Lecture 17- The story animal

Question 1

What are some things that humans do slightly differently be are not unique in compared to other animals?

Answer 1

• Moving across large landscapes
• Displacement
• Modifying the environment and tools
• Social learning
• Theory of mind

Question 2

What is displacement? What’s different about how we do it?

Answer 2

• The ability to talk about things that are not current, critical in the forming of symbols.
• We can imagine a different reality (past, present, things that don’t and can never exist)

Question 3

What is the theory of mind the same as?

Answer 3

• The ability to understand + guess what others are thinking about.
• Same as attention schemas

Question 4

What is included in an attention schema?

Answer 4

1. An agent in place 1
2. Attends to thing in place 2
3. An attended thing will have a causal effect on agent
4. Agent attends for some purpose

Question 5

Is our model for attention schemas the same as an animals?

Answer 5

• No, the model that other animals have is different/absent completely
• Our model is therefore distinctively labelled as ‘‘human mind reading’’

Question 6

What are the two areas of the brain heavily invovled in attention schemas and what do they do?

Answer 6

• Pre-frontal cortex: Daydreaming, emotions, self, is the default network (still going in fMRI)
• R. Temporal Parietal Junction: Social attention, others, awareness

Question 7

What allows us to do our version of things (different from animals)?

Answer 7

Attention schemas (robust awareness)

Question 8

What is an additional thing that attention schemas allow us to which is slightly different to how it presents in animals?

Answer 8

• Form teams with complementary roles
• Possible as we understand that what someone else is doing to separate to what I am doing
• Its this specialization to allows us to either be dependent on others or learn from them

Question 9

What the basic elements that allow humans to tell stories?

Answer 9

• Imagining a new reality
• About protagonists
• From different perspectives
• Teaming up with others to accomplish something together
• By setting events in motion to have some effect
• Often going on journeys in time and space together

Question 10

What is it that truly makes human’s unique from other animals?

Answer 10

We are the story animal

Question 11

What is some evidence that stories are part of what it means to be human?

Answer 11

-All peoples tell stories
-History is story, and we often really care about
it. E.g. we will kill to preserve our own culture/ story
-We fill our free time with stories (movies, books, writing)
-We are motivated by stories (anecdotes over
statistics)

Question 12

How do we perceive the world? What does this mean?

Answer 12

• We perceive the world as made up of stories

- When the world doesn’t behave like a story, we are confused or reject it.

Question 13

What the areas of cognitive research that looks into stories?

Answer 13

-Inferring both logical connections between sentences
and theory of mind connections (primarily, cause and
effect)
-Updating the events of the situation
-Imagining yourself in the place of the protagonist

Question 14

What are the parts of the brain invovled in stories and what do they do?

Answer 14

• Prefrontal cortex: Logical / Theory of Mind inferences
• Temporal parietal junction : Imagining protagonists
• Medial parietal: Updating events and situations

Many of the areas responsible for narrative cognition are the same as those involved in attention schemas

Question 15

What three things overlap?

Answer 15

Attention schema, situation model and narrative model

Question 16

Are Narratives important to everyday life?

Answer 16

Yes:
-Conversations are the basic setting
-Every conversation employs and is about situation
model (same as a narrative model basically)
-Transfers meaning by getting other people to infer
what we prompt.