Abstract
Engaging in the art of creating and telling stories is a defining behaviour of humankind. Humans have been sharing stories with each other, with and without words, since the dawn of recorded history, but the cognitive foundations of the behaviour can be traced deeper into our past. The emergence of stories can be strongly linked to Mental Time Travel (the ability to recall the past and imagine the future) and plays a key role in our ability to communicate past, present and future scenarios with other individuals, within and beyond our lifetimes. Stories are products engraved within the concept of time, constructed to elucidate the past experiences of the self, but designed with the future in mind, thus imparting lessons of such experiences to the receiver. By being privy to the experiences of others, humans can imagine themselves in a similar position to the protagonist of the story, thus mentally learning from an experience they might have never encountered other than in the mind's eye. Evolutionary Psychology investigates how the engagement in artistic endeavours by our ancestors in the Pleistocene granted them an advantage when confronted with obstacles that challenged their survival or reproductive fitness and questions whether art is an adaptation of the human mind or a spandrel of other cognitive adaptations. However, little attention has been placed on the cognitive abilities that might have been imperative for the development of art. Here, we examine the relationship between art, storytelling, Mental Time Travel and Theory of Mind (i.e., the ability to attribute mental states to others). We suggest that Mental Time Travel played a key role in the development of storytelling because through stories, humans can fundamentally transcend their present condition, by being able to imagine different times, separate realities, and place themselves and others anywhere within the time space continuum. We argue that the development of a Theory of Mind also sparked storytelling practises in humans as a method of diffusing the past experiences of the self to others whilst enabling the receiver to dissociate between the past experiences of others and their own, and to understand them as lessons for a possible future. We propose that when artistic products rely on storytelling in form and function, they ought to be considered separate from other forms of art whose appreciation capitalise on our aesthetic preferences.
Highlights
Reviewed by: Michael Charles Corballis, The University of Auckland, New Zealand Thomas Wynn, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, United States
We propose that when artistic products rely on storytelling in form and function, they ought to be considered separate from other forms of art whose appreciation capitalise on our aesthetic preferences
If one wants to investigate the evolution of art and the cognition that makes it possible, attention should be paid to how evolving art and storytelling practises would have been adaptive for our ancestors in the Pleistocene era, during the 1.8 million years or more that hominids spent as hunter gatherers
Summary
STORIES OF THE SELF AND THEIR EVOLUTIONARY SPACE AND TIME “How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. In order to examine the adaptive need to describe concepts to one another through artistic practise and its evolutionary timeline, we will investigate the relationship between the art of storytelling (i.e., art that entails the transmission and narration of ideas and concepts to the observer), with the cognitive abilities imperative for its production–namely Mental Time Travel i.e., the ability to remember the past and imagine the future (Suddendorf and Corballis, 1997), and Theory of Mind i.e., the ability to attribute mental states to others (Premack and Woodruff, 1978). We argue that the development of both Mental Time Travel and Theory of Mind allowed our species to disseminate past experiences to others for future use, with and without words, giving rise to narrative practises such as the art of storytelling and ritual, and that these practises became intrinsically linked to the survival of both the individual and the group
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