Emily Falk

And so going to festivals like Burning Man and studying how people think and feel and behave in those kinds of contexts, Molly's team has found that those kinds of transformative experiences often involve having more of a sense of connection to other people, more of a sense of not having a bounded sense of me and not me that our brains are typically and sort of more automatically able

So when people do these kinds of things where they're connected to their community or experiencing community in a really different way, then that can help them let go of that like sense of ego that sometimes I think is characteristic of the defensiveness that we feel.

Well, one of the things that's really fascinating is the way that stories seem to get around our defensiveness.

We see this in all kinds of situations where people are able to reason about facts and information in a different way when it comes from a story than when it's just presented as a list of facts.

And I noticed this a lot as a parent.

When my kids were little, I read an article summarizing some research about the way that Inuit parents sometimes use stories to help teach children how to control their anger.

And

That work highlighted all of the different ways that stories can be used to shape our understanding of morality, our understanding of how we should behave.

And I also saw it on a day-to-day basis in my household.

So I have twins, and the twins often would get into very hyped-up states with each other where

They'd be fighting over a toy or they'd be fighting over who got to wear the blue pajamas or they would be fighting over, you know, who got to go first to get into the bathtub.

And any of these things seemed like just very dire, stakesy situations.

And

You know, when I would ask them, like, guys, like, can you please just calm down or what's going on?

Like, why are you behaving this way?

Like that didn't have any effect at all.

But when I would ask them, would you like to hear a story?

Then sometimes they would pause and listen.

And we had two characters in our house, Charlie and Charles Adams, named after the cartoonist who we all like.

And when we'd tell stories about Charlie and Charles Adams, then we'd get a completely different reaction.