From Scientific American:
ShareEchoing Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Story Paradox (Basic Books, 2021), Breithaupt warns that our addiction to narrative—however fulfilling—can close off possibilities outside the borders of our pet stories. Casting ourselves as victims tempts us to stay in that role, and when we want to believe epic-style justice will triumph, we may not accept realities that veer in a different direction.
Even so, Breithaupt remains a narrative optimist. Our storytelling knack, he contends, primes us to master what he calls “playability”: rendering endless possible futures in story form, which helps us anticipate and plan for the best of these futures. “Narratives can be the medium of our unhappiness,” he writes, “but they are also the means of escaping it.” He includes few details about how to achieve this escape; unlike the classic stories that inspired it, The Narrative Brain does not build to a clear resolution. Yet its very open-endedness—its invitation to reimagine ill-fitting stories—makes it a timely corrective to our fierce zest for certainty. (Read more.)
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