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By Root 980 0

general, what would have been the lore a hunter-gatherer society. What ever the brain processes that enable the human mind acquires and organizes a vast knowledge-store terms of dramatic episodes of clan history, war stories, hunting anecdotes, near misses, tales of forbidden love, foolhardy actions with tragic outcomes, and so forth. These cases are used analogically and in terms shared and differentiated features to make sense of new situations and to interpret past experience. (In this connection, it is worth noting that the ability to recognize and use analogies effectively remains a staple basis of contemporary intelligence tests.) As Pinker has put it, in this kind of case-based reasoning, an “entire configuration of relevant details spelled out and recorded in memory, and the reasoner, when faced with a new scenario, searches in memory for the stored case whose constellation of details is most similar to the current one.”

Fictional storytelling is not, therefore, a capacity uniquely cut off from nonfictional ways of describing and communicating facts but is an extension that was adaptively present in the human mind early on. In terms larger picture of human history, one of the most significant steps evolution of the mind was the achievement of sophisticated counterfactual information processing: the ability of human beings to extend themselves by representing in their minds possible but nonexis tent states affairs—situations that were-true-in-the-past or are-not-true-in-the-present or are-possibly-true-in-the-next-valley or might-be-true-in-the-coming-hunter-gatherer bands who were especially adept at it to exploit opportunities, cope with threats, and outplan and outcompete less articulate imaginative groups and individuals. Fictional storytelling, which likely came later, does not function separately from this faculty but is an and extension of counterfactual thinking into more possible worlds with more possibilities than life experience could ever offer up individual. To the ability to think counterfactually, case-based reasoning adds a capacity to interpret and so gain knowledge by drawing analogies and identifying dissimilarities in richly complex situations that confronted in reality and contemplated in imagination.

I earlier stressed the spontaneous capacity of even small children to tag facts according to whether they belong to one or another pretend world, or to the real world, and moreover to be able to cross imaginatively between worlds without confusion. This is a fundamental human faculty with, again, crucial survival value: an imaginative species whose members could not distinguish seeing a tiger in the forest from daydreaming about a tiger in the forest would have been at a distinct competitive disadvantage. But the manifest evolved ability to discriminate between what is true or valid in one world from what is fantasy does not mean that everything in a make-believe fantasy world is a make-believe fantasy fact. Just as the pretend tea in a doll’s tea party obeys the same of gravity as real tea, so the facts and background information fictions can be validly useful for living in the real world. To convey accurate facts and teach lessons for life is an ancient function of fiction and likely part of its adaptive importance.

Going about today, as we do, in a world of factual knowledge taught learned through nonfiction books and other media, we can lose sight the power of fiction to convey information and so extend an individual’s knowledge-store. For example, I fancy that I possess a fair understanding of life and society in nineteenth-century Russia—the system, the basic economics of everyday life, the position of the czar court, the country estates of the rich, the cultural admiration ( envy) of more advanced Europe, the vast distances and sense of psychological isolation of the provinces, and so forth. But come to think of am not sure if I have ever read a history of czarist Russia. Like many seeing perperformances of Chekhov, and experiencing film and opera versions of these writers’ works. The Russian