ひとかけら

Gottschall’s encouraging thesis is that human beings are natural storytellers—that they can’t help telling stories, and that they turn things that aren’t really stories into stories because they like narratives so much. Everything—faith, science, love—needs a story for people to find it plausible. No story, no sale.

Do entertaining stories make us more ethical? “The only way to find out is to do the science,” Gottschall says, reasonably enough, and then announces that “the constant firing of our neurons in response to fictional stimuli strengthens and refines the neural pathways that lead to skillful navigation of life’s problems” and that the studies show that therefore people who read a lot of novels have better social and empathetic abilities, are more skillful navigators, than those who don’t.

Good scientific theories are always startling, too. The narrative excitement of the great scientific theories, far from residing in their reassuring simplicity, lies in their similarly radical exclusions, their shocks: Everything in the whole universe is instantly attracting everything else! Everything! The big earth is dully pulling the apple and the apple is pluckily pulling on the earth.

A study now suggests that simply taking a break does not bring on inspiration — rather, creativity is fostered by tasks that allow the mind to wander.

“We’ve traditionally found that rapid-eye-movement sleep grants creative insight. That allowing the mind to wander does the same is absolutely fascinating. The implication is that mind-wandering was only helpful for problems that were already being mentally chewed on. It didn’t seem to lead to a general increase in creative problem-solving ability,” says Baird.

As well as revealing that breaks on their own do not encourage creative thinking, Baird’s work suggests an explanation for one of psychology’s great mysteries: why we zone out.

From an evolutionary perspective, mind-wandering seems totally counterproductive and has been viewed as dysfunctional because it compromises people’s performance in physical activities. However, Baird’s work shows that allowing the brain to enter this state when it is considering complex problems can have real benefits. Zoning out may have aided humans when survival depended on creative solutions.

「人がいつ死んでしまうかわからない」と正直に感じる人は、大抵どこか壊れている。

普通の世界は、そういう「虚無」というものを隠蔽するために、仕事したり、恋をしたり、家族を持ったり、夢中になったり、空気を読んだり、旗をふったり、戦争したり、僕らは大騒ぎして生きているのだ。「空気に合わせて楽しく生きる」というのは、世界の虚無を隠蔽する陽気なお祭り騒ぎだ。

でも、一部の人は、自分の心に対してそういう隠蔽をスルのが下手だ。
そういう人は、みんなが盛り上がっている瞬間に、ふと世界に醒めてしまう。そして、その世界に醒めていること自体を必死で隠そうとする。糖衣が剥がれてしまった苦い薬を、甘いままであるようなふりをしてしゃぶり続ける。
「アンダーカレント」は、そういう世界の隠蔽ができないままに、それでもグダグダとなんとなく、飄々と生きる主人公の姿を描いてみせた驚異的なお話だった。