How stories make us human
It’s not easy to infect the brain of another person with an idea; it can be accomplished only by hitting the small exposed hole in the system. For the brain, that hole is story-shaped.—David Eagleman Eagleman’s lines appear in his review of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, by Jonathan Gottschall, in this week’s New York Times Book Review. Narratives that we heed are inherently and intensely moralistic—as a group-level adaptation, they encourage pro-social behavior and are “as …