During the first ten minutes of class, write a summary of your reading of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, “Hell is Story-Friendly” in your notebook. Has your understanding of Gottschall’s writing style changed as you have read more of his book? How does he relate now to Medina?
Before our next class, type up your summary, run spell/grammar check, save it, and copy-and-paste your work into a comment to this blog post.
I enjoyed reading storytelling animal chapter hell is story friendly. I liked it because it is true that people love fiction, it’s our guilty pleasure. You never really hear people say oh well I that auto biography was so suspenseful; it had me shaking in my boots. We like the drama, the suspense in a story. Also this chapter relates to something else I read not sure if its brain rules or not, but people hate the truth it’s boring. That’s why fiction always sells so well and these television shows we watch catch our attention, it has a way of reeling us in wanting more.
Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, “Hell is Story-Friendly” is an amazing chapter. He begins with a story of a father and daughter in a supermarket and then tells the same story in a more fantastic and simple way. I really enjoy the two point of view of the story because is like changing my mood. In other words, is like the same theme but differently.Therefore, this experience prove that fiction is an escapist entertainment. As Gottschall explain, we all enjoy and want movies of the human condition such as love, sex, challenges and fear of death. Also, we have empathy for the fictional characters because we experience the same feelings ourselves. Therefore, our responses to fiction improve our ability to deal with real problems. In my mind, Gottschall and Medina are very alike because both appreciates the brain in everything they write. In other words, both agree that studies of brains fiction are consistent with the problem of reality and theory of storytelling.
Nowadays, we spend so much time on watching television, movies, and fiction stories because it keeps us entertained. From the reading “Hell is Story-Friendly”, It talks about how people love fiction. Most of the people don’t like the truth because reality is boring. We want some that can provide beauty and creativity to be enjoyed, which we can get from fiction, dramas, and television.
People nowadays give their attention to movies, fictional stories, and television shows or sitcoms. “Hell is Story Friendly” Gottschall explains how people love fiction, I can agree fiction a little fiction here and there isn’t bad. People don’t love the truth and hide themselves in what is not real, since reality is boring unless something exciting happens. Humans always want to get told a lie just to feel better about themselves, if you give it to them straightforward they’ll get offended, “the truth hurts” as people usually say.
In “Hell is Story-Friendly”, Gottschall explains how most people nowadays use fiction in everyday life because we enjoy escaping reality. Sometimes we want to turn away from how boring relaity is and fiction is more entertaining. We can relate to the characters in these fiction stories because we can empathize with them and we can relate to similar scenarios. Nobody likes to be told the truth and fiction is just a tool that is used to, once again, run away from reality.
I personally love this chapter.
It says that humans do not need simple, drama-free stories based on daily activities, which do not involve any challenges, bad news, fights or actions…
That is why people love fictions. Even it might seem bizarre on some level, it helps us to escape from reality, get in imaginary worlds of struggle and stress and mortal woe. Fiction gives us pleasure. Fiction is a creative form of art.
We need to know that there are heroes that problems might be solved and the worst situation will be over.
In our mind we will remember the pilot that landed airplane in difficult conditions, almost crashed but by some miracle and professional skills he could safely land and no one were killed. This person will stock in our memories, even though all pilots have dangerous job and deal with risk on daily basis.
I much enjoyed the “Hell is Story-Friendly” chapter of Jonathan Gottschall’s “The storytelling Animal”. It is a well-known fact that we enjoy fiction. We use it as a way to escape our everyday lives. But this is actually a kind of a paradox. We use fiction to entertain ourselves, but the fiction we enjoy the most is displaying things like death, fear and great challenges. The reason why we find fiction so interesting, is our mirror neurons, which causes us to in a way experience the same feelings as the persons we see on the screen or in books. Fiction can be compared to an airplane simulator, preparing and training us for the challenges we might meet in real life.
The idea of fiction itself is very fascinating! Fiction brings us “escape” from the real world partly because it sorta gives us this innuendo that a certain situation would more than likely not occur and if it did it gives us the satisfaction of thinking about “What If I was in that position?” and try to mentally prepare even though you necessarily can’t. Taking our fears and things that we as people are extremely worried about and putting them on big screens and funny situations sorta makes us have different emotions and not become aware that this is something i’ve always been afraid of…… in some cases. Everything is a paradox and it’s a paradox that two opposites actually go together, thus making taking fiction and making it bizarre creates something that is what we call “normal”. I guess just having the ability to feel makes fiction a best seller.
Fiction is a part of our everyday lives, and we as human beings fancy it, it is as though if there were no fiction, our lives would become boring. According to Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, “Hell is Story-Friendly”, fiction is usually seen as escapist entertainment and are pleasurable because it allows us to escape from life into Neverland, which is easier. Also, he states that we are attracted to fiction not because of an evolutionary glitch, but because fiction is, on the whole, good for us. Gottschall explains that this is because human life, especial social life, is intensely complicated and the stakes are high. He added that fiction allows our brains to practice reacting to the kinds of challenges that are, and always were, most crucial to our success as a species.
Stories are pleasurable because they allow us to escape. Life is hard; Neverland is easy. People wants fiction in their life. Fiction is a powerful and ancient virtual reality technology that stimulates the big dilemmas of human life. When we pick up a book or turn on the TV we are teleported into a parallel universe. Gottschall says “When we watch returns of Seinfeld or read a john Grisham novel, we take a short vacation from the pressure of reality. Life hounds us. We hide from it in fiction.” I don’t really know about returns of Seinfeld but I watch a lot of fiction movies and TV series and gottschall is true, I am in a different land when I get into those stories. We are drawn to fiction because fiction gives us pleasure. But what is actually in fiction is unpleasant threat, death and despair. Most of the Fiction bestsellers list consist of the massacres, murder and rapes. We see the same in TV shows. If there is no knotty problem there is no story. If you walk by a store there is no story but if you walk by a store and you saw two guys trying to break the glass, steal stuff, kill the cashier and run that’s a heck of a story. If Game Of Thrones was all about seven kingdoms where everyone lived happily then it would never have been so popular. Around 30 main characters have died in the show and sadly that’s is what makes it so interesting. We are attracted to fiction not because of an evolutionary glitch, but because fiction is in whole, good for us. Fiction allows our brain to practice reading to the kind of challenges that are, and always were.
Jonathan Gottschall’s third chapter, “Hell is Story-Friendly” from The Storytelling Animal, as all its chapters, started with a nice quote. In this case, he used a Robert Pinsky’s one that talks about how poems of loss of death, can please the reader mightily. I enjoyed the stories at the beginning of the chapter and how he compared both of them and explained what would happen if he changes the way of how the acts developed. The first one is a nightmare and the other one could occur in real life. Nevertheless, the one that the readers would prefer is the one with suspense and sad events because it infects you with the need to know what will happen next. Fiction is usually seen as escapist from entertainment, stories are pleasurable because the allow us to escape from reality. However, this allows us to escape from our troubles but it embroils us in new sets of troubles. Gottschall explains that hyperrealism fails for the same reason that pure wish fulfillment does. Both lack of the key ingredient of story: the plot contrivance of trouble. It is incredible how complicated fiction stories could transport us to a new world of pleasure. Janet Burroway argues, “Literature offers feelings for which we don’t have to pay. It allow us to love, condemn, condone, hope, dread, and without any of the risks those feelings ordinarily involve. I loved to read this quote because I deeply understand it and enjoy it too, because I am a follower of stories that talks about feelings. Studies of “brains on fiction” are consistent with the problem simulation theory of storytelling. They suggest that when we experience fiction, our neurons are firing much as we were taking a shower and a killer suddenly tore down the curtain. Humans are always going to be attract by fiction because they are able to feel the stories as if they were theirs. The funny thing of this is that we usually remember problematic events more than the easy ones of life. In conclusion, fiction is good for us. It enables us to escape from reality and the struggles we have to live day by day.