Coltan Scrivner

We have language, transmissible culture.

We tell stories.

What does that allow us to do?

Well, it allows us to retain almost all of the learning benefit of a situation, but remove virtually all the cost.

And we can envision future scenarios that we've never encountered, or maybe variations of a scenario.

What if this happened in the woods versus the savanna versus the lake?

And so stories allow us to very, very cheaply

simulate potential situations, in many cases, potentially dangerous situations that might happen to us at some point.

Maybe we heard about a story and then we tell a fictional version of it to amp that up a little bit.

It was a wolf.

Well, what if the wolf was larger and hairier and it was a werewolf?

And so we do these super stimuli where we make them bigger and scarier and more memorable.

And we still gain the learning benefits from that.

And we're incentivized to create that content as humans too, because

it's good for you to pass on dangerous information to people.

Again, historically, that would have been people you live next to, your family, your friends, your trading partners.

And so there's a bit of an incentive to kind of tell these stories.

There's also some evidence that you get a bit of a status boost.

Yes.

Because you're an important person, right?