About the Book:
For millions of years our ancestors survived on the marginal niches of the environment while the bigger beasts reigned on Earth. They were a bunch of weak, defenseless, and unimportant creatures serving out their time before being swept into evolution’s dustbin. Then, sometime between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago, they embarked on a journey unprecedented in the history of life on the planet – one that took them from being footnotes in the book of Life to the dominant species of the planet. What secret superpower propelled this incredible charge? Tool use? Language? These were important, of course. But there was something else. We learned to tell stories. Drawing on insights from the evolutionary and social sciences, psychology, and the cognitive sciences, the author shows how the ability to tell stories has been at the foundation of our success as a species. They help us pass on crucial knowledge, imagine possible futures and co-operate flexibly in large groups. But the importance of stories in our lives goes deeper. It isn’t only that stories help us live. Recent discoveries in the cognitive sciences suggest that stories could be the most fundamental form in which we experience our lives : we live in stories every moment of our lives. That is why they have such power over us. If you have ever been captivated by a novel, film, or television show, and wondered why the storyteller is able to weave such magic (not merely how they do it); if you want to know why storytelling makes us human, and why to be human is necessarily to be a storyteller, then this book is for you.
My Thoughts:
Why Stories Work is an unconventional read for me. It is a far cry from most fiction and non-fiction works that I read. Having said that, I was intrigued by this book from the start. The simplest way to sum up this book is to talk about the conclusion that in the end human beings are storytellers in some form or the other.
To elaborate, I’ll go back to the start of the book. the author first touches upon how stories evolved and served as a way of sharing information. This leads to a look into unreal words and the imaginary. Following this, we talk about how our experiences and outcomes of situations shape the direction of the stories we tell and finally a conclusion on how stories impact us.
The book draws from various interdisciplinary fields, merging the different thoughts and ideas and bringing to us a well researched and well thought out idea. The author draws upon cognitive science and developmental psychology as well as philosophy to try to explain the importance of stories and storytelling. Humans are indeed complex organisms and the human brain is like no other. We cannot being to understand the entirety of how it works, but we can see common threads in the evolutionary process that set humans apart. One such idea is how we share information.
I particularly like how the author has written the book, making it informative, interesting and even interactive. He draws on examples and scientific ideas in the same context and merges them together seamlessly. The style of writing and the delivery is unique and this is what sets this book apart. Drawing from his experience in the field of films and entertainment, the author brings to us a wonderful book that really does not read like a work of non-fiction. This book is itself a story of evolution and the importance that stories and storytelling have in our lives today.