Boyd, Brian
2009
On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, cognition, and fiction

The quotes from the conclusion (380-398) are very concise!

4
“Like some human arts, dolphin air art involves design but not representation. Without representation, fiction—and indeed much song and dance or painting and sculpture—would be impossible.”

7
“As we will see, unique aspects of human parent-child interaction, a special instance of our species’ singular capacity to share attention, hold a major key to the origin of art. Here the father engages his son’s attention to change his mood. He thereby affects the mood of others, whose appreciation in turn alters his own mood. The feedback of action, attention, reaction, and the refinement of action to shape further attention and reaction provide an exclusively human basis for art.” An entarch allows for that kind of feedback, broadcast doesn’t.
“in our own species the impulse to art develops reliably in all normal individuals.”

10
“That is what I want to explain in evolutionary terms: our impulse to appeal to our own minds and reach out to others for the sheer pleasure of sensing what we can share even in an unprecedented new move.”

11
“I’ll believe that computers can think not when they can beat a Kasparov at chess, with its rapidly proliferating but after all calculable permutations, but when they can be fed something as unexpected as the photograph of “Ralph, come back, it was only a Rash” daubed on a wall, and can read the words, deduce the story, then laugh at the joke they have recognized for themselves.”

14f
“Humans uniquely inhabit “the cognitive niche”: we gain most of our advantages from intelligence. We therefore have an appetite for information, and especially for pattern, information that falls into meaningful arrays from which we can make rich inferences. Information can be costly to obtain and analyze, but because it offers an invaluable basis for action, nature evolves senses and minds to gather and process information appropriate to particular modes of life. Like other species, humans can assimilate information through the rapid processing that specialized pattern recognition allows, but unlike other species we also seek, shape, and share information in an open-ended way. Since pattern makes data swiftly intelligible, we actively pursue patterns, especially those that yield the richest inferences to our minds, in our most valuable information systems, the senses of sight and sound, and in our most crucial domain, social information.”

15
“We can define art as cognitive play with pattern. Just as play refines behavioral options over time by being self-rewarding, so art increases cognitive skills, repertoires, and sensitivities. A work of art acts like a playground for the mind, a swing or a slide or a merry-go-round of visual or aural or social pattern. Like play, art succeeds by engaging and rewarding attention, since the more frequent and intense our response, the more powerful the neural consequences. Art’s appeal to our preferences for pattern ensures that we expose ourselves to high concentrations of humanly appropriate information eagerly enough that over time we strengthen the neural pathways that process key patterns in open-ended ways.”

19
“our minds and behavior are always shaped by the interaction of nature and nurture, or genes and environment, including the cultural environment.”

23
orature = oral literature
“The extent of human cultural differences has been made possible by the evolution of the mind. Without the complex shared architecture of the mind, culture could not exist. Because of that shared design, there are many universals across cultures: there is a human nature.”

25
culture = “the nongenetic transmission of behavior, including local customs and even fashions”
“Evolution has allowed humans to develop our singular capacity for culture because culture helps us track changes in the environment more rapidly than genes do.”

27
“”We have not escaped evolution [because we humans have a culture], as so commonly assumed. We experience evolution in hyperdrive.”” Culture is faster evolution.

28
“any group can compete more effectively against other groups by minimizing within-group fitness defferences.”

32
“if there is inheritance, and we know there is […]; if there is variation, and we know there is […]; if some variations are more successful than others, and we know they are […], then in a world of limited resources and competing interests, not all will be equally successful in producing offspring that themselves produce reproductively viable offspring.”

33
“”Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection.””

34
“Genetic drift – chance changes in frequency in genes not under strong selection pressure – can have consequences, especially in small, isolated populations, but drift is directionless, as much back or sideways as forward, unlike the steady compounding of advantages under selection pressure.” The film industry was drifting for many years and now there is selection pressure.

36
“an adaptation need not be perfect to establish itself; it needs only to perform better on average than the available competition. If further variation can generate a still better refinement, this will in turn predominate, so that design may continue to improve.”

40
“We come into this world prepared especially to learn from and share with each other […]” Children can imitate a smile already an hour after birth. They know subconsciously which muscles to use for example. Nobody taught them. Evolution put that knowledge in their DNA. The DNA of all living things is the immense memory of evolution/the world.
This is evolutionary psychology in the broadest sense?

47
“In the severely limited space of working memory, we process information not unconsciously or implicitly, but consciously or “explicitly,” and not in parallel but in series […]” When consumers see entertainment content that they feel they know already, they process it in the backs of their minds and can do other things at the same time. If they see something they think is new, it becomes their main and only thing to think about. Perhaps kids today feel like they’ve seen everything that’s on TV or the Internet and that’s why they watch TV, surf the net, and text at the same time. If we gave them something new, would it become their sole occupation? I don’t think this reasoning can be extended that far.

50
“By developing our ability to think beyond the here and now, storytelling helps us not to override the given, but to be less restricted by it, to cope with it more flexibly and on something more like our own terms.”

52
“”Selfishness beats altruism within single groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.“”

53
“although genetic mutations can spread only over generations, cultural changes with significant effects on the relative fitness of groups can spread within a single generation.”

56
“even in the most cooperative of relationships competition is inevitable, [this is] why the powerful emotions engendered by family loyalty and conflict saturate stories from Genesis to The Sopranos.”

57f
“For altruism to work robustly a whole suite of motivations has to be in place: sympathy, so that I am inclined to help another; trust, so that I can offer help now and expect it will be somehow repaid later; gratitude, to incline me, when I have been helped, to return the favor; shame, to prompt me to repay when I still owe a debt; a sense of fairness, so that I can intuitively gauge an adequate share or repayment; indignation, to spur me to break off cooperation with or even inflict punishment on a cheat; and guilt, a displeasure at myself and fear of exposure and reprisal to deter me from seeking the short-term advantages of cheating. […] Rather than merely taking these emotions as givens, we can account for them as natural selection’s way of motivating widespread cooperation in highly social species.” In the end we are egoistic/selfish, we only cooperate because it helps ourselves in the end.

62
“We have evolved not to be “rational individuals,” profit maximizers, but social animals, holding others to fair dealings even at our own cost.” The dictator game: a “dictator” gets 100$ to distribute between himself and another person. If that person accepts its share, both can keep the money. If the distribution is not perceived fair by the other person, that person won’t accept the money, and they both won’t get anything. In different societies “dictators” offer different amount: between 15% and 58%, on average 50% -> this depends on the level of trust in the cultures.

63
“free-riding, taking benefits without paying the full cost, persists as the fundamental problem of social life.” -> Black Book
“The social monitoring already intense elsewhere in the primate line becomes still more intense for humans – and a powerful prompt for storytelling.” A LOT of good stories are based on a sense of un/fairness!

63f
“In small-scale societies, uncooperative acts were often punished through personal revenge, motivated by an evolved sense of outrage but often leading to destructive cycles of vengeance. Especially in larger societies, better means were needed. Centralized systems of justice, and eventually a police force, could detect transgressions, assess charges, and administer punishment. Depersonalizing justice could dampen incendiary emotions and diminish vendettas.” This system worked fine as long as societies/cultures lived relatively separately from each other. Now they interact A LOT but there is no institution in the world that represents the depersonalised justice. That’s why we have so many wars and “cultural vendettas”! -> Black fucking Book!

65f
“Evolution offers a much more complex and nuanced view of the social world than the artificial model of the rational individual of economics, or the romantic idea, common since Rousseau, of good people perverted by evil systems, or the paranoid Nietzschean or Foucauldian suspicion that all moral claims mask a lust for power.”

70
“Some philosophers of art claim that other times and cultures cannot have art because they lack “our” Western notion of art, the distinction drawn in eighteenth-century Europe between fine art for detached contemplation and mere craft. But the very concept that there is no non-Western art is a Western one […].”
“if audiences appreciate, artists appropriate.”

78f
“the very flexibility of human behavior suggests that sexual selection has been an extra gear for art, not the engine itself.” Kind of a summary of the whole chapter, p69-79.

90
“if a stimulus remains unchanging, if the pattern can be predicted, the psychological process of habituation automatically switches off attention.”

94
“”the Internet is just one of those things that contemporary humans can spend millions of ‘practice’ events at, that the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to. Our brains are massively remodelled by this exposure – but so, too, by reading, by television, by video games, by modern electronics, by contemporary music, by contemporary ‘tools,’ etc.”” Michael Merzenich quoted in Doidge, Norman (2007): The Brain That Changes Itself, quoted in Boyd (2009). The Internet has “massively remodelled our brain”, it is time storytelling adapts to these new brains. Will Boyd go on to say that? Is there an age limit to this remodelling? Will only young people enjoy this new storytelling?
“art can reconfigure minds only so long as it rewards us enough, like play, to hold our attention again and again.”

96
“art, as practiced by all in the days before it could become a status badge or consumer product, rewarded all, because it sharpened minds and skills.” Today, high art “serves no particular good, certainly not the exalted functions claimed for it.”

99
“Art dies without attention, as people since Aristotle have noted, both within and outside evolutionary explanation.”

105
“And despite video and sound recording we still respond more intensely if we form part of a larger audience that listens, claps, sings, sways, dances, laughs, or cries together.”

106
“Art, even if it diverts energy from immediate survival or reproductive needs, can improve cooperation within a group enough for the group to compete successfully against others with less inclination to art. We should think in the first place not of art galleries or concert halls (though these too raise community confidence and lower alienation), but of chants, drums, dance, body-markings, costumes, banners, and the like.”

115
“Religion, on the other hand, needs art as a precursor. Without the existence of stories that diverge from the true, without the first fictions, religion could not have arisen. Religion depends on the power of story.”
“Recent research shows we remember best those stories with characters that violate our categoric expectations, crossing one animal kind with another, or combining human and animal, or separating the psychological from its usual physical constraints.”

120f
Definition “Darwin machine”:
“They cannot find the right answer beforehand: there is no single right form of live, no single right antibody, no single right synaptic link, no single right move. But they can generate possibilities that the environment tests. Survivors generate new variations and face new rounds of tests, so that even without preplanning, success accumulates.”

121
“Art constitutes another Darwin machine, an evolutionary subsystem effectively designed, in this case, for creativity.”
“If a work of art fails to earn attention, it die. If it succeeds, it can last even for millennia.”

122
“Since repeating exactly the same thing over and over again guarantees it will lose its impact, art faces a consistent pressure for novelty.”

123
“In art understood as a Darwin machine, works are not somehow created to fit the cultural environment. Instead they are generated, unpredictably, in the minds or actions or artists, and selected first by them in accordance with their intuitions about their social world, and then by this world itself.”

129
“Why do we spend so much of our time telling one another stories that neither side believes?”

139
“We keep mental “files” on individuals without confusing them, in ways that make it easy for us – and extremely hard for computers – to track individuals in life or in literature.”

152
Definition “semantic/episodic memory”:
“Semantic memory stores general knowledge, like my knowledge of trees or words like tree, root, oak, deciduous, memories often overlearned, automatized, and rapidly accessible through parallel searches. Episodic memory records particular events that I remember as experienced, as mine, and can more or less locate to a specific place and time in my past, like my memory of climbing a particular macrocarpa in childhood, or breaking off a poplar branch to use as a knight’s lance.”

155
“When we combine our inferences about what others know with our sense of their character traits, we have at our disposal a powerful social calculus.”

156
“Mirror neurons, which fire in the appropriate part of our own motor areas when we see another perform an action, form the basis for the simulations that underlie our rich social cognition so central to narrative.”

159
“Aristotle, the first great analyst of narrative, called storytelling the imitation of an action.” Boyd also gives specific quotes from Aristotle’s Poetics.

163
“We know how [others] feel because we literally feel what they are feeling.” Mirror neurons.

164
“[…] we know that we often don’t know about particular items of strategic information; that others may know when we don’t know; and that we and they know what a difference it can make to know or not. We therefore listen eagerly to those with strategic information they think we will value.”

165
“Just as our continued craving for sweet and fat reflects old circumstances, so our sometimes indiscriminate appetite for social information reflects a time when we were likely to encounter repeatedly everyone we heard about [and knowing about them helped us predict their behaviour]. And we especially ingest information about the powerful, because their decisions and actions could influence our lives, and about those who command attention, since those who could do so were usually social leaders.”

167
“In most forms of reciprocal altruism, the main temptation is not to repay the full value received.”

168
“the capacity to command attention in social animals correlates highly with status – and the incapacity to gain attention marks low status, the inability to avert negative attention augurs danger (mockery, reproach, attack, or punishment), and the withdrawal of attention (ostracism, isolation) constitutes a severe punishment in itself.”

177
“For children, direction, narration, and enactment flow readily and naturally into one another. So long as the play-story continues, consistency of medium or mode does not matter.” ENTAAARCH!

196
“And stories can help solve the problem of common knowledge: traditional stories ensure that all know and react to, and know that others know, the core values of the group.
The very nature of fiction makes it likely that storytellers earn least audience resistance and most admiration – the highest status – if they tell stories that appeal to values shared by the audience.”

199
Definition “fiction” or “the most important function of pure fiction”:
“By appealing to our fascination with agents and actions, fiction trains us to reflect feely beyond the immediate and to revolve things in our minds within a vast and vividly populated world of the possible.”

207
4 categories of stories:
low cost + high long-term benefit: proverbs, parables, fables
low cost + high immediate benefit: jokes
high cost + high immediate benefit: screen and print fiction
high cost + high long-term benefit: serious stories that provoke us to reconsider what it is to be human

209
“Art prepares minds for open-ended learning an creativity; fiction specifically improves our social cognition and our thinking beyond the here and now.”

215-231
4 essentials to keep the audience’s attention:

• Tradition and Innovation
• Character
• Event (goal, action, obstacle, outcome)
• Plot – the combination of Character and Event

230
“Storytellers need to balance audience benefits against audience costs in time and comprehension effort.”

251
“Throughout the Odyssey, Homer offers us the pleasure of anticipation and foreknowledge, by making us privy to the decisions of the gods and the decrees of fate, the pleasures of sympathizing with characters coping with their plight without the luxury of foreknowledge, and the pleasures of the unexpected.”

253
“A story’s appeal begins in character and plot. Art, like anything else catches our attention against a background of expectations: in he case of story, especially expectations of human nature (character) and experience (plot).”
But our expectations about

• the story form (generic)
• the storyteller (author-specific)
• the expectations generated by the work so far (work-specific)

“may drastically modify the way we attend.”

283
“Brains are “anticipation machines” whose task is to guess what will happen next in order to stay one step ahead.”

285f
“Life is what matters, and the only immortality worth wanting is in the memory of the living.” And if we are intelligent and think long-term we stand “our best chance for a long mortal life and a lasting memory in the minds of others.”

310
“If we wish to assess religion’s social benefits, its truth matters less than its power to motivate. So long as they are widely believed, false ideas can powerfully spur social cooperation: that the gods can watch every human move, that sooner or later they will punish infringements, that ritual can signal our respect for them and the precepts they safeguard.”

349
“Individuality is no late Western invention but a biological and psychological fact.”

357
“Even genius does not know quite where it is going until it arrives there, usually after a long cycle of generate-test-regenerate. But it gradually builds on its partial discoveries to arrive at substantial and often lasting solutions to problems it could not formulate before reaching them. It becomes an efficient system for generating significant novelty.”

376
“As I and others argue, all art serves creativity.”

378
“Once we understand clearly that we may not know everything relevant to a situation, we will often wish to seek out a deeper explanation.” It used to be religion, now it is science.

379
“Attention and meaning remain distinct from and irreducible to each other, but they feed off and into each other.” If storytellers want to be successful, they have to gain and keep attention and deliver meaning.

381
“Art in this broad sense is a human adaptation, its chief functions being

1. to refine and retune our minds in modes central to human cognition – sight, sound, and sociality – which it can do piecemeal through its capacity to motivate us to participate again and again in these high-intensity workouts;
2. to raise the status of gifted artists;
3. to improve the coordination and cooperation of communities, in our very social species; and
4. to foster creativity on an individual and social level.”

382
“creativity ultimately benefits us in producing a wider array of behavioral options, some of which will survive better than others under unpredictable selection pressures.” We might survive dangerous situations because we are creative.

382
“Storytelling appeals to our social intelligence.” Stories HAVE to be about inter-personal relations to be interesting to us.

383
“Fiction fosters cooperation by engaging and attuning our social and moral emotions and values, and creativity by enticing us to think beyond the immediate in the way our minds are most naturally disposed – in terms of social actions.”
Definition-storyworld / story world: “So long as s storyteller holds our interest, we will infer significance both from the story world – from characters and events – and from the storyteller’s intentions in recounting these events in just this way.”

386
“Evocriticism makes possible genuine and valid interdisciplinarity […]” He is talking about literary theory, but evolution is generally a furtile common ground for interdisciplinarity.

389
“[An evolutionary approach] takes seriously the idea that the complex emerges out of the simple, mostly building slowly, by minute increments, in the design of species (the universal), in cultural tradition (the local), in personal development (the individual), and in artistic composition and comprehension (the particular).” biological evolution -> cultural evolution -> personal evolution -> particular storytelling situation evolution

392-395
He stresses the exceptional importance of ATTENTION.

396
“We can see authors as problem-solvers with individual capacities and preferences making strategic choices within particular situations, by shaping different kinds of appeals to the cognitive preferences and expectations of audiences – preferences and expectations shaped at both specieswide and local levels – and balancing the costs against the benefits of authorial effort in composition and audience effort in comprehension and response.” Every bit of this sentence is IMPORTANT.

403
“Like design, purpose emerges rather than precedes.” I can only purposefully move my arm, because evolution has already been working on the human arm for a very long time. Today, I have the purpose to move my arm and I do. But I can only do it, because I physically and mentally can (thanks to evolution).

407
“Norms help unambitious filmmakers attain competence, but they challenge gifted ones to excel. By understanding these norms we can better appreciate skill, daring, and emotional power on those rare occasions when we meet them.”

414
“Only when science began to offer alternative naturalistic explanations of the world did religion and art start to split right apart. When science offered a detailed explanation of natural design without the need for a designer – the theory of evolution by natural selection – that, more than any other single idea, stripped us of a world made comfortable by a sense of purpose apparently underwritten by beings greater than us.”
“We do not know what other purposes life may eventually generate, but creativity offers us our best chance of reaching them.”