Emotions Are What People Do Together

A collection of thoughts today, things I don't want to become the ephemera of life. A preview:

• Speak truth to power
• Six thumbs up
• Be the stampede
• Experience the spell that reading casts
• Nearly every tumultuous movement in American politics has coincided with a call to ban books
• Don't impede the marketplace of ideas
• Don't weaponize language against potential allies
• Mental health is communal
• Emotions are what people do together
• Sensations make us interested in stories, ideas, and experiences
• Because our lives feel like something, we can also better imagine what others are feeling
• The adaptive role of immersing ourselves in the vicarious worlds of narrative and drama
• Machine brains need rest, too
• We might as well just grab the algorithms and dance with them
• Do teddies dream of stuffie sheep?
• Our job is to be there no matter what
• We're special because we love one another
• There is always wisdom to be found in the land of the dead
• Stories are the collective wisdom of everyone who has ever lived
• Story genes evolve us

First, some personal things from the realm of my work as a youth services librarian.

Speak truth to power | Six thumbs up | Be the stampede

Part of an email an administrator in my library system sent to me, one relatively new to his position and interacting with our group.

I really appreciate how you stay engaged in the conversation [Degolar]. I have noticed that you are able to speak truth to power, speak for teams who may not find the courage or words to speak for themselves, and add critical viewpoints where needed. AND, I have noticed that when you speak, you regularly end up coming back to helping solve the problems. I appreciate how you bring a critical eye and add value by helping find solutions. That is good leadership work.

If that's what's coming across to others, then I am accomplishing exactly what I hope.

Years ago I led a Guys Read Book Club, and the mother of two brothers who attended has been a Facebook friend since. She sent me this message out of the blue the other day:

Can you believe that our youngest is going to graduate? Both my boys still talk about "Guys read" at the library with you. My husband just got published in his first book. So much has changed, but grateful for your part. What you do as a librarian matters.

That is stunning and wonderful to hear.

More recently, I hosted a large Girl Scout group last night, 20 first graders plus some older and younger siblings. We had an hour; I gave them an extended version of this talk, gave them a tour, and their leader had them do a quick bit of research. Their leader who set up the visit with me sent this follow-up message this morning:

Thank you again! A lot of the scouts went and found books after which I loved. My daughter gave this meeting “six thumbs up!”

And a colleague added:

And my two cents - I observed the tour part of this excursion when [Degolar] was surrounded by little girls in blue vests - it was adorable - [Degolar] did a great job managing the crowd and their many and varied questions. There was A LOT of enthusiasm.

The worst possible outcome I can imagine from such an experience is that they tune me out as a talking head, so I make it interactive and conversational from the start--which means they talk more than they should and I have many interruptions to deal with, but at least they stay engaged and enthusiastic the entire time.

This is something I shared with colleagues after storytime last week as a way of recommending the book, then put it on Facebook too.

All the kids at Preschool Storytime this morning were so engaged by Bear Is a Bear by Jonathan Stutzman that the room was almost completely silent. The only sound, in fact, was a mom sniffling and sobbing because she was moved by the story.

source

And this is simply a funny thought I had in the office of a local school, waiting to present an activity.

I am highly amused by this motivational slogan I came across to go with their buffalo mascot: "Lead the Stampede."

"stampede (noun) 1: a wild headlong rush or flight of frightened animals"

From Merriam-Webster.

So, essentially, "Lead the Stampede" = be the first to panic and at the head of the mob as it thoughtlessly flees.

Excellent advice.

I mean no mockery because I understand and appreciate their intent. But you have to admit that the overly literal interpretation is funny.

This next series of reads groups nicely, with some nuanced when taken together.

Experience the spell that reading casts | Nearly every tumultuous movement in American politics has coincided with a call to ban books | Don't impede the marketplace of ideas | Don't weaponize language against potential allies

I was willing to sign up for the "free one-month trial" subscription with The Atlantic so I could access the whole article. (I've been tempted to subscribe for years because they do great stuff, but don't currently have the budget for it.)

Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love With Reading

Hint: It’s not just the screens.

What parents today are picking up on is that a shrinking number of kids are reading widely and voraciously for fun. . . . 

I recently spoke with educators and librarians about this trend, and they gave many explanations, but one of the most compelling—and depressing—is rooted in how our education system teaches kids to relate to books. . . . 

In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early ’80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost. . . . 

As a result of this widespread message, that reading a book means analyzing it within an inch of its life, the high/low dichotomy that has always existed in children’s literature (think The Giver versus the Goosebumps series) now feels even wider. “What do you call your purely fun books for kids?” a middle-grade author recently asked on Twitter. A retired fifth-grade teacher seemed flummoxed by the question: “I never called a book a fun book,” she wrote. “I’d say it’s a great book, a funny book, a touching book … So many books ARE fun!!”

And yet the idea that reading all kinds of books is enjoyable is not the one kids seem to be receiving. . . . 

We need to get to the root of the problem, which is not about book lengths but the larger educational system. We can’t let tests control how teachers teach: Close reading may be easy to measure, but it’s not the way to get kids to fall in love with storytelling. Teachers need to be given the freedom to teach in developmentally appropriate ways, using books they know will excite and challenge kids. (Today, with more diverse titles and protagonists available than ever before, there’s also a major opportunity to spark joy in a wider range of readers.) Kids should be required to read more books, and instead of just analyzing passages, they should be encouraged to engage with these books the way they connect with “fun” series, video games, and TV shows.

Young people should experience the intrinsic pleasure of taking a narrative journey, making an emotional connection with a character (including ones different from themselves), and wondering what will happen next—then finding out. This is the spell that reading casts. And, like with any magician’s trick, picking a story apart and learning how it’s done before you have experienced its wonder risks destroying the magic.

This is almost the exact same thing I wrote recently to a high school senior interviewing me for her research project; find it in Green Grass & Goblins. (Yes, I'm guilty of going out of my way for confirmation bias, but also to add more voices to my cause.)

(Preemptive knock on wood . . . ) This has not hit me personally in the same way it has others, but the trend is out there and we are seeing it.

The Librarians Are Not Okay

Nearly every tumultuous movement in American politics has coincided with a call to ban books. “This piece of it is nothing new to librarians,” Allison Grubbs, the director of the Broward County Libraries in Florida, told me. “What I think is new is some of the pathways that people are choosing to take.” Protests in and outside libraries and library board meetings have become more dramatic. Online, in Facebook groups such as “Informed Parents of California” and “Gays Against Grooming,” the language is more and more incendiary. And the librarians themselves are being personally attacked.

They told me about getting hate mail and harassing phone calls on their private lines, about being verbally attacked while on the job over things as seemingly banal as book displays. “You can’t do a pride display—forget about it,” Shirley Robinson, the executive director of the Texas Library Association, told me. “That’s not gonna work.”

“I’ve been called a pedophile. I’ve been called a groomer. I’ve been called a Communist pornographer,” Cindy Dudenhoffer, a former president of the Missouri Library Association, told me. “I’ve been called all kinds of things. And I know many of my colleagues have been as well. It’s very hurtful.” . . . 

The  graduate degree for librarians is not, typically, a master of arts, but a master of science—in library and information sciences. Librarians may adore books, but they are trained in the technical and data-driven work of running libraries. Unlike a privately owned bookstore, where the stock might reflect the tastes and preferences of the proprietor, at the library, books are acquired based on information about what its particular community wants and needs.

“Librarians love data,” Dudenhoffer, who now coordinates the information-science program at the University of Missouri, told me. “Knowing how to analyze your community, knowing how to look at data, knowing how to look at circulation numbers, knowing how to look at population movement, those things are becoming increasingly important in what we do, and that drives all of this.”

Public librarians, she said, are looking at such things as regional household income, age, education level, and racial and ethnic backgrounds while making their selections. They also consider patron requests. In a school library, this analysis might include information shared by students or teachers about the needs and interests of the current student body.

Librarians who showcase books about underrepresented groups, including LGBTQ people, surely believe that these stories are valuable. But the librarians I spoke with insisted that they’re making these choices because an assessment determined that there was a patron need for these books, not to push some personal social agenda. Those controversial book displays? Many, Dudenhoffer said, are a means of letting patrons know that material they might be too shy or embarrassed to ask for is in stock.

“It’s really unfair to characterize displays or programs as ‘woke,’” Dudenhoffer lamented. “That’s just such a terrible word to use right now. But it’s not about that. It’s about serving our community, and everyone in the community, to the best of our abilities.”

What seemed most painful to the librarians I spoke with—even more than the personal attacks and fear of litigation—was the way in which book bans hinder their ability to connect their patrons to information that might help them.

Our only agenda is getting everyone the information and stories they need, with all their variety of needs.

Though only implied, I see this recent Facebook post from Wait But Why as entirely about those who want to ban books and censor content. Here are some excerpts:

The idea supremacist believes that ideas they disagree with are so vile and dangerous that they must be silenced. They don't just impose their preferred echo chamber on the people who choose to spend time with them--they try to impose their echo chamber on everyone.

Trying to cancel a talk is one obvious form of idea supremacy. But it also applies to trying to get people fired, reprimanded, mass shamed, etc. for saying the wrong thing--any behavior that uses coercion or fear to hinder discussion or the spread of ideas is idea supremacy.

If you consider yourself a (lower-case-L) liberal, you should push back against idea supremacy in all its forms. It doesn't matter whether you happen to agree or disagree with the idea supremacist's ideas--they're impeding the marketplace of ideas and should be vocally criticized.

Of course, anyone can be guilty of idea supremacy, not just those on the political right. I'm uncomfortable with how many on the left are lately as well.

So is Ryan Dowd, who offers training for librarians (and others) with homeless patrons. Here's his most recent weekly message:

How NOT to Change the World

I am liberal.

If you do not consider yourself liberal, you can stop reading now. This isn’t for you.

Ok, now that it is just us liberals, I need to rant about a trend that seems to be intensifying within progressive circles.

We have adopted a dangerous fixation on language.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I do think that language matters. To some degree, language shapes perception.

NOTE: I don’t think it matters as much as we want it to. “Better” language doesn’t change the underlying systems of injustice and oppression. It just renames them.

That isn’t my biggest issue with our fixation on language, though.

I absolutely despair when we weaponize language against potential allies.

We prowl social media looking for language sins, so we can howl at another’s transgression:

• “In talking about gay rights, you missed one of the letters, so you are homophobic.”
• “When you are talking about people from Latin America, make sure you put an X at the end, or you are sexist.”
• “You used the phrase ‘homeless individuals’ instead of ‘individuals experiencing homelessness,’ so you hate poor people.”

This last one is especially frustrating to me.

A recent article on homelessness included this choice line:

“If you use the term ‘homeless people’ instead of ‘individuals experiencing homelessness’ then you are part of the problem.”

I can’t think of a better way to ensure that well-meaning people never have another conversation about homelessness. A whole group of potential allies opts out of the cause for fear of a verbal misstep.

That isn’t how you change the world.

That is how you chase people away from one of the most important issues facing our world today.

How you actually change the world.

Changing the world is hard, but it is not complicated.

There are two basic steps:

• Step 1: Recruit lots of people to the issue you care about.
• Step 2: Organize those people around specific structural changes.

We can’t change the world if we are chasing away all our potential allies.

So, next time someone uses the wrong word:

• Use the occasion to engage them on the issue. Show your passion for the cause.
• Explain why you use the language that you do.
• Do NOT shame them for their linguistic misstep.

Thank you for letting me rant!

Peace,

Ryan

Sometimes we get so busy policing ourselves that we lose sight of the larger goal.

Here's a grouping of thoughts about what it means to be human.

Mental health is communal | Emotions are what people do together | Sensations make us interested in stories, ideas, and experiences | Because our lives feel like something, we can also better imagine what others are feeling | The adaptive role of immersing ourselves in the vicarious worlds of narrative and drama | Machine brains need rest, too | We might as well just grab the algorithms and dance with them

The first thing I thought upon reading this article was: When one side of the gun debate wants to blame mental illness and the other wants to blame cultural influences and personalities, the response is both. They're one and the same.

Chinese Philosophy Has Long Known That Mental Health Is Communal

An emphasis on the individual can lead us to neglect communal approaches to treatment. Often overlooked are the ways in which social norms, cultural beliefs and communal attitudes contribute to mental illness. Ancient Chinese scholars understood this well. . . . 

As helpful as treatments such as psychiatric medication or cognitive behavioural therapy are, they don’t address all the underlying issues that lead to mental illness. Features of the communities and cultures of which one is a member have great influence on the formation and expression of our emotions. It would be wrong to see anger, for example, as a universally natural response to certain events, independent of culture. Members of certain communities will be more likely to display or feel anger in given situations than members of other communities with different cultural norms governing emotion. The ways in which we evaluate and even experience emotions are influenced by elements of culture. In an interview in 2018, the Dutch cultural psychologist Batja Mesquita said:

"Many cultures don’t think about their emotions as something that lives inside of an individual, but more as something between people. In those cultures, emotions are what people do together, with each other. So when I’m angry, that is something that lives between you and me."

Mental illness is often due to a combination of genetic predisposition and situational features. What calls for anxiety, anger, joy or other responses will almost always be in large part dependent on communal norms, of the kind integrated into the expectations and behavioural tendencies of individuals from a young age, through interaction with the community. . . . 

Being part of harmonious and virtuous communities is necessary for the development of healthy behaviours, attitudes and emotions. If we are in bad, vicious or unhealthy communities, our beliefs, emotions, expectations and attitudes (among other things) will be disordered in critical ways.

This is relevant when it comes to mental illness, because such illness is at least in part a matter of behavioural and emotional norms governed by society. Confucians would likely have said of our own modern world that the alienation created by the self-centredness required for modern economic and consumer culture plays a major role in driving mental illness. Tu Weiming, a contemporary scholar of Confucianism, writes that, according to the Confucian view, ‘self-centredness easily leads to a closed world … to a state of paralysis’. The kinds of community that promote self-centredness and self-concern – ranging from the seemingly innocuous concern with ‘defining oneself’, via various individual and consumer choices, to the corrosive lack of empathy or care for others in the community – are communities likely to inculcate in individual members behavioural and attitudinal traits that contribute to mental illness.

Of course, it applies to so much more than U.S. gun culture.

(I'm sure I've mentioned before, but my library building hosts a growing population of homeless patrons every day, and we see much mental illness in them.)

I find this most fascinating.

Nicholas Humphrey’s Beautiful Theory of Mind

In his new book, “Sentience,” a neuropsychologist argues that consciousness evolved to make us feel that life is worth living.

Perception registers information about objects in the external world; sensation is the subjective feeling that accompanies perceptions. . . . There’s a difference between perceiving the shape and position of a rose or an ice cube and experiencing redness or coldness. . . . 

If it’s possible to navigate the world using only nonconscious perceptions, then why did humans—and, possibly, other species—evolve to feel such rich and varied sensations? . . . 

In his view, our ability to have conscious experiences shapes our motives and psychology in ways that are evolutionarily advantageous. Sensations motivate us in an obvious way: wounds feel bad, orgasms feel good. But they also make possible a set of sensation-seeking activities—play, exploration, imagination—that have helped us to learn more about ourselves and to thrive. And they make us better social psychologists, because they allow us to grasp the feelings and motives of other people by consulting our own. “The more mysterious and unworldly the qualities of phenomenal consciousness”—the felt sensations of properties such as color, smell, and sound—“the more significant the self,” he writes. “And the more significant the self, the greater the value that people will have placed on their own—and others’—lives.” . . . 

The startling performance of software programs like ChatGPT has convinced some observers that machine consciousness is imminent; recently, a law in the U.K. recognized many animals, including crabs and lobsters, as sentient. From Humphrey’s point of view, these attitudes are misguided. Artificially intelligent machines are all perception, no sensation; they’ll never be sentient so long as they only process information. And animals such as reptiles and insects, which face little evolutionary pressure to develop a grasp of other minds, are also very unlikely to be sentient. If we don’t understand what sentience is for, we’re likely to see it everywhere. Conversely, once we perceive its practical value, we’ll acknowledge its rarity. . . . 

[Sentience] must have evolved through natural selection, and this, in turn, means that conscious sensations must be valuable in their own right. . . . 

Sensations, Humphrey thinks, make us interested in stories, ideas, and experiences. Because our lives feel like something, we can also better imagine what others are feeling. . . . 

Because stories and imaginative literature let us do this, Humphrey sees an adaptive role for immersing ourselves in the vicarious worlds of narrative and drama. . . . 

Humphrey believes that human beings have evolved to take intrinsic delight in conscious sensation for its own sake. He suspects that we’re probably not the only creatures to enjoy our sentience. Animals such as wolves and crows also live in social groups and engage in sensation-seeking, and so are plausible candidates. Videos show rooks sledding, swans surfing, and monkeys leaping from high ledges into pools of water. By contrast, convincing examples of insects or reptiles engaging in this sort of sensory play are hard to find.

I couldn't not like it, of course, since he emphasizes two of my core beliefs: stories and empathy. I'm planning on reading his book when I get a chance.

I find this perhaps even more fascinating, if possible.

Even Machine Brains Need Sleep

Artificial neural networks are prone to a troublesome glitch known, evocatively, as catastrophic forgetting. . . . 

In natural sleep, he had seen that the same basic brain processes occur in humans and in honeybees, working over information accumulated during waking moments. . . . 

The idea was to simply provide the artificial neural networks with a break from external stimuli, to instruct them to go into a sort of rest state. Like the dozing human brain, the networks were still active, but instead of taking in new information, they were mulling the old stuff, consolidating, surfacing patterns.

And it worked. In a pair of papers in late 2022, Bazhenov and his colleagues showed that providing the neural networks periods in a sleep-like state mitigated the hazard of catastrophic forgetting. It turns out that machine brains need rest, too. . . . 

Sleep, of course, is also essential for our own memory and learning. The downtime seems to strengthen new task-related connections forged in the brain during wakefulness and help transfer them to areas of the brain for longer-term storage. Researchers have known for decades that, while we might not suffer a full episode of catastrophic forgetting, lack of sleep interferes with our ability to efficiently learn new skills and retain memories. Newer research even suggests that we don’t need to fully power down to improve our procedural memory. Simply quietly resting while not pursuing new inputs—or as the researchers put it, engaging in “offline memory consolidation”—seems to work for human brains, too.

I'll be curious to see further studies into the dynamic. It brings to mind some thoughts I recorded a long time ago in Memory, Like All Information, Needs Filters.

I include this because it's related, but only followed the link because he's been one of my favorite artists since the 80s.

Peter Gabriel on the future of AI: 'We might as well just grab the algorithms and dance with them, rather than fight them'

“I'm probably just as scared [of AI] as everybody else, but I like to jump in the river rather than talk about it. … I do think about it quite a lot, and I think not enough people are thinking about it. And it would be great to get ahead [of it]. You know, this is something that's going have way more impact than the Industrial Revolution and the nuclear bomb. So, if we don't start anticipating what it might do, it's going to be too late, because it's very fast.” . . . 

“It's like the King Canute and the waves,” Gabriel continues matter-of-factly. “We have that story that he tried to hold back the tide by using his kingly powers: The tide won. The same is true of AI. It's coming whether we like it or not, so we might as well try and work with it rather than work against it, and make sure that there are programs in there that protect ethics and some sort of morality." . . . 

“A big part of these musical interventions that we're trying to explore, with pioneering researchers [24 of which were interviewed for Reverberation: Do Everything Better With Music] are around AI — basically taking not only music that could be created, but existing music, to put it to work for caregivers, for dementia patients, but also for more practical reasons like increasing focus, increasing leadership in the workplace, increasing and building creative teams. A lot of this is going to be AI-forward, and we're doing our best to stay ahead of that conversation.” . . . 

The first project from Hermann and the Gabriels’ tech company is Reverberation: Do Everything Better With Music, written by veteran Maxim/Rolling Stone journalist and former World Science Festival chief digital officer Keith Blanchard, which Anna says is designed to be “something you can flip through and use as a guide to on how to use music, how music can change us and affect our brains.” Firmly rooted in “science, science, science,” as Hermann puts it, but “with all of our collective artistry laid on top of it” and simple enough for the even most daunted layperson to understand, Reverberation serves as the music fan’s handy guide to increasingly complex modern life. “The book was literally and physically engineered, inside and out, to be carried with you, to put in your backpack, in your purse, in your satchel, in your pocket,” says Hermann.

I think he takes a healthy view toward our AI future.

Finally, a couple of long reviews of books I read recently with many related themes.

Do teddies dream of stuffie sheep? | Our job is to be there no matter what | We're special because we love one another | There is always wisdom to be found in the land of the dead | Stories are the collective wisdom of everyone who has ever lived | Story genes evolve us

First, They Stole Our Hearts (The Teddies Saga, #2) by Daniel Kraus.

Do teddies dream of stuffie sheep?

This white teddy understood nothing of the world outside the cellar. Amazement and delight awaited her, but so did shock and pain. They snugged close, enveloping her in warm plush that smothered the factory's cold. Their silence felt solemn. Buddy bet all of them were thinking of the teddies who hadn't made it.

This series. It has a suspenseful, action-filled plot and characters who develop and grow, but its strength is its philosophical nature. At its heart is the cognitive dissonance of innocent, naive teddies who just want to be loved and give snugs as they are aggressively confronted with the existential horror of life's hardships and suffering. In the first book, one character reacted to something awful she'd seen by plucking her eyes out. In this one, they struggle onward in their intimidating quest to track down their makers in hopes of better understanding their lives' meaning. They have a creation myth and legends that guide them, but the further they investigate the more they discover much of what they think they know is lies.

This book centers on their discovery of a community of teddies who have built an organized life united by a cause, a religion their leader has created dedicated to celebrating their worthlessness.

The Forgiver began.

"We teddies have been left behind by the world!"

All the teddies responded as one: "Mother, thank you!"

"We deserve this fate, for we are bad teddies!"

"Mother, thank you!"

"We are repellent to behold, loathsome to touch!"

"Mother, thank you!" . . .

The Forgiver turned his face toward the ceiling. His voice broke with a shout.

"Mother, please accept our apologies!"

With that, the Forgiver took his chain and held it in both paws in front of him. All this time, Buddy realized, the chains hadn't been belts. They'd been weapons. With all the might in his noodly arms, the Forgiver whipped it.

The chain flew over the Forgiver's shoulders, striking his back with a hard snap. A small puff of plush rose into the air.

Before Buddy could react, awful noises erupted from all sides. Snap! Whap! Crack! Whump! He turned, and turned more, and more, spinning in circles.

Each teddy in the cellar was striking their soft, vulnerable teddy backs with a chain. Every slap peeled off bits of fur, which floated upward. It filled the air like dandelion fluff, except purple, gold, ivory, scarlet, lemon, and turquoise. It would have been gorgeous except for how terrible it was.

The cellar teddies were ruining themselves before the world could do it.

It's the cuddliest horror story I've ever encountered. Definitely edgy for young readers, but I don't think it's the stuff of nightmares so much as--to steal a phrase from Neil Gaiman--an inoculation against them. For the harsh realities of life might be enough to break some teddies, but not Buddy and his companions. Even in the darkest moments, they find ways to help each other remember courage and hope and love, and that there's more to life than suffering.

Cuddly, horrible, and courageous. That's the Teddies Saga.

I can't wait to read the next one.

"I let them believe they are special. Meanwhile, their display of loyalty helps keep the population orderly."

"Orderly?" Buddy repeated. "Have you ever seen a child's room? No, you haven't! Well, let me tell you--it's the furthest thing from orderly! A child's love is the same way. It's messy. It's strong one day and weak the next. A teddy's job is to be there no matter what. By keeping these teddies down here, you're robbing them of the chance to fulfill their purpose.!"

-----

"We were all wrong," Buddy insisted, and the truth of it made him stand taller. "Don't you see, Forgiver? You, me, Reginald, Sunny--we were wrong to believe that what we are made of has anything to do with who we are. We're more than So-So-Soft fur. We're more than Real Silk Hearts. We're special because we love one another. We take care of one another. No other teddies in the history of teddies have done that."

You can see a bit of book #1, including a piece of the excellent, atmospheric artwork, in Stuffing Drifted Down Like Snow.

This one I came across somewhere and requested my library add it to our collection because I knew I would love it. I do. I didn't wait until it was overdue like most everything else I read, but put it on top of the pile and read it right away.

Land of the Dead: Lessons from the Underworld on Storytelling and Living by Brian McDonald:

I was, I think, 18 years old when I saw the movie Flatliners; just the right age for it to make a vivid impression on me even though it has never been thought of as a particularly good film. The characters are medical students who agree to take turns temporarily dying ("flatlining") before being revived by the others. They hope to experience a moment of the afterlife to gain insight and wisdom. They wanted, in the parlance of this book, to learn from a visit to the land of the dead.

McDonald writes that we don't have to actually die to gain that wisdom, though, as stories of visits to the land of the dead are all around us. He takes a wide-ranging tour through stories from different times, cultures, and media, drawing parallels and showing how they include different elements of the underworld. Sometimes characters travel literally or metaphorically to that land; sometimes elements of that land visit us. At one point he writes:

There are two types of ghosts--someone who is dead yet dwells in the land of the living, and someone who is alive yet dwells in a place that is dead.

For example. Other examples abound.

This is a book of literary criticism, an extended essay with pictures in graphic novel format. It doesn't, though, require any literary training or expertise; it's accessible and entertaining. He describes the movies Castaway and The Martian as examples of the land of the dead's element of isolation and Indiana Jones's descent into the serpent pit in Raiders of the Lost Ark to illustrate the ubiquitous presence of serpents in the land of the dead. He compares Dickens's Great Expectations to the film Sunset Boulevard in their representations of decay and stagnation. And the everlasting party (that's a trap) shows up in Pinocchio, The Odyssey, and Hansel and Gretel.

The book opens with a tale from Mongolia and an extended look at Gilgamesh, the oldest tale we know. He finds stories where heroes visit the underworld in myths of the Mayans, from Africa, and around the world. Other stories he looks at extensively include: Sisyphus, Our Town, Gulliver's Travels, Hamlet, Little Red Riding Hood, Silence of the Lambs, Moby Dick, A Christmas Carol, Planet of the Apes, The Time Machine, the Buddha's beginnings, the Donner Party, and Shadow of a Doubt. He also notes a special category, in contrast to those where the devil walks among us, he calls "angels from the sky." A supernatural being appears, doesn't change anything about the actual circumstances of the story, but gives the main character a new perspective that changes their outlook about everything. Examples here include Mary Poppins, Cinderella, It's a Wonderful Life, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, and Casablanca.

Interspersed with all of this are thoughts about the wisdom those stories provide and the science behind how they become meaningful to us. It is endlessly fascinating and insightful.

This is a place of wisdom. There is always wisdom to be found in the land of the dead. Storytellers have always known and made use of this.

-----

It seems that humans have a deep belief that knowledge and wisdom come from those who have gone before. The dead always have the answers.

Many societies, both ancient and modern, have some form of ancestor worship, such as the building of temples or shrines for the dead. Originating in Mexico, El Dia de Muertos--the Day of the Dead--is celebrated in Latin America to honor loved ones who have died. Even those societies that would claim that they have no ancestor worship build secular holy places to honor the wisdom of the dead [picture of the Lincoln Memorial].

We study the words of Sun Tzu, Aristotle, William Shakespeare, and others because we believe that the dead have a special wisdom.

Just as the ancient hero Odysseus journeyed to the underworld to seek knowledge from the dead, so do we visit the dead for answers. The most common way we do this is through stories.

The word story originates from the Latin word historia, meaning "history." Stories are histories. Each one is a journey to the past--to the Land of the Dead. The underworld--the land of the dead--has been used in stories of all types since ancient times and is still used today.

Maybe it will help you tell better stories yourself.

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A journey to a library is a journey into the land of the dead because it is a place where the dead speak.

Stories are the collective wisdom of everyone who has ever lived. Stories themselves are The Library of the Ages and all of humanity is allowed access.

In the book The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, biologist David Sloan Wilson posited that "stories often play the role of genes in non-genetic evolutionary processes." In other words, stories show us how our ancestors did--and didn't--survive different types of conflict and prepare us for an uncertain future. These "story genes" are passed on from person to person, culture to culture, generation to generation. A given story can last as long as it helps people survive.

Don't be fooled by the word survival into thinking this only means physical survival--there are all types of survival. There is social survival. There is cultural survival. And there is also emotional survival.

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So how does one reap the benefits of someone else's story?

You can benefit from someone else's story because neurologically your brain doesn't know the difference between an experience that happens to you and one that happens to someone else.

This is because of mirror neurons in one's brain. These neurons fire when one watches, hears, or reads a story, thus causing one's brain to mirror the observed action as if the observer were themselves physically involved in that activity. . . .

It is how we become so immersed in a story that we are able to take advantage of the experiences of others, real or fictional, as if we had been through them ourselves.

Because, as far as our brains know, we have been.

For more from David Sloan Wilson and stories as genes, see December's The Acme of Evolution.

We're special because we love one another.

Stories teach us to love.