Fritz Breithaupt (Meesburg, Germany, 56 years old) believes that telling life is at the center of our humanity. Stories help us organize the world, to remember what has happened and share it with others, and to be able to better plan for the future. And they are also tools that put us in the shoes of others or help us put them in ours. The surprising human capacity to cooperate was built on stories. Breithaupt, professor of Germanic Studies and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Indiana (USA), also imagines that the narratives occupied the center of the tribes, with an almost ritual category, in scenarios that served to train the capacity for storytelling, empathy and the organization of the universe with stories.
“These people, in these meeting places, could focus on an individual who is trying to communicate something to them, who has seen a dangerous animal or food, or who says that there is a member of the group injured somewhere. I don’t assume that they had language, perhaps they were doing a pantomime, but they were capable of making something present for the group that was not present,” explains the researcher. “Once you have achieved that effect, these people begin to detach themselves from the here and now, they can remember an event from the past or imagine and plan the future, and that opens up a world of possibilities,” he speculates. Breithaup just published The narrative brain (Sexto Piso), a profound essay in which he tries to explain why stories are so important.
Ask. In the book he talks about how there are those who confront narratives with scientific thinking, how the latter can be a source of reliable knowledge while deceptions creep into the stories, and he remembers how Plato wanted to throw the poets out of his ideal republic because they spread misinformation. . But the philosopher was also carried away by the attraction of his own stories that were not true.
Answer. We live our narratives and do not realize it, although when we judge the stories of others we can be very skeptical and say that they are simple propaganda. Our narratives are us while those of others are just stories, words, deceptions.
Q. He also talks about the value of stories to train empathy, to share experiences and build identity and values. This is positive, but it can also be negative, right? Many stories that reinforce our bonds with the group or shared values do so by pitting them against those of another group.
R. Yes. In principle, empathy is wonderful because it works with everyone, and so do narratives. You can tell me the story of someone who is far from me, geographically or politically, and I can still co-experience their situation. This is the wonderful thing about narratives and empathy. We develop a great brain not only to solve technical problems and have great intelligence in general, but to have the ability to co-experiment. Many human evolutionary biologists agree that our brain is a brain for empathy.
But here comes the catch. Narratives push us to empathize with others, but one of the triggers for empathy has to do with taking sides. You see a couple in a bar, they start arguing and even though you don’t know them, you take sides. It happens when you watch a soccer game, even if you’re not on any team. You take sides and the other becomes the enemy, we don’t like them. So empathy is great for individual experiences because it allows us to transcend our experience, we’re not stuck alone in our brain. But when there is conflict it leads us to take sides and that is why empathy is very bad for resolving conflicts, despite the fact that people believe otherwise. Empathy makes them worse. To resolve a conflict you have to take a step back and leave empathy outside, because empathy leaves us trapped inside one narrative and outside the other.
Many biologists of human evolution agree that our brain is a brain for empathy.
Q. Could the ability of narratives to remember the past and predict the future also be behind many of our mental problems, the depression caused by being trapped by your past or the anxiety of uncertainty about the future?
R. Narratives are very powerful because they contain the promise of emotional reward. Many of us imagine a positive ending, triumph, love, whatever. For many this may be positive, but there are people who suffer from anxiety thinking about what could happen, because they have too many narrative versions in their minds, or they always return to a bad memory. These are problems of narratives that often have a narrative solution. You can change your narrative, tell your own story. It is something that therapists do and it is also done in politics. A good strategy is to focus attention on a small detail in the story that allows us to look the other way, away from the bad, and from there alternatives emerge.
Q. We are surrounded by stories, novels, movies and series that professional narrators tell us. Is it possible that we tell our own stories less and less?
R. I see it as a great danger that we lose our individual narratives. One of the places where most stories are told is at school. In recent decades, there has been a lot of emphasis on acquiring skills such as mathematics, but children do not have the opportunity to tell their stories. In schools there is a lot of pressure for children’s performance and having a child tell what they did over the weekend does not sound very productive. But it is important for your growth.
Another factor is social networks, which have a lot to do with telling stories, but it is different because you don’t tell them live. I’m not against social media, it can be great for people to tell their stories and connect with people with similar experiences, but the problem is the time we spend on the phone, away from real life contact with real people. , sharing experiences. There is something different about being in the same space and saying how are you? Happened yesterday? I think we should cultivate those spaces where this communication happens.
You can change your narrative, tell your own story. It is something that therapists do and it is also done in politics
Q. Are some stories more natural than others, universal stories that could appear at different times in separate human groups, independently?
R. I don’t think there is a universal story, although we know that, in terms of folklore, there are stories that have been with humanity for a long time, stories that have been told over and over again in different regions. I think they are not independent, but go back to early narratives. This is speculative, but I believe that our ancestors, before having a language as we understand it now, made some theatrical presentations with mime, with which they shared some stories, of hunting, of death… There is a reason why many stories are similar. . There is an original nucleus that later, with the travels of the nomads and their encounters, spread. The best way to create bonds is to share stories, even between people who did not have a shared language. Once you hear the other group’s story it is no longer necessary to kill each other, you can trade and make other exchanges.
A second point is the telling of stories. There have been scholars who argued that all stories are one, the hero who sets off on an adventure and returns. A basic story. We wanted to put it to the test with the broken telephone game, with tens of thousands of people. We wanted to see what people change when they hear a story and have to tell it again. Our idea is that at the end of that process we would have the basic narratives. If there is a universal narrative, all stories should go in that direction. We did the experiment and I think ultimately there is no basic nuclear story. A constant element is that stories have to have an ending. You have expectations and you need this end point, which has a lot to do with emotions. It can be a happy ending or an embarrassing story or a surprise, which is also an emotion. And they are emotions that are not there at the beginning, you need a change, an arc in the story that takes you to that end. Another necessary element is that there are multiple versions, that other things can happen, because if not, it is boring.
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