ADVICE AND DISSENT

Why we find it pleasing to read stories we know to be untrue

In “Why We Love Fiction,” an article he wrote for the October 5, 2010 issue of Axess Magazine in Sweden, Brian Boyd says that stories play a large part in our lives and that more important, fiction has helped humanity survive. “As psychologist and novelist Keith Oatley remarks,” Boyd says, “fiction works as a social simulator, allowing us to stretch our scope beyond the actual to the possible or the impossible. We need not be confined to the given, but can turn actuality around within the much larger space of possibility to explain how things are or to see how they could have been or might be.”

Boyd wonders, though: “Why do we spend so much of our time in story worlds, from pretend play and fairy tales to novels, comics, TV sitcoms and vampire series, movies from Hollywood to Bollywood and arthouse, and the stories in poems, song lyrics and computer games. Wouldn’t you expect a successful species, as we seem to be, to spend its time focusing on what’s true in the world? But we, uniquely, often distract ourselves with what we know to be untrue.”

In search for a scientific explanation, Boyd makes incursions into Charles Darwin’s Theory of the Origin of the Species, the ideas of biologist Richard Dawkins on the profound inclination of animals like beavers to pursue such apparently useless activities as building dams, and the research cited by anthropology professor Malvin Kinner in his 2010 book The Evolution of Childhood on the great power of play in shaping animal bodies and minds.

“Science may help explain why and how art and fiction have come to matter,” Boyd concludes, “but that will not give science their emotional impact, nor allow it to find a formula for art or fiction, nor make them matter less. If anything, it will only clarify why and how they matter so much.”

Read Brian Boyd’s “Why We Love Fiction” in Axess Magazine now!

RELATED READING:
In “Science Knows Best,” his review of Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press, 291 pages) in the October 3, 2010 issue of The New York Times, Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Ghanaian philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist, appreciates Harris’s efforts to draw attention to the fact that “science increasingly allows us to identify aspects of our minds that cause us to deviate from norms of factual and moral reasoning.” However, Appiah says that after reading Harris’s harsh diatribes against relativism, finds himself “wishing for less of the polemic against religion” and wanting more of “the illumination that comes from our increasing understanding of neuroscience.”

Read Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Science Knows Best” in The New York Times now!

Read Amazon’s Exclusive Q & A with Sam Harris

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