On the Origin of Stories
In On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, “Brian Boyd rehearses the history of the rapid growth in hominin brain size over the past couple of million years, showing that with the development of the neocortex we’ve been endowed with all kinds of cleverness to compensate for the fact that we’re slow, weak, flat-toothed and clawless. We are thoroughly social creatures, and when we work together we can be formidable predators; accordingly, we’ve evolved various attributes that enable mutualism, such as shared attention, mirror neurons and theory of mind. The latter allows us access to something no other animal seems aware of, namely, the notion that other members of our species might have false beliefs. The survival value of art, then, is that it hones and enhances those functions of mind that in turn enhance our capacity for social interaction and exploration: “Art develops in us habits of imaginative exploration, so that we take the world as not closed and given, but open and to be shaped on our own terms.””
On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction by Brian Boyd, reviewed in American Scientist.
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