From Apes to Apps: How Humans Evolved as Storytellers and Why it Matters

Our brains are structured to understand the world around us in the form of stories. How could this have happened? And why is that important to us now?

Today, Collca released my latest ebook, From Apes to Apps: How Humans Evolved as Storytellers and Why it Matters

I’m especially excited because it is the first title in Collca’s new series – BiteSize Science. And the timing is perfect: the world celebrates science and Charles Darwin’s 204th birthday on February 12!

From Apes to Apps is ‘readable science’, written with my storyteller’s pen while wearing my anthropologist’s hat and it explores the two key questions above.

Not only are we ‘wired’ for story, we are primed to believe and comply with the stories we are told, sometimes with disturbing consequences. Would you press a switch to torture a stranger you couldn’t see, simply because you were immersed in a ‘story’ that demanded it?

Repeated experiments have shown that most of us would – men and women equally.

Charles Darwin didn’t read many stories. He studied the classics that were required for school, and promptly forgot them after the exams. As a young man he was more interested in collecting beetles and shooting things, but in his childhood, he had a fertile imagination: “I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement.”

On one occasion he told a classmate that he could “produce variously coloured polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain coloured fluids.”

He could also fall for a good story as much as the rest of us. Shortly after starting school, a playmate took him into a cake shop where he was given buns without having to pay for them. When young Charles asked how this was possible, his friend told him: “Why, do you not know that my uncle left a great sum of money to the town on condition that every tradesman should give whatever was wanted without payment to any one who wore his old hat and moved [it] in a particular manner?”

He demonstrated this in another store (where his family was also well known). Showing Charles how to move the hat, he handed it to him, encouraging him to try it for himself, which he did, in another cake shop. Inevitably, our little hero was chased from the premises by an angry proprietor, dropping his ill-gotten cakes on the way, while his friend doubled up with laughter outside.

Had Darwin read more stories, he might have recognised their deep power and asked himself where they came from. But 142 years after The Descent of Man was published, we now know far more about the human brain and the science of evolution.

From Apes to Apps gathers and synthesises this recent research in neuroscience, psychology, archaeology, linguistics and anthropology, to tell the tale of how we evolved as storytellers, and warns of the problems this can create for us in our global digital age.

From Apes to Apps: How Humans Evolved as Storytellers and Why it Matters, http://collca.com/fata

 

Original link: http://trishnicholsonswordsinthetreehouse.com/2013/02/09/from-apes-to-apps/#.USY4JVee6Bw