Description
Book SynopsisThis book explains how and why our brains think in stories. Angus Fletcher, an expert in neuroscientific approaches to narrative, identifies this capacity as “storythinking.”
Trade ReviewFletcher’s done it again. His polymathic erudition and word-wizardry elegance pull off the equivalent of a Copernican revolution in our understanding of storytelling—in all its resplendent iterations. With
Storythinking he invites us on an extraordinary odyssey that enriches understanding of our deep, instinctive impulse to create stories as makers and transformers of our world.
Storythinking is nothing less than a cosmological paradigm shift that puts story making and thinking at the center of all that we do. -- Frederick Luis Aldama, award-winning author and Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, UT Austin
Angus Fletcher explains why effective narrative prioritizes the unique, shifts viewpoints, and encourages conflict. Not for their own sake. It makes a writer create and clarify more thoughtful ideas and leads readers to intuit and retain the message. Both revelatory and pragmatic, and so gracefully explained. -- Shane Greenstein, author of
How the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New NetworkStorythinking is absolutely excellent: a much-needed reminder of and expansion on the transformative power of story, story as an enriched form of learning and as a valid epistemology. The book is a lovely, readable addition to academic and public life. I am eager to see the use of story resurrected! -- Lisa Miller, Ph.D., Professor & Founder, Spirituality Mind Body Institute, Teachers College, Columbia University
Story is a basic mental operation. Most of our experience, knowledge, and thinking is formed and organized by story: prediction, evaluation, planning, explanation, agents and actors, processes, goals. Story is an indispensable element of creativity. Human beings project from story to story and blend stories to create new concepts, new proposals, new science. How can we push the cognitive science of story forward? Fletcher, in this captivating and inspiring new book, leads the way. -- Mark Turner, author of
The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and LanguageThe quickest way to elicit a scoff from 'serious thinkers' is to mention 'story'. But as someone who has built a career as a science communicator, who consistently straddles the line between art and science, and whose work is grounded in neuroscience, I know intuitively that storytelling is fundamental to how we think. Finally, Angus Fletcher brings his deep understanding of narrative together with his keen scientific mind to explain
why we think in stories, why embracing story structure is the way forward, and how
stories provide an architecture to thought as powerful and important as logic. Read this book. -- Indre Viskontas, Cognitive Neuroscientist, University of San Francisco
[
Storythinking] is a most unusual book, plumbing the depths of history to find where philosophy went off the rails, examining neurobiology for insight into creativity, and festooned with stories about great characters all the way through. I can honestly report I’ve never read anything like it. And that’s a good thing. * The Straight Dope *
Table of Contents1. Story
2. Story and Thinking
3. The Origin of Story
4. Why Our Schools Teach Logic, Not Story
5. The Limits of Logic—or Why We Still Need Storythinking
6. The Brain Machinery of Storythinking
7. Improving Storythinking
8. Storythinking for Personal Growth
9. Storythinking for Social Growth
10. Story’s Answer to the Meaning of Life
Coda: Conversations with a Storythinker
Notes
Index
