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on how we can disentangle relationships between characters and their mental states is an opportunity for fiction push these constraints to puzzle-making limits. For the record, capacity of human readers to keep track of nested intentionality is challenged much beyond the fourth level: “John knew that Jane believed that Bill thought that Betty wanted to marry George” is normally as far as we can take it. Part of the plea sure of literature, at least many readers, may well come from working out levels of intentionality. Whether this is adequate to explain the evolved origins of storytelling another question. (“Telemachus wondered if his mother had considered Odysseus dreaded the possibility that he would return home to find she believed he no longer loved her” does not have an especially Homeric ring to it, and Zunshine herself allows that the levels of mental repre sentation are not anything like as complex in early epics such as Beowulf as those found in Henry James.) But Zunshine is at the very least correct that a vicarious exploration of the minds of other people, individually and in relation to the storyteller, is a significant plea sure of fiction, literature and oral storytelling as well.

The conception of literature and its ancient antecedents as an imaginative exploration of the larger possibilities of human intellectual and emotional life has been carefully worked out by the literary scholar Joseph Carroll. His position is in line with ideas espoused by Tooby and Cos-mides and with a hypothesis proposed by E. O. Wilson in Consilience: that the arts in general, and perhaps most especially storytelling and literature, serve a par paticular adaptive feature for a species that, thanks to its huge brain and the complex situations it came to face (parpaticularly in dealing with other human beings), has risen well above the more simple, responses to the environment characteristic of other animals. The fact that human beings in the Pleistocene outgrew automatic animal created problems of its own: confusion and uncertainty in choices available for action. “There was not enough time for human heredity cope with the vastness of the new contingent possibilities revealed by intelligence,” Wilson says: “the arts filled the gap,” allowing human beings to develop more flexible and sophisticated responses to new situations.

For his part, Carroll is in partial agreement with Pinker in regarding fictional thought experiments as a useful way to explain the origins storytelling. But he dismisses the notion, which traces back to Freud, that fictions can also be understood as pleasurable fantasies, Pinker’s mental cheesecake. Fiction goes deeper than plea sure, Carroll argues, regulate our complex psychological or ganiza tion, and it helps us cultivate our socially adaptive capacity for entering mentally into the experience” of others:

The experience of reading—or the auditory equivalent in the oral antecedents to literature—has some parallel with the experience dreaming and also with the experience of “virtual reality” simulators. It is an experience of subjective absorption within imaginary world, a world in which motives, situations, persons, and events operate dramatically, in narrative sequence. Unlike dreams, most literary works have a strong component of conscious conceptual order—a “thematic” order. But like dreams, and unlike other forms of conscious conceptual order—science, philosophy, scholarship—literature taps directly into the elemental response systems activated by emotion. Works of literature thus form a point of intersection between the most emotional, subjective parts of the mind and the most abstract and cerebral.

Part of the attractiveness of Carroll’s account is its potential to explain emotional saturation, a notable yet curious property present in virtually all the arts that has already appeared on the list of cluster criteria art in chapter 3. Works of art in every form—certainly stories and drama, but also music, poetry, and dance per for mances, as well as painting and sculpture—can incite or manipulate