Jonathan Gottschall Quotes

Humans simply aren't moved to action by 'data dumps,' dense PowerPoint slides, or spreadsheets packed with figures. People are moved by emotion. The best way to emotionally connect other people to our agenda begins with Once upon a time

If someone breaks into your home when you're there - that is, they don't wait to be sure that the house is empty - it's a bad situation. Honor doesn't come into it at all. Anything you need to do to survive at that point becomes A-OK.

Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence, authors trick readers into doing most of the imaginative work.

People like head trauma. They love knockouts. The crowd is silent, silent, silent ... and then a knockout happens, and everyone goes native. There would be far fewer knockouts without the gloves.

Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can't resist the gravity of alternate worlds.

Whenever I was confronted in the schoolyard, I found some way to avoid the fight. I ran for it. I backed down. Psychologically and emotionally, that isn't a low-cost course of action for most boys. You avoid a physical beating, but you pay a real social and psychological cost for it. Those moments of walking away from fights, even though I knew it was the rational and civilized thing to do, cost me tremendously.

My reason for arguing against abolishing these types of sports isn't some kind of lofty, philosophical rationale. It's just that I did it and I liked it. It comes down to a libertarian issue for me. I feel that if I know the risks and I want to take them, I should be allowed to do so.

Fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape.

Memories are often pruned and shaped by an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.

In my profession more generally, it's not an exaggeration to say that masculinity is viewed as the root of all evil. If you were to take a literary theory course, you might think it would be about literature, but it's really not. It's about all the various forms of oppression on earth and how we can see them playing out in literary works. And behind all these forms of oppression is a guy.

Story is more akin to the lines on your palm. No matter what your fortuneteller claims, the lines are not maps of your future. They are side effects of the flexion of the hand.

Studies show that when ordinary people do something wrong - break a promise, commit a murder - they usually fold it into a narrative that denies or at least diminishes their guilt.

When you spar in boxing, the only thing that gets hurt is your brain. Everything else feels pretty good.

Bull riding is probably the most dangerous sport in the world in terms of head injuries.

The top fighters spar hard. They're really sparring for two reasons: One is to improve their technique, but the other, which is just as important, is to build endurance, toughness, and courage. They want to practice as realistically as possible so that when they go into a real fight, the transition isn't as jarring.

The idea that stories slavishly obey deep structural patterns seems at first vaguely depressing. But it shouldn't be. Think of the human face. The fact that all faces are very much alike doesn't make the face boring or mean that particular faces can't startle us with their beauty or distinctiveness.

Fiction writers are fully ten times more likely to be bipolar than the general population, and poets are an amazing forty times more likely to struggle with the disorder. Based on statistics like these, psychologist Daniel Nettle writes, "It is hard to avoid the conclusion that most of the canon of Western culture was produced by people with a touch of madness." Essayist Brooke Allen does Nettle one better: "The Western literary tradition, it seems, has been dominated by a sorry collection of alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, manic-depressives, sexual predators, and various unfortunate combinations of two, three, or even all of the above.

When we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to leave us defenseless.

Story, in other words, continues to fulfill its ancient function of binding society by reinforcing a set of common values and strengthening the ties of common culture. Story enculturates the youth. It defines the people. It tells us what is laudable and what is contemptible. It subtly and constantly encourages us to be decent instead of decadent. Story is the grease and glue of society: by encouraging us to behave well, story reduces social friction while uniting people around common values. Story homogenizes us; it makes us one. This is part of what Marshall McLuhan had in mind with his idea of the global village. Technology has saturated widely dispersed people with the same media and made them into citizens of a village that spans the world.

bad things do not happen because of a wildly complex swirl of abstract historical and social variables. They happen because bad men live to stalk our happiness. And you can fight, and possibly even defeat, bad men. If you can read the hidden story

There is a paradox in fiction that was first noticed by Aristotle in the Poetics. We are drawn to fiction because fiction gives us pleasure. But most of what is actually in fiction is deeply unpleasant: threat, death, despair, anxiety, Sturm und Drang.

In an effort to civilize combat sports, authorities mandated padded gloves and instantly made the sports far more savage. Granted, putting gloves on the hands seems like a nice thing to do. If you were being punched in the brain by a powerful man, wouldn't you rather he strap a pillow around his fist? But the glove doesn't do anything to diminish your brain damage.

We are creatures of story, and the process of changing one mind or the whole world must begin with 'Once upon a time.'

I think that a lot of people who like training with guns are probably drawn to it not only for practical reasons, but also in that same restless quest for physical excellence that draws people to a martial arts dojo.

If you want to burrow a message into a human mind. Work it into a story

There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.

I think the proper attitude toward fighting sports is one of ambivalence. You can be drawn to them, but you should also be repelled by them.

Story is where people go to practice the key skills of human social life.

We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard.

The average daydream is about fourteen seconds long and we have about two thousand of them per day. In other words, we spend about half of our waking hours - one-third of our lives on earth - spinning fantasies.

I watch fights and I often feel morally compromised by it. I feel like I'm morally culpable for what's occurring because I'm the spectator and ultimately footing the bill for the spectacle.

Literature offers feelings for which we don't have to pay. It allows us to love, condemn, condone, hope, dread, and hate without any of the risks those feelings ordinarily involve.

The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can't.

Watching this little scene makes my throat ache. It seems an apt metaphor for the role most men play--even in egalitarian modern marriages--as quasi-outsiders in their own families. Of course, men have always contributed importantly to the family, and our wives and children would miss us if we were gone. But there's also a tacit understanding that we are the expendable ones: if something evil comes through the front door, everyone knows whose job it is to die guarding the family's retreat out the back. Men are a little on the periphery of family life, cut off from the biologically precious mother and children as though by an invisible pane of glass.

Part of why I was attracted to the idea of owning a gun was self-defense, and part of it was that I've been fascinated by guns since I was a little kid, and I want to play with them. It seems like a lot of fun.

A boxing contest is a brain-damage contest. Who can give out more brain damage and who can absorb more of it?

Conspiracy theories - feverishly creative, lovingly plotted - are in fact fictional stories that some people believe. Conspiracy theorists connect real data points and imagined data points into a coherent, emotionally satisfying version of reality. Conspiracy theories exert a powerful hold on the human imagination - yes, perhaps even your imagination - not despite structural parallels with fiction, but in large part because of them. They fascinate us because they are ripping good yarns, showcasing classic problem structure and sharply defined good guys and villains. They offer vivid, lurid plots that translate with telling ease into wildly popular entertainment.

The brain stays up all night telling stories while we sleep. We just call them dreams.

We are a species addicted to a stories.

I don't think people are reacting primarily to the danger of the sport. There are many other activities that are truly dangerous that we have no inclination to ban.

It's an empirical question whether training makes one more or less likely to get in a fight outside the gym. In some ways, I'm probably more likely to get into a fight, because I feel more competent, and I know what it's cost me in the past to back down from fights, and I don't want to feel that way.

I can walk into a gun store in my town and buy military-grade weapons. You'd be shocked by the amount of firepower you can buy - 50 caliber sniper rifles and the same shotguns the Marines carry in Iraq or Afghanistan. It doesn't matter whether I know how to use these things - I can just walk into a store and buy them.

I think what bothers us about fighting sports isn't the damage to the athlete but the fact that you win by doing more harm to your opponent than he does to you. It just seems ugly.

Fiction is an ancient virtual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems.

As the video game designer and writer James Wallis puts it, Human beings like stories. Our brains have a natural affinity not only for enjoying narratives and learning from them but also for creating them. In the same way that your mind sees an abstract pattern and resolves it into a face, your imagination sees a pattern of events and resolves it into a story.