On "The Origin of Stories"

Here is my mini-review of The Origin of Stories, by Brian Boyd (Harvard Univ. Press, 2009).

This book changed my way of thinking about stories. It addresses the following natural questions.

• 
  How do we represent meaning in our experiences?
  
• 
  How does our understanding of stories contibute?
  
• 
  How did stories, or more generally art, or more generally play, evolve (in the sense of evolutionary adaptation) as an aspect of human mind and/or behavior?
  
• 
  How is one to understand the creative work of the author/artist (or reader/audience) from this perspective?
  

Here are a few quotes which might serve to approximate Boyd's explanation:

From page 14:

We have an appetite for information, and especially for pattern, information that falls into meaningful arrays from which we can make rich inferences. Information can be costly to obtain and analyze, but because it offers an invaluable basis for action, nature evolves senses and minds to gather and process information appropriate to particular modes of life. Like other species, humans can assimilate information
through the rapid processing that specialized pattern recognition allows, but unlike other species we also seek, shape, and share information in an open-ended way. Since pattern makes data swiftly intelligible, we actively peursue patterns, especially those that yield the richest inferences to our minds, in our most valuable information systems, the senses of sight and sound, and in our most crutial domain, social information.

From pages 80-81:

An evolutionary adaptation is a feature of body, mind, or behavior that exists throughout a species and shows evidence of good design for a specific function or functions that will ultimately make a difference to the species' survival and reproductive success.

From page 92-94:

The more often and the more exuberantly animals play, the more they hone skills, widen repertoires, and sharpen sensitivities. Play therefore has evolved to be highly self-rewarding. As for play, so for the cognitive play of art we can specify the
design conditions in advance. If there are cognitive capacities in which flexible fine-tuning and widening the range of options deployed at short and context-sensitive notice can make decisive differences - and out aural, visual, vocal, manual, and social skills all qualify - then individuals with stronger motivations to practice
such behavior in situations of low danger and adequate resources will fare better.

From page 156:

We think, remember, and imagine by mentally stimulating or reactivating elements of what we have previously perceived, understood, enacted, and experienced. Simulations appear central to the representation of meaning.

From pages 381-383:

Art is a human adaptation, its chief functions being

1. 
   to refine and retune our minds in modes central to human cognition - sight, sound, and sociality - which it can do piecemeal through its capacity to motivate us to participate again and again in these high-intensity workouts;
   
2. 
   to raise the status of gifted artists;
   
3. 
   to improve the coordination and cooperation of communities, in our very social species; and
   
4. 
   to foster creativity on an individual and social level.
   

The problem-solution model allows us to analyze closely the choices we infer behind a work of art. Storytellers' first problem is to capture attention. Each attempted solution to the problem of holding audience interest will involve different costs and benefits for both storytellers and their audiences. Storytellers will attempt to reduce the costs and raise the benefits of their own compositional efforts and their audiences' responses.

page 322:

The evolutionary approach follows three main lines:

1. 
   a problem-solution model that links the long term of evolution to the short term of n author making choices about this detail or that detail;
   
2. 
   earning attention as prior to generating meaning in the problems an author faces; and
   
3. 
   a multileveled system of explanation.
   

There are four interconnected levels of explanation appropriate to any work of literature: a universal level, which considers aspects of human nature in general; a local level, which focuses on particular cultural, historical, social, economic, technological, intellectual, or artistic contexts; an individual level, which assesses the dispositions and experiences of an author (or, alternatively, of a reader or critic); and a particular level, which examines the specific problem situation of the author composing this story, or of a reader readng it in a certain situation (for the first time or the n-th time) or for a given purpose.

Highly recommended.