. You would definitely dig the relevant chapters.
Yuval Noah Harari covers this more eloquently in his book Sapiens.
time to read it again I think. It is a wonderful book, but I dont remember reading about this particular topic in enough detail. Thank you for your comment
You are more than welcome! The chapter is called Unification of Humankind for anyone else interested, here is a little excerpt:
“Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called ‘culture’.”
time to read it again I think. It is a wonderful book, but I dont remember reading about this particular topic in enough detail. Thank you for your comment
haha, thank you again!
Seems like there’s a bunch of Sapiens books. Which book and which chapters were you thinking of?
It’s literally Sapiens, the first book. The chapter is called the Unification of Humankind, from the quick look I had online.
Humans have brains and are social creatures. Brains love processing information. Learn from things that happen to people around you or even fictional ones. Are curious and want to connect information. Also we’re built to empathize with others to be able to form groups/a society. We will even empathize with fictional characters and inanimate objects that have big eyes and a mouth.
Evolution gave that to us. We wouldn’t have survived as a species if we had cared zero what happened to our neighbours. A story about Harry Potter is probably on the same level for our brains.
Beautiful explanation. I just learned something else. Our brain can’t learn and listen to everything, so if you listen to stories from the point of view of a certain ideology or person, the more you feel justified to defend that person as long as that person is within rational limits of actions.
You get what I am trying to say, I think this is a factor in why we are so polarized today. We are empathizing with and listening to people who have a particular bent of ideology more and more and since our brains don’t really like contradictions, the more we listen to one kind of stories, we can’t listen to the other kind of stories, what do you think?
I’m not so sure with the contradictions. People love being hypocrites. I’ve seen otherwise very intelligent and educated people believe in hocus pocus like homeopathy but adhere to scientific results in other aspects and be happy with both. Religion is just contradictions on steroids…
But usually hypocrites don’t see themselves as such. They think they are behaving rationally, and lie to themselves as to not see the contradiction.
We’d rather discount new information than confront our biases.
I agree with you completely here. Although I too am not sure about contradictions. I think I was going for the word coherence here.
Religion is just contradictions on steroids…
This is so true. I mean, for something which is holy, our fingerprints are all over it and it shows.
We’ve been telling stories for as long as we’ve been talking. They’re knowledge, history, dream and memory.
stories are us, they’re how we teach our children what to believe, how to live, who to trust. And then we fucked it with the printing press and advertising and cinema and consumerist attachment lol
Adding to consumerist attachment, these days stories are also used as an escapism tool. From a fatalistic point of view, you can lose yourself in a movie for a little while, binge a series, read a book and be somewhere totally different than where you are. You can believe that for a while if the story is good enough.
There’s also the appeal of “living vicariously” through a story. I tend to enjoy stories with more focus on characters and their development, and inevitably get invested in them from the simple connection of being human. I can see the ugly side of myself within flawed characters, I can learn lessons from the mistakes of others, I can take comfort in certain emotional developments and despair in others. Stories provide a safe place to explore different points of view, ideas, emotions, and events, especially ones people don’t talk about day to day or ones that are darker than your every day life.
The world is complicated and difficult to navigate. Stories usually give you a simplified world where it’s easier to understand and relate to. Just think of most religious stories and myths, they exist to explain something unexplainable (how the world was created) or how to behave in a society (cautionary tales and parabolas)
how to behave in a society (cautionary tales and parabolas)
I find the best cautionary tales are quadratic
We tell ourselves stories about our own actions, choices and beliefs (internally). We desperately want to believe that our own behavior is consistent and coherent. Fitting our behavior into a narrative helps us maintain this illusion (“I did Y thing because X thing happened to me, and then Z thing happened because I did Y”).
We tend to assume that cause-and-effect relationships are true and real, that we perceive causes and effects correctly, that we associate causes with effects accurately, and that we perceive all causes and effects that are relevant. These assumptions give us a narrative structure through which we make sense of our own behavior… though they are about as reliable as any of our other assumptions.
Anyway, the upshot is that framing the actions, choices and beliefs of others into a story helps us to understand and empathize with them (or condemn and villify them). The stories are a construct formed mostly from confirmation bias, but we struggle to make sense of reality without them.
Under appreciated comment. Thank you very much!
Empathy and projection.
You can understand how they feel, and by doing so, you can place yourself in their situation.
I would say the simple answer is in why we still teach “story problems” in math.
The “story” of the math problem gives us a way to contextualize knowledge in how it can be applied to real life.
Most stories impart social knowledge, not math knowledge. Stories are primarily about relationships and how to (or how not to) navigate them.
This is an interesting question, I hope someone answers!
Edit: I did some googling npr
On functional MRI scans, many different areas of the brain light up when someone is listening to a narrative, Neeley says — not only the networks involved in language processing, but other neural circuits, too. One study of listeners found that the brain networks that process emotions arising from sounds — along with areas involved in movement — were activated, especially during the emotional parts of the story.
Also interesting, maybe not as related to the question:
As you hear a story unfold, your brain waves actually start to synchronize with those of the storyteller, says Uri Hasson, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. When he and his research team recorded the brain activity in two people as one person told a story and the other listened, they found that the greater the listener’s comprehension, the more closely the brain wave patterns mirrored those of the storyteller.
nice article thank you!
In philosophy, what you’re asking about is called the paradox of fiction.
thank you very much! This is one of the most helpful comments here
Harry Potter is the product of just one
brilliantbarely literate woman’s imagination.she’s good though! I don’t know about her education but after all this, I am sure it doesn’t matter. Why do you say barely literate, I don’t think I found anything wrong with the books
Her writing is awful, wooden, and stilted. Her dialogue is painful. Her characters are boring at best and outright racist stereotypes at worst.
She either doesn’t know how to write skillfully or chooses not to. I figured the former was more charitable.
Harry Potter is a fucking Tory wet dream of a story.
This is a bad take. I’ve never read Romance novels, but I’m not enough of a book snob to tell people that things that get them reading or brings them joy is awful, wooden or painful to read.
Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
-Maya AngelouHarry Potter was valuable in getting millions of people, especially children, interested in reading. Not everything needs to be high art, and not everything needs to appeal to you. You’re clearly not the target audience, so don’t shit on someone because they enjoy a thing that you don’t.
If there is something offensive in a book, it can and should be discussed, and readers can become aware of representation and other issues this way, but you’re not trying to have a good faith discussion with your comments above.
