{"id":707,"date":"2023-05-07T14:02:49","date_gmt":"2023-05-07T14:02:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/d2fpc.com\/?p=707"},"modified":"2023-06-08T14:03:20","modified_gmt":"2023-06-08T14:03:20","slug":"fact-or-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/d2fpc.com\/?p=707","title":{"rendered":"Fact Or Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Fiction acts like fact once we suspend disbelief<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Stories, fiction included, act as a kind of surrogate life. You can learn from them so seamlessly that you might believe you knew something\u2014about ancient Greece, say\u2014before having gleaned it from Mary Renault\u2019s novel The Last of the Wine. You\u2019ll also retain false information even if you didn\u2019t mean to. That seems like a liability: Philosophers have long concerned themselves with what they call \u201cthe paradox of fiction\u201d\u2014why would we find imagined stories emotionally arousing at all? The answer is that most of our mind does not even realize that fiction is fiction, so we react to it almost as though it were real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, very young children \u201ccan rationally deal with the make-believe aspects of stories,\u201d distinguishing the actual, the possible, and the fantastical with sophistication, as Denis Dutton has written in The Art Instinct. \u201cNot only does the artistic structure of stories speak to Darwinian sources: so does the intense pleasure taken in their universal themes of love, death, adventure, family conflict, justice, and overcoming adversity.\u201d That may help explain why, when stories are done well, we love them so much. Just as artificial sweeteners fool our minds into thinking we\u2019re eating sugar, stories\u2014even weird ones like Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland\u2014take advantage of our natural tendency to want to learn about real people, and how to treat them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s experimental evidence for this. Children, for example, sometimes actually believe that puppets are alive. Even animals sometimes react to pictures the same way they react to real things. The industrialized world is so full of human faces, like in ads, that we forget that it\u2019s just ink on paper, or pixels on a computer screen. Every time our ancestors saw something that looked like a human face, it probably was one. As a result, we didn\u2019t evolve to distinguish reality from representation. The same perceptual machinery interprets both. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The rational parts of our minds, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, do indeed know that what we\u2019re looking at, or reading, isn\u2019t real. One way to understand this is by thinking about optical illusions. In the Muller-Lyer illusion, we can trace and know the two horizontal lines are the same length, but at the same time appear to be different lengths. Even after you understand how an illusion operates, it continues to fool part of your mind. This is the kind of double knowledge we have when we consume fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seeing is Deceiving: The lengths of the horizontal lines are the same, but even after we\u2019ve measured the lines, we can\u2019t help but see one as longer than the other in the top panel. We can\u2019t interpret it otherwise. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the best experience of a narrative film we willingly suspend our disbelief. We even wholeheartedly submit to the auteur’s sequence of events and become more and more emotianally invested in the outcome as the story unfolds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These perceptual areas of our brains are very closely connected to our emotions. That\u2019s why emotions don\u2019t just motivate us to act in certain ways but force us to interpret the world differently. A 2011 paper, for example, explained how fear can affect vision, moods can make us more or less susceptible to visual illusions, and desire can change the apparent size of goal-relevant objects. The authors proposed that emotions offer information \u201cabout the costs and benefits of anticipated action,\u201d knowledge that can be used swiftly, without thought, \u201ccircumventing the need for cogitating on the possible consequences of potential actions.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the solution to the paradox of fiction, and why telling ourselves, \u201cIt\u2019s only a movie,\u201d can only partially attenuate the feelings we have about it. Our brains can\u2019t help but believe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

== Jim Davies<\/strong> ==<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stories, fiction included, act as a kind of surrogate life. You can learn from them so seamlessly that you might believe you knew something\u2014about ancient Greece, say\u2014before having gleaned it 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