The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [64]
Just as there would have been a major adaptive advantage in learning from stories to deal with the threats and opportunities of the external physical world, so for an intensely social species such as Homo sapiens there was an advantage in the ancestral environment in honing an ability to navigate in the endlessly complex mental worlds people shared with their hunter-gatherer compatriots. The conclusion of chapter 2 the extent to which the features of a stable human nature revolve around human relationships of every variety: social co alitions of kinship tribal affinity; issues of status; reciprocal exchange; the complexities sex and child rearing; struggles over resources; benevolence and hostility; friendship and nepotism; conformity and in dependence; moral obligations, altruism, and selfishness; and so on. As we shall presently these issues constitute the major themes and subjects of literature its oral antecedents. Stories are universally constituted in this way because of the role storytelling can play in helping individuals and groups develop and deepen their own grasp of human social and emotional experience. The teller of a story has, in the nature of the storytelling art, direct access to the inner mental experience of the story’s characters. This access is impossible to develop in other arts—music, represent single views of a subject matter, and music can express emotions, but neither of these arts can unambiguously portray the complicated causal sequences of linked events and intentions that is natural storytelling in its most rudimentary forms. Storytelling is a mirror ordinary everyday social experience: of all the arts, it is the best suited portray the mundane imaginative structures of memory, immediate perception, planning, calculation, and decision-making, both as we experience them ourselves and as we understand others to be experiencing them. But storytelling is also capable of taking us beyond the ordinary, therein lies its mind-expanding capacity.
To understand, intellectually and emotionally, the mind of another is a distinct ability that emerges spontaneously in children around the age and is normally fully developed by the age of five. That it is a distinct, evolved adaptation—and not simply a generalized application intelligence—is shown by the effortless reliability with which it develops. specific functional character is also demonstrated, incidentally, by unhappy fact that there exists a particular affliction that can inhibit development alone without affecting other intellectual capacities: autism. varying degrees, the autistic child suffers from a neurological impairment in the ability to engage imaginatively the minds of other people— problem that extends to an inability to enjoy fictions, experience ordinary empathy, and appreciate irony and jokes. Autistic children can highly intelligent by many measures: tasks such as mathematics or mechanical manipulation, which are separate from reading the thoughts and emotions, may not challenge them. That autistics can be otherwise intellectually normal and yet have a special difficulty in learning how to communicate with others in terms of a shared mentality demonstrates that capacity for empathy that we take for granted as central to pretend play and the enjoyment of stories (not to mention ordinary human empathy) is not learned but is rather a particular innate faculty.
The vicarious mind-reading function of literature is of particular to the literary theorist Lisa Zunshine, who argues that it is utilized high degree in modern writing but is characteristic also of literature’s antecedents: in fiction, we exercise our ability to read the minds literary characters, especially with regard to multiple perspectives nested wanted, and felt what and when.” Fiction “engages, teases, and pushes tentative limits our mind-reading capacity.” In her view, the fact that there are cognitive constraints