Here at the library, we deal in stories. We check out books full of stories, we hold a weekly storytime, and there are numerous book clubs that discuss stories in detail. Stories surround and direct us, and recent scientific breakthroughs in neuroscience point to the importance of these stories in the fundamental evolution of the brain.
In his book “Sapiens,” Yuval Noah Harari puts forth the hypothesis that humans are the most successful animals on the planet not because of their individual talents but because we humans can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. This flexibility is due in part to our ability to create fictional stories that are adopted by large groups of people. The best example of one of these fictional stories is money. I can hand a complete stranger a piece of paper and they will give me real objective items. This is only possible because we have all adopted the story that the paper has value.
Stories are also at the heart of Angus Fletcher’s new book titled, “Primal Intelligence.” Fletcher’s theory is that intuition, commonsense, and the rest of Primal Intelligence are driven by narrative cognition. “The human brain is real-life smart because it thinks in stories.” He suggests that simple organisms evolved to think soon after developing the sense of sight. Being able to see pushed multicellular organisms to develop plans to find food or keep from becoming something else’s food. After all, what is a plan but a story about a possible future. As animals advanced, they developed the ability to create multiple plans and then choose the one they believed might lead to a successful outcome. His theory does not require a brain to be conscious to create stories and allows that all animals have a shared ability to think.
The human brain has an ability to meet an unknown situation where there is no available data from which to analyze and still create multiple plans for navigating this situation and then choose what it believes will be the most likely path to the best possible outcome. Fetcher argues that this is just one of the reasons computers will never work the same as a human brain. “Primal Intelligence” is just one of the many new and thought provoking books that have been added to the library’s collection.
As we start a new year, I challenge you to consider why, if we humans are writing the stories which control and shape our lives, we don’t write better ones? Pairing with this thought, the Ignacio Community Library staff have created a bookmark with the following: 2026, Happy New Year, “Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one.”