Most of the Mind Can’t Tell Fact from Fiction
"exec" writes:
Stories, fiction included, act as a kind of surrogate life. You can learn from them so seamlessly that you might believe you knew something-about ancient Greece, say-before having gleaned it from Mary Renault's novel The Last of the Wine. You'll also retain false information even if you didn't mean to. That seems like a liability: Philosophers have long concerned themselves with what they call "the paradox of fiction"-why would we find imagined stories emotionally arousing at all? The answer is that most of our mind does not even realize that fiction is fiction, so we react to it almost as though it were real.
At the same time, very young children "can rationally deal with the make-believe aspects of stories," distinguishing the actual, the possible, and the fantastical with sophistication, as Denis Dutton has written in The Art Instinct. "Not only does the artistic structure of stories speak to Darwinian sources: so does the intense pleasure taken in their universal themes of love, death, adventure, family conflict, justice, and overcoming adversity." That may help explain why, when stories are done well, we love them so much. Just as artificial sweeteners fool our minds into thinking we're eating sugar, stories-even weird ones like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland-take advantage of our natural tendency to want to learn about real people, and how to treat them.
Our brains can't help but believe.
-- submitted from IRC
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