“Tolstoy was right — the emotions and ideas in fiction are highly contagious, and people tend to overestimate their immunity to them.”— Jonathan Gottschall, amazon.comTagged: fiction, Media Virus
“The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will…”— Jonathan Gottschall, amazon.comTagged: Epistemology, fiction, Illusion, Narrative Fallacy, Simulacrum
“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”— Jonathan Gottschall, amazon.comTagged: Dreams, fiction, Reading, Sleep, Storytelling