As you know, we are switching our reading from John Medina’s Brain Rules to Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal. We will alternate our readings between Brain Rules and The Storytelling Animal according to the schedule on the syllabus.
During the first ten minutes of class, write a summary of your reading from Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, The Witchery of Story. Consider these things in your response: How does Gottschall’s writing style compare to O’Shea, Marcus, and Medina? How is story important to the way we think and the way we communicate with others?
Before our next meeting, type up your response and post it as a comment to this blog post.
in chapter one of “The StoryTelling Animal”, Jonathan Gottschall explains how life is full of storytelling. He mentions the different ways storytelling takes place, through dreams, children, writing, speech, and daydreaming. In my opinion, I think humans spend most of their storytelling through day dreaming and dreaming while sleeping. As Gottschall mentioned, the mind is restless. There are never-ending thoughts constantly flowing through our minds. Gottschall’s writing is similar to O’Shea’s, Medina’s, and Marcus’ writing style because they all give concepts of how the mind works, but each author explains in different ways. Gottschall give concepts of how the mind works by explaining how our mind story tells. O’Shea give gocncepts of how our mind works by explaining how parts of the brain affects human behavior. Marcus explains the faults of our mind and actions, he is more negative about human nature and the mind. O’Shea, Medina, and Gottschall’s writings are all positive.
In chapter one of “The StoryTelling Animal”, Jonathan Gottschall explains how life is full of storytelling. He mentions the different ways storytelling takes place, through dreams, children, writing, speech, and daydreaming. In my opinion, I think humans spend most of their storytelling through day dreaming and dreaming while sleeping. As Gottschall mentioned, the mind is restless. There are never-ending thoughts constantly flowing through our minds. Gottschall’s writing is similar to O’Shea’s, Medina’s, and Marcus’ writing style because they all give concepts of how the mind works, but each author explains in different ways. Gottschall gives concepts of how the mind works by explaining how our mind story tells, while O’Shea explains how parts of the brain affects human behavior. Marcus explains the faults of our mind and actions, he is more negative about human nature and the mind. O’Shea, Medina, and Gottschall’s writings are all positive.
According to chapter one of “The Story Telling Animal” by Jonathan Gottshall, life is full of storytelling experiences. Gottschall points out the various methods of storytelling. Storytelling, according to him, can be done through ideas, thoughts, daydreams, written, speech and many other different forms. Gottschall writes that the mind is very active and it tells stories. Gottschall’s writing parallels O’Shea’s, Medina’s and Marcus’ writing because the mind is the subject. Marcus highlights the pros and cons of our mind. Medina mentions how the mind works. O’Shea talks about the relationship between the mind and our actions. Gottschall, O’Shea, Medina and Marcus, all write about the mind and how complex and mysterious it is.
According to Gottschall, the mind is always viewing everything as a story. Whether we are trying to figure out another person, or are daydreaming, our mind processes everything through stories. There are various methods of storytelling, such as communication (speech), ideas, etc. Since the mind is always processing information it never rests. We tell stories when we are trying to comprehend something or someone. This is an important factor in my opinion that separates us from other animals. It kind of makes me think of dolphins and how they use echolocation to communicate with one another. They are very social animals and go crazy and get depressed when they cannot communicate with each other. This is similar to humans, and I feel this is something Gottschall could have mentioned. Compared to Oshea, Medina and Marcus’ writing, he takes a more specific approach with storytelling.
In Jonathan Gottschall, “The Story Telling Animal,” Chapter One, “The Witchery of Story,” discuss how story telling controls our lives. Gottschall uses the term witchery to describe how a writer can craft a story in a way to captivate its reader, thus pulling them away from their reality into the pages of the book. Although a writer supplies the words, a reader must have what Gottschall calls “willing suspension of disbelief.” It requires the reader to put aside their opinions of the story given, whether you know if the account is true or false, and embrace the story being pictured. I feel his writing style had me intrigued just like Medina’s. Both writers’ styles are easy to comprehend. Gottschall and Gary’s writing style are similar in telling both sides. Gottschall tells us how fascinating story can be with our imagination but we now get our stories from media outlets, such as television and music. Gary spoke highly of the brain but also pointed out its flaws. Story is important to the way we think and the way we communicate with other because it keeps us thriving in a community. We stay engaged amongst each other by the stories we tell. Who would have thought gossiping kept us flourishing? As Gottschall states, “We are creature of story.”
While reading chapter one of Jonathan Gottshall’s, “The Storytelling Animal”, he simply explains that life is like a neverending trail of stories of experiences we’ve faced or others before us has faced. From Jonathan’s point of view, storytelling to him is basically through everyones thoughts or ideas, daydreams or written out, through speech and many other forms. According to Gottshall, he have stated that our mind always makes up stories as we experience and go through our everyday life. Gottschall’s writing compares with O’Shea’s, Medina’s and Marcus’ writing because their writing all revolves around the human brain and how its so amazing and powerful. Marcus point out what’s great about the brain and what’s not so good about the brain. Medina mentions how the mind functions and other interesting facts about the brain that a huge majority of the readers might not know about. Lastly, O’Shea talks about the relationship between the mind and the actions we take that affect it. Gottschall, O’Shea, Medina and Marcus, all discuss about the mind and how we should really take care of them and watch the actions we take so that we don’t affect them in a negative way.
In “The witchery of story” a chapter in The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottshall, the author explains the different variety of storytelling concepts, whether it is thru books, movies, TV shows, and how it makes us visual imagine things, and drive our thought process during the day. He explains different examples, many are from past books and why they are told the way they are. Gottschall’s writing style is different in many ways compared to the several authors we have read. He makes his point by adding examples from other literature writing, like “Moby Dick” or “Neverland”. He makes us look at pictures with captions to catch the main point of what he is trying to tell the reader. He also gives us examples from a movie that gets the audience interested, because of the relation he is trying to make to the reader. Stories has been passed on from many generations, we lived thru stories and our powerful nations were built from a thought making the story a reality. Stories are important to our daily lives, because human beings are driven socially. The first civilizations were made by not one person, but a community and everyone on that community helped, shared stories, ideas, and eventually made those a reality.
In Jonathan Gottschall’s “The Story Telling Animal”, chapter one the topic of discussion is all about stories. Stories revolves all around our lives. Our life is a never ending story that we make ourselves. Whether it’s through our history, dreaming, daydreaming or even a child playing a game about being a princess, everything we do has a story behind it. The title of chapter one is named Witchery because its saying that we craft our stories in a way to captivate our audience to stay glued on the pages. Gottchall has many similarities to the other authors we have been writing. He gives a variety of examples and states facts time after time. One distinct difference though would have to be the pictures and captions he uses. No other writer actually has pictures to help us understand the text better except for him.
The first chapter of the story telling animal was very interesting. It is amazing how our brains react when we are reading a story. At first I disagreed with the chapter but I decided to start reading a random book I have and I started to imagine I am right there watching the story unfold. It is amazing how our brains react to stories as we get older.
Jonathan Gottschall’s writing style is different from the other authors we have read before because the examples he uses are relatable. He also uses stories before he tries to make a point unlike the others who would use numbers before getting to their point. He is also different because he grabbed your attention by putting you through a “test” then explained his point. So he made you experience an example before his explanation. An example of a specific author that writing style is different from Gottschall is John Medina. John Medina at the end of his chapter puts like the main points of the chapter in one page unlike Gottschall, and many others, who summarizes with a closing paragraph. It’s important that we read stories because we learn from them and our brain makes note of it and applies what you have learned from stories to our daily life.
Life is one thing that all mammals including humans are bound to face. Humans have a weird power but we don’t know it. Human spike to gossip and tell stories, most of our knowledge is gossip and/or stories mixed in with a few facts. This storytelling is in our nature; how we share our information. Storybooks, for example “Moby Dick” or “In The Heart Of The Sea” are not only forms of information sharing but also entertainment; people tend to relish in another’s success or suffering. Jonathan Gottschalls describes the writing implement as a wand, the author waving it to write. “Moby Dick” published in 1851, is a story about Nantucket whalemen, their lives, their adventures. J.G. Points out an illustration on the cover, as it is incredibly vivid. The story is not one would call “happy”, whales eating men, men resulting to cannibalism to survive. JG also alludes to how the audience is addressed, at our desks, back pain and all. JG also writes as if he is speaking to the audience face to face. Authors in general ask the user to visualize, by that I mean trick or coax the reader into painting a mental picture of the story. Reading is thought of as passive, we do it without much thought. The writer is simply a tour guide, the book is the tour, and we the readers are the tourists
In Jonathan Gottschall, “The Story Telling Animal,” Chapter One, “The Witchery of Story” he explains how our life is always surrounded by storytelling. He mentions that we don’t only tell stories by writing them, but we can express it through ideas, thoughts, daydream and in many more ways. As we experience the events or anything in our lives, the brain processes it all and we start to think everything beyond our imagination. We think of more possibilities. It gives us the little pieces of knowledge we need in order for us to grow and think outside the box. Relating this chapter to other material we have read including O’Shea’s, Medina’s and Marcus readings, they all inter connect with each other. They put the brain as the center of the attention and explain everything they know about it and all the knowledge we basically lack about it. They give it a lot of importance and reading all these actually does give me so much to process and learn all the stuff I didn’t know about.