Paley’s book Boys and Girls is about the year she spent trying to get her pupils to behave in a more unisex way. And it is a chronicle of spectacular and amusing failure. None of Paley’s tricks or bribes or clever manipulations worked. For instance, she tried forcing the boys to play in the doll corner and the girls to play in the block corner. The boys proceeded to turn the doll corner into the cockpit of a starship, and the girls built a house out of blocks and resumed their domestic fantasies. (543)

I’ve been arguing that children’s pretend play is relentlessly focused on trouble. And it is. But as Melvin Konner demonstrates in his monumental book The Evolution of Childhood, there are reliable sex differences in how boys and girls play that have been found around the world. Dozens of studies across five decades and a multitude of cultures have found essentially what Paley found in her midwestern classroom: boys and girls spontaneously segregate themselves by sex; boys engage in much more rough-and-tumble play; fantasy play is more frequent in girls, more sophisticated, and more focused on pretend parenting; boys are generally more aggressive and less nurturing than girls, with the differences being present and measurable by the seventeenth month of life. (551)

Sex differences in children’s play reflect the fact that biological evolution is slow, while cultural evolution is fast. Evolution hasn’t caught up with the rapid changes in men’s and women’s lives that have occurred mainly in the past one hundred years. Children’s play still seems to be preparing girls for lives beside the hearth and preparing boys for lives of action in the world. (580)

There is a yawning canyon between what is desirable in life (an uneventful trip to the grocery story) and what is desirable in fiction (a catastrophic trip). In this gap, I believe, lies an important clue to the evolutionary riddle of fiction. (658)

But it’s hard to reconcile the escapist theory of fiction with the deep patterns we find in the art of storytelling. If the escapist theory were true, we’d expect stories to be mainly about pleasurable wish fulfillment. In story worlds, everything would go right and good people would never suffer. (664)

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. Take a look at the carnage on the fiction bestseller lists—the massacres, murders, and rapes. See the same on popular TV shows. Look at classic literature: Oedipus stabbing out his eyes in disgust; Medea slaughtering her children; Shakespeare’s stages strewn with runny corpses. Heavy stuff. But even the lighter stuff is organized around problems, and readers are riveted by their concern over how it will all turn out: Can Dumb and Dumber overcome their obstacles to win mates who are way out of their league? (675)

Hyperrealism fails for the same reason that pure wish fulfillment does. Both lack the key ingredient of story: the plot contrivance of trouble. (704)

As Charles Baxter puts it in another book about fiction, “Hell is story-friendly.” (710)

Stories the world over are almost always about people (or personified animals) with problems. The people want something badly—to survive, to win the girl or the boy, to find a lost child. But big obstacles loom between the protagonists and what they want. Just about any story—comic, tragic, romantic—is about a protagonist’s efforts to secure, usually at some cost, what he or she desires. (715)

Story = Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication (718)

Stories are not about going to the bathroom, driving to work, eating lunch, having the flu, or making coffee—unless those activities can be tied back to the great predicaments. Why do stories cluster around a few big themes, and why do they hew so closely to problem structure? Why are stories this way instead of all the other ways they could be? I think that problem structure reveals a major function of storytelling. It suggests that the human mind was shaped for story, so that it could be shaped by story. (753)

According to evolutionary thinkers such as Brian Boyd, Steven Pinker, and Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, story is where people go to practice the key skills of human social life. (770)

For example, Janet Burroway argues that low-cost vicarious experience—especially emotional experience—is the primary benefit of fiction. As she puts it, “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.” (773)

The psychologist and novelist Keith Oatley calls stories the flight simulators of human social life. Just as flight simulators allow pilots to train safely, stories safely train us for the big challenges of the social world. (779)

In the 1990s, quite by accident, Italian neuroscientists discovered mirror neurons. (791)

In their book The Media Equation, the computer scientists Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass show that people respond to the stuff of fiction and computer games much as they respond to real events. For Reeves and Nass, “media equals real life.” Knowing that fiction is fiction doesn’t stop the emotional brain from processing it as real. (814)

It is an axiom of neuroscience that “cells that fire together wire together.” When we practice a skill, we improve because repetition of the task establishes denser and more efficient neural connections. This is why we practice: to lay down grooves in our brains, making our actions crisper, faster, surer. (839)

In his groundbreaking book How the Mind Works, Pinker argues that stories equip us with a mental file of dilemmas we might one day face, along with workable solutions. In the way that serious chess players memorize optimal responses to a wide variety of attacks and defenses, we equip ourselves for real life by absorbing fictional game plans. (843)

In one study, they found that heavy fiction readers had better social skills—as measured by tests of social and empathic ability—than those who mainly read nonfiction. This was not, they discovered, because people who already had good social abilities naturally gravitated to fiction. In a second test that accounted for differences in personality traits—as well as factors such as gender, age, and IQ—the psychologists still found that people who consumed a lot of fiction outperformed heavy nonfiction readers on tests of social ability. In other words, as Oatley puts it, differences in social abilities “were best explained by the kind of reading people mostly did.” (867)

Jouvet raised the possibility that dreams are for practice. In dreams, animals rehearse their responses to the sorts of problems that are most germane to their survival. Kitties practice on kitty problems. Rats practice on rat problems. Humans practice on human problems. (995)

Although there is some controversy about how to interpret the data, most dream researchers generally agree with Hobson: Dreamland is not a happy place. (1009)

Trouble is the fat red thread that ties together the fantasies of pretend play, fiction, and dreams, and trouble provides a possible clue to a function they all share: giving us practice in dealing with the big dilemmas of human life. (1057)

But as we’ve already seen, conscious knowledge can be overrated. There are two kinds of memory: implicit and explicit. The problem simulation model is based on implicit, unconscious memory. We learn when the brain rewires itself, and we don’t need to consciously remember for that rewiring to occur. The most spectacular proof of this comes from amnesia victims, who can improve by practicing tasks without retaining any conscious memory of the practice. (1071)

In psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig’s massive study of mental illness and creativity, The Price of Greatness, he found an 87 percent rate of psychiatric disorders in eminent poets and a 77 percent rate in eminent fiction writers—far higher than the rates he found among high achievers in nonartistic fields such as business, science, politics, and the military. (1178)

Because of the quirky wiring of the brain, visual information that enters the right eye is fed to the left brain, and information entering the left eye goes to the right brain. In an intact brain, visual information that goes to the left brain is then piped via the corpus callosum to the right brain. But in split-brain individuals, information that enters only one eye gets marooned in the opposite hemisphere, leaving the other hemisphere in the dark. (1218)

The side of the subject’s brain responsible for communicating with the researchers (the left) had no idea that the right side of the brain had received an image of a snowy scene. All the speaking side of the brain knew was that the left hand (controlled by the right brain) had reached out and chosen a picture of a snowy scene. It had no idea why. Nonetheless, when the researchers asked, “Why did you choose the shovel?” the subject had a ready and confident response: “Because you need a shovel to clean out the chicken coop.” (1235)

The left brain is a relentless explainer, and it would rather fabricate a story than leave something unexplained. Even in split-brain subjects, who are working with one-half of their brains tied behind their backs, these fabrications are so cunning that they are hard to detect except under laboratory conditions. (1246)

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. (1290)

if there is no story there—we are only too happy to invent one. Consider the following information: Todd rushed to the store for flowers. Greg walked her dog. Sally stayed in bed all day. Quick, what were you thinking? If you are like most people, you were puzzling over the three sentences, trying to find the hidden story. Perhaps Sally is sad because someone has died. Perhaps Greg and Todd are her friends: one is seeing to Sally’s dog, and the other is buying her flowers. Or perhaps Sally is happy. She has just won the lottery, and to celebrate she has decided to luxuriate in bed all day. Greg and Todd are the underwear models she has hired as her masseurs and personal assistants. In fact, these sentences are unrelated. I made them up. But if you have a healthy storytelling mind, you will automatically start to weave them together into the beginnings of a story. Of course, we recognize consciously that these sentences could serve as building blocks for an infinite number of narratives. But studies show that if you give people random, unpatterned information, they have a very limited ability not to weave it into a story. (1303)

Conspiratorial thinking is not limited to the stupid, the ignorant, or the crazy. It is a reflex of the storytelling mind’s compulsive need for meaningful experience. Conspiracy theories offer ultimate answers to a great mystery of the human condition: why are things so bad in the world? They provide nothing less than a solution to the problem of evil. In the imaginative world of the conspiracy theorist, there is no accidental badness. To the conspiratorial mind, shit never just happens. History is not just one damned thing after another, and only dopes and sheeple believe in coincidences. For this reason, conspiracy theories—no matter how many devils they invoke—are always consoling in their simplicity. 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. (1429)

In his trailblazing book Darwin’s Cathedral, the biologist David Sloan Wilson proposes that religion emerged as a stable part of all human societies for a simple reason: it made them work better. (1493)

But Wilson points out that “elements of religion that appear irrational and dysfunctional often make perfectly good sense when judged by the only appropriate gold standard as far as evolutionary theory is concerned—what they cause people to do.” And what they generally cause people to do is to behave more decently toward members of the group (coreligionists) while vigorously asserting the group’s interests against competitors. (1504)

I should say that people are willing to imagine almost anything. This flexibility does not extend to the moral realm. Shrewd thinkers going back as far as the philosopher David Hume have noted a tendency toward “imaginative resistance”: we won’t go along if someone tries to tell us that bad is good, and good is bad. (1578)

We are only too happy to leer on as the bad guys of fiction torture, kill, and rape. But storytellers never ask us to approve. Morally repellent acts are a great staple of fiction, but so is the storyteller’s condemnation. It was very wrong, Dostoyevsky makes clear, for Raskolnikov to kill those women. It would be very wrong, Swift makes clear, to raise babies like veal, no matter the socioeconomic returns. (1594)

But Plato was wrong, and so were his panicked descendants. Fiction is, on the whole, intensely moralistic. (1601)

As novelists such as Leo Tolstoy and John Gardner have argued, fiction is, in its essence, deeply moral. Beneath all of its brilliance, fiction tends to preach, and its sermons are usually fairly conventional. (1624)

According to David Elkind’s The Power of Play, children’s pretend play always has clear “moral overtones—the good guys versus the bad guys.” (1654)

It is easy for us to forget, sitting alone on our couches with our novels and television shows, that until the past few centuries, story was always an intensely communal activity. For tens of thousands of years before the invention of writing, story happened only when a teller came together with listeners. It wasn’t until the invention of the printing press that books became cheap enough to reward mass literacy. (1670)

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. (1679)

The emotions of fiction are highly contagious, and so are the ideas. As the psychologist Raymond Mar writes, “Researchers have repeatedly found that reader attitudes shift to become more congruent with the ideas expressed in a [fiction] narrative.” In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. (1811)

A related explanation comes from the psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock. They argue that entering fictional worlds “radically alters the way information is processed.” Green and Brock’s research shows that the more absorbed readers are in a story, the more the story changes them. Fiction readers who reported a high level of absorption tended to have their beliefs changed in a more “story-consistent” way than those who were less absorbed. Highly absorbed readers also detected significantly fewer “false notes” in stories—inaccuracies, infelicities—than less transported readers. (1829)

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. (1835)

A life story is a “personal myth” about who we are deep down—where we come from, how we got this way, and what it all means. Our life stories are who we are. They are our identity. A life story is not, however, an objective account. A life story is a carefully shaped narrative that is replete with strategic forgetting and skillfully spun meanings. (1942)

In 1977, the psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik coined the term “flashbulb memories” to describe photo-perfect recollections of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. People vividly remembered where they were, what they were doing, and who they were with when they heard the awful news. Subsequent research on flashbulb memory has shown that Brown and Kulik were both right and wrong. We really do vividly remember the big and traumatic moments of our lives, but the details of these memories can’t be trusted. (1956)

In short, flashbulb memory research shows that some of the most confident memories in our heads are sheer invention. (1983)

This study was among the first of many to show how shockingly vulnerable the memory system is to contamination by suggestion. (2011)

Memories for sight, sound, taste, and smell are stored in different locations. When we recall the bike accident, we don’t queue up a videotape; we recall bits of data from all around the brain. This data is then sent forward to the storytelling mind—our little storytelling Holmes—who stitches and pastes the scraps and fragments into a coherent and plausible re-creation of what might have occurred, taking his usual poetic license. (2032)

Put differently, the past, like the future, does not really exist. They are both fantasies created in our minds. The future is a probabilistic simulation we run in our heads in order to help shape the world we want to live in. The past, unlike the future, has actually happened. But the past, as represented in our minds, is a mental simulation, too. (2035)

This self-exculpatory tendency is so powerful in human life that Steven Pinker calls it the “Great Hypocrisy.” (2052)

For example, Thomas Gilovich’s book How We Know What Isn’t So reports that of one million high school seniors surveyed, “70% thought they were above average in leadership ability, and only 2% thought they were below average. (2068)

Psychologists call this “the Lake Woebegone effect”: we think we are above average when it comes to just about any positive quality—even immunity to the Lake Woebegone effect. Most of us think we are clear-eyed in our self-assessments. (2077)

According to a recent review article in American Psychologist, controlled scientific studies show that the talking cure works as well as (and perhaps much better than) newer therapies such as antidepressant drugs or cognitive-behavioral therapy. A psychotherapist can therefore be seen as a kind of script doctor who helps patients revise their life stories so that they can play the role of protagonists again—suffering and flawed protagonists, to be sure, but protagonists who are moving toward the light. (2106)