Angus Fletcher, a distinguished professor of story science, offers a wealth of knowledge on the power of narrative and its profound impact on human cognition and well-being. His work, which merges neuroscience and literature, provides a unique lens through which to understand ourselves and the world.
On Storythinking and Narrative Intelligence
The core of Fletcher's work revolves around the concept of "storythinking," our innate ability to understand and navigate the world through narrative.
- On the essence of storythinking: "Every time we think ahead, we are crafting a story."[1][2]
- Storythinking as a fundamental human trait: Fletcher argues that "storythinking is fundamental to what makes us human."[1][2][3][4]
- The antiquity of narrative: “Storythinking hails from a time prior to authors, prior to humans, prior to language. It dates back hundreds of millions of years to the first creaky machinery of the animal brain.”[5]
- How stories shape our experience: "Stories organize all our experiences... We are stories."[5]
- The forward-looking nature of stories: "A new plan is a new sequence of actions it's a new story about the future."[6]
- The limitations of logic: "Most of the time in life you don't have enough information to use logic."[6]
- The power of "what if": The fundamental question that drives storythinking and innovation is "what if?"[1][2][5]
- Narrative vs. AI: "Artificial intelligence can perform symbolic logic, rational deduction, and mathematical calculation, but it is incapable of deliberating in narrative."[1][2][3]
- Why AI will never replace human storythinking: "Humans think in narrative; computers think in statistics."[7]
- The problem with how we teach literature: "In school, we're taught to read literature as words to be interpreted... It deletes all the story."[7]
From Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature
Fletcher's book Wonderworks explores the specific emotional and cognitive tools that literature provides.
- The power of fiction: "For whatever the power of truth may be, literature's own special power has always lain in fiction. That wonder we construct. It is the invention that unbreaks the heart and brings us into hope and peace and love.”[8][9][10][11]
- Literature as a remedy: "Literature could go beyond representing our worldly fears—and it could help to remedy those fears."[12]
- The invention of courage: "The Iliad's real triumph is a literary invention that doses our brain with the courage to face down lightning and death and even Zeus, transforming us into heroes ourselves."[12]
- The nature of courage: "Courage wasn't a stoic virtue or a rational choice."[12]
- The power of wonder: "The oracle's psychological secret to catching all these curious hearts is an emotion known as wonder."[12]
- The importance of curiosity: "Curiosity is crucial for our survival. But it's also crucial for our happiness."[12]
- On innovation: "It was innovate—or perish."[12]
- The secret of self-disclosure: "The more private the self-disclosure, the more potent it is."[12]
- On love: "The real story is love."[12]
- The paradox of attraction: "What we must not fail to notice is, that likes repel, and opposites attract."[12]
- The power of shared experience: "In death, we will have one tomb."[12]
- The role of free choice: "Our free choice is what determines whether we are 'punished' or 'rewarded,' earning us the high light of heaven—or the dark fires below."[12]
- The value of the quest: "Dante believed that the secret was less important than the looking for the secret."[12]
- On mental play: "Mental play is a kind of anarchy... Anarchy simply means that no one's in charge. We're all free to make up our own rules—and change them, if we'd like, as we go along."[12]
- The function of allegory: “Never lightly assume that clarity is the unclouded aim of... allegory.”[8][9][13]
On Personal Growth and Resilience
Fletcher's insights into narrative have direct applications for personal development and overcoming adversity.
- On suspending judgment: "...there are a number of judgments that we can suspend permanently, including most of our judgments about other people."[14][15]
- The downside of snap judgments: While they "feel instantly good to our neurons," in the long run, they "make us anxious, incurious, and less happy."[14][15]
- The benefit of patience in judgment: "For the longer we suspend our judgments, the more accurate our subsequent verdicts become."[14][15]
- The power of a sincere apology: "There's only one kind of apology that cannot fail to generate empathy: an apology that instantly convinces us of its sincerity."[14][15]
- How literature helps us understand sincerity: Literature allows us to "peer into characters' heads, inspecting their minds for an apology's neural proof: remorse."[14][15]
- Building confidence: "Confidence is earned by creating evidence for yourself that you can do hard things."[16]
- Leadership and fear: "Being a leader is all about contemplating fear. Stepping up when adversity strikes is why we exist as leaders."[16]
- The mark of a true leader: “Real leaders activate the leader within you.”[16]
- The importance of humility: "You must be genuinely humble to learn from your mistakes."[16]
- Transforming trauma through narrative: "‘Plot twists’ can transform trauma into growth — individually and collectively."[17]
- Finding good in the bad: By reflecting on your life, you can "go back over your own life and start to reflect on those moments where good moments came out of bad moments."[17]
- The narrative potential in biology: Fletcher refers to the ability to get stronger from negative experiences as "anti-fragility."[17]
- The power of personal narrative: Realizing that positive outcomes can arise from negative events in your own life "has an absolute fidelity to your brain."[17]
- Viewing challenges as plot twists: When negative things happen, instead of seeing them as purely negative, you can say, "Okay this could be the beginning of a plot twist."[17]
On Primal Intelligence and the Human Mind
Fletcher champions a broader understanding of intelligence that goes beyond the computational.
- The brain is not a computer: He emphasizes that "most of the way that we think of the brain now is as a kind of computer," but "the brain isn't very good at those things."[18]
- The components of primal intelligence: This form of intelligence includes "intuition, imagination, emotion, and common sense."[18]
- The value of primal intelligence in a changing world: "when an environment is changing very quickly... you need to sort of tap into these other parts of intelligence."[18]
- The failure of the education system: "we've created a school system that's focused almost entirely on logical rational computational forms of intelligence."[18]
- The result of a narrow view of intelligence: This focus is "one of the reasons why young people are having such a hard time nowadays struggling with uncertainty struggling with volatility."[18]
- Embracing change: "volatility is... natural... that's the way that life is... we evolve to handle that."[18]
- The need to trust ourselves: "we have to start to learn to trust ourselves and kind of be more confident in ourselves."[18]
- The journey to leadership: "the moment that they became a good leader was actually when they remembered who they were and how they got back to trusting themselves."[18]
- Human intelligence and planning: "human intelligence is characterized by the ability to make plans... and if you can make a new plan you can handle new situations."[6]
- The crisis of planning in young people: "what we're seeing today is a crisis particularly among young people and an inability to make new plans when they don't know what to do they turn to somebody else for advice."[6]
- The obsolescence of old plans: "your parents succeeded yesterday they don't have a plan that's going to work today."[6]
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