The Power of Storytelling, with Salman Rushdie

Gather ‘round everyone, it’s story time! Neil deGrasse Tyson, world-renowned author Salman Rushdie, comic co-host Eugene Mirman, literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall, and literary neuroscientist Natalie Phillips investigate the history, science, influence, and future of storytelling. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/the-power-of-storytelling-with-salman-rushdie/ Photo Credit: Brandon Royal.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the hall of the universe. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and tonight we explore the science of storytelling, featuring my interview with celebrated novelist Solomon Rusty. Yes, so let's do this. My co-host Eugene Mirman, Eugene. Hello. Welcome back. Great to be here. Yeah, thank you. And also joining us, because I have no expertise in any of this, is literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall. Jonathan, welcome to the show. Thank you. First time on Starts Off? Yes. I hope it's not the last. Me too. You researched the connection between literature and evolution. Yes. Very nice. Author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human.

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we'll be heavily relying on your expertise tonight. Excellent. And we've got Solomon Rusty, a novelist. He's a celebrated author of 12 novels, including Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses, you've all heard of that one, Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty Eight Nights. In 2007, he was knighted for his services to literature. Which country?

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For all of them. His work is considered to be among the best fiction there ever was. And so what I found curious when I interviewed him was, his path to becoming a writer might have gone another way. So let's check it out.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  I almost became a scientist. I was supposed to be a scientist.

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you mean "supposed to be"?

• 1:49Speaker 01

  That was the plan.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is America, you can be whatever you want.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no "supposed to be".

• 1:54Speaker 01

  But when I was 16, my best subjects were math and physics.

• 1:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, by far my best. And so the plan was that I should go ahead and do math and physics and be either a mathematician or a physicist. And I jumped ship and did history, French and Latin.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa, whoa. So we lost one.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  But you know, I kind of regret it because I really...

• 2:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Note to Time Machine.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Forget about books, do equations.

• 2:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'm gonna go back in time, because I think you... Well, of course, we love your books, so I don't want... Maybe there's a pathway where you could have done both, maybe?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Maybe, but you know, I actually think... I was lousy at chemistry, I was really very bad at chemistry, but I was pretty good at physics. And what I think has happened, both in the physics of the very big and in the physics of the very small, it's become so interesting that it's almost like philosophy, you know, and very inspiring, I think, to layman practitioners of a different art like me.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Solomon had the makings of a great scientist. Are you surprised by that?

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Not really. We think of science and art sort of as binary categories, and we isolate the scientists and the artists on different sides of the campus, make sure they don't interact with each other. But they seem to be motivated by pretty similar goals. They're both after deep, durable, that.

• 3:26Eugene Mirman?

  Hooking up, partying, knowledge.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  And deep, durable, artful. And artful insight into what it means to be human. There is a sort of crippling ignorance of science in many districts of the humanities.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that phrase, and I use that like forever and ever now.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Crippling ignorance of science. Would you say that novelists or artists in general, sort of capital A artists, are not fundamentally different from scientists in the sense that both branches of human pursuit are in search of a higher truth?

• 4:02Speaker 02

  I think it's exactly right. I think they are both pursuing truth and they both say so all the time. If you ask a storyteller what they're after, they're after the truth. If you ask an actor what they're trying to capture in a scene, they're trying to capture the truth. If you ask a scientist, they're trying to get it... They'll give you a mushy-mouthed answer. They'll say, "I'm after more reliable, durable..."

• 4:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And my error bars and my uncertainty.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  And truth is capital, not capital T, truth, it's lowercase truth.

• 4:28Eugene Mirman?

  Only people in insurance are looking for lies. Everyone else is seeking the truth.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you see me reading it in a fortune cookie or something?

• 4:37Eugene Mirman?

  No, but one day you will, once I control the fortune cookie industry.

• 4:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, because I asked Solomon just that direct question, given what I just learned about his background, I just wanted to know how science can serve as that which inspires a storyteller. And so I just wanted to find out what role that would play. Let's check it out.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  I think there's quite a few creative writers now who are very inspired by sciences.

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, that's my best indication that science, however slowly, but determinately, is mainstreaming.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because if it's just what scientists do, then you can always just circumscribe, you draw a line around it and say, "I will walk around that, under it, climb over it." But that's what scientists do. The moment artists start reaching in, "So I like that. Give me some of that."

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Sometimes when artists do that, they don't get it right exactly. You know, so for example, I've seen fiction based on the idea of the theory of uncertainty, which assumes that what Heisenberg's theory is saying is that, gee, everything is uncertain, you know, and which is actually not what it's saying. It's actually talking about how to calculate the degree of uncertainty in anything. And so it's actually about arriving closer to something like certainty. But the trouble is when you just use it as a metaphor, you can actually misuse it.

• 6:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So my ammo in that, my literary ammo is a quote from Mark Twain, where he says, you might be familiar with it, he says, "First get your facts straight, then distort them at your leisure."

• 6:19Speaker 01

  No, I think that's right. I mean, it's sort of like, you know, Picasso was a great realistic painter before he discovered abstraction.

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  But it's not that he couldn't paint a human being to look like a human being.

• 6:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. But if you first see his ones with the two eyeballs on one side of the head, and you just did that in your kindergarten class, you're wondering.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  I could do that. It's a very bad thing to think when you look at art.

• 6:45Eugene Mirman?

  So Neil, is there someone who's the scientific equivalent of Picasso? Who sort of started being, you know, very accurate and then kind of became more abstract?

• 6:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not really, I mean, if I had to sort of reach in deep, maybe Einstein? In the sense that he had some brilliant, though, sort of mainstream, on the main boulevard ideas that were just ahead of everybody. So there, he's showing his street cred there. Then later on, he invents general relativity. This is later on, ten years later. Special relativity first, general theory of relativity. We might not have that today, were it not for Einstein back in 1916. That's how innovative and different it was. And so, and we all had to catch up with him. But usually when people sort of step out of the box, they're really out.

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're not coming back, and no one is following them, and they get lost in space. So I think that that concept is more familiar in the artist realm. Where they're just gonna take you someplace you've never been, and the center mass of all the creativity follows it. Would you agree with that?

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, thank you. Actually, I don't know that that happened with James Joyce, and Ulysses, and all these other great novels that are so celebrated of his from the 20th century. Where, did that shift the center mass? Did all writers start doing that? Or does he stand out as a lone wolf?

• 8:16Speaker 02

  He stand out as a lone wolf. Think about somebody like James Joyce, is they're read by elite readers. And they're read...

• 8:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the thing, elite readers.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Elite readers, by college professors, and the students who are forced to read Finnegan's Wake, or Ulysses. Ordinary people really don't read that. It's too hard, it's too demanding. So it hasn't really penetrated the mainstream.

• 8:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, because it was a challenge. And it's no less of a challenge today than then. Although, it was a challenge first listening to Jimi Hendrix. When you heard, you know, these ballads sung by quartets before, and now you hear this guitar, what is that? And then everybody kind of drifted there. So it's not impossible.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  It's not impossible, but somebody who's pushing it as far as James Joyce was in a book like Finnegan's Wake, most humans simply cannot stand to read it. So even the literary scholars I know, who are Joyce fans, almost no one's managed to read Finnegan's Wake all the way through.

• 9:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I tried.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  You can admire it.

• 9:16Eugene Mirman?

  Sounds like a wonderful book. I don't know.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  You can admire it as a stunning work of literary artistic swagger, but you can't quite love it. You can't sink into it like a narrative and sort of lose track of the world.

• 9:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A quick note, at the end of that last clip, Solomon was referring to the uncertainty principle, and it's discovered by Heisenberg, who became the name, the alternate name of the character in Breaking Bad. So there are threads here in the storytelling. So let me ask you this, if you know enough nature and science, and you want to somehow fold it into your story, from your point of view, I got my own opinions here, but I got you here now. Do they have to, should they, must they have to get the science right in their storytelling?

• 10:05Speaker 02

  I think of storytellers, what they're trying to do, I think storytelling is an ancient form of virtual reality simulation. So you get a story, and the storyteller, if they are good, they are building the simulation, scene by scene, character by character, smell by smell, texture by texture, until it comes to life vividly in your mind.

• 10:26Eugene Mirman?

  So you're not against dragons?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  I'm not, as long as it's consistent with that world.

• 10:32Eugene Mirman?

  Sure.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  There's rules in a story world, and as long as it's consistent with the rules of the story world, in Game of Thrones, for instance, it's fine.

• 10:38Eugene Mirman?

  But in Bourne Identity, it would be like, no dragons.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  That would be a violation, and it would ruin the virtual reality simulation. It jars you out of it if there's glaring errors. Now, of course, most people do not see the scientific errors that you see, so it doesn't have an effect on them.

• 10:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess if you don't know and don't care, but somehow it works in the story, then it works, by definition.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, if people don't understand that there's a violation of the second law of thermodynamics or something, then it doesn't interfere with the simulation.

• 11:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because Solomon Rusty, he's known for creating characters and situations that actively and explicitly defy the laws of physics. And I asked him why, like, where are you coming from with this? Let's check it out.

• 11:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you thinking this is violating the laws of physics? Or are you thinking maybe one day physics can accomplish this?

• 11:31Speaker 01

  No, I'm thinking about interestingly violating the laws of physics. You know, in my last novel, there is this character who begins to levitate. And he ends up this much off the ground. Now, the point is that this is just as great a violation of the law of physics.

• 11:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  As if he's 20 feet in the air.

• 11:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As Superman.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  But it's funnier.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  And then, I think what you do, when you have one of these moments, when you do something which is physically not possible, you then have to take it completely seriously. For instance, I had another novel, a more fairy tale-like novel, in which there actually is a flying carpet. And the question then is, okay, if there's a flying carpet, how does that work? Because first of all, a carpet is a soft object. And if you're up there on the flying carpet, there's presumably wind currents. And how do you stay on the flying carpet? Because it's going to be flapping about.

• 12:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Secondly, if you get up even a short distance into the air, it gets to be very cold. So how would you be staying warm on the flying carpet? You know, etc. So you have to...

• 12:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Generally, people on flying carpets are not wearing much clothes. It's a hot desert climate.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Exactly. So you know, there are some scientific issues to be solved in the whole flying carpet thing.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  And again, similarly, once you have a character, once you've decided that you have a character who's walking half an inch off the ground, then you have to take that really seriously. If you were half an inch off the ground, or if your foot was always half an inch away from any surface that it was trying to reach, how would you drive a car when your foot was always half an inch off the brake and accelerator? You know, how would you make love? How would you go to the bathroom? All these things have to be answered in order to make it. So you have to invent a pseudoscience is what I'm saying in order to.

• 13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Invent a world.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Invent, yeah, invent a logic which explains the illogical thing you've done.

• 13:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I can tell you this, that in the sci-fi, sci-fi fantasy community, the tighter is your interior logic. The more you can get, the more freedom they'll give you to tell whatever story you want.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely, and the whole, the secret of this kind of writing is that the world must be coherent in its own terms. And I think one of the reasons why people go on reading books like The Lord of the Rings is because of the enormous care that Tolkien took to create that world. He created its languages and its mythologies and its history.

• 14:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His maps.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, but you know, his depth of knowledge is far greater than the actual story he's telling. You know, and, and that because we know that or feel it, we have great confidence in, in the world that is being shown to us.

• 14:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like the point that he was making that the story that exists from which the book is drawn, the story in his head goes way deeper than what he actually writes. And as a reader of The Lord of the Rings, you, you feel that. There's something coming from much more than just what's on the page.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, the storyteller knows much more about his world than he puts on the page is usually.

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ideally.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Ideally.

• 14:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, you're not going to communicate that and it'll feel kind of shallow.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so what I liked about this is he's got the science background. I have a bias there. And now he knows he's going to violate the science, but at least be internally consistent. So I would submit to you that many novels might be richer or deeper or stronger if they knew the science. And then that had that as an anchor, so you will knowingly violate it in a logically consistent way.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or use it in a way to tell something else that you didn't have the latitude to even think of before. Is that a fair requirement? Make every novelist take some physics?

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no.

• 15:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, but every, excuse me, every physicist takes English class? Not in France.

• 15:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I take English class. I read Shakespeare.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Oh, no, I, I, I agree with you.

• 15:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm still screaming at you, let me finish screaming.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had how many years of English, right? So.

• 15:45Eugene Mirman?

  We are doing a show in English. I think it's pretty reasonable.

• 15:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 15:48Eugene Mirman?

  That you have to convey information and you're not sitting here just saying equations.

• 15:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you telling me I'm being unrealistic by asking you this?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  No, I think people in the humanities should know a lot more science. And I do think science classes should be mandatory, including for scholars and graduate programs. They should be taking courses on the scientific method. They should be taking courses on statistics and.

• 16:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But is there a limit to how much you can expect your character to suspend disbelief? I mean, can't you end up taking them too far? Like suppose, suppose I told you just in the walls of this institution, Bigfoot lives here and walks around at night and he spends time in the planetarium, reading exhibits, and he's learning about the universe. Is that too much to ask of a reader?

• 16:47Speaker 02

  No.

• 16:48Eugene Mirman?

  Of a reader, no.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  No, people will suspend their disbelief for just about anything. It's only when Teen Wolf and Bigfoot show up together in Game of Thrones that it shatters the disbelief.

• 17:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but one of them is okay.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  One of them, maybe, no, probably both of them, both wouldn't fit in that world. But as long as, he's saying, as long as that interior logic is on her.

• 17:10Eugene Mirman?

  So could you have like Teen Wolf?

• 17:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, so our Bigfoot wants to learn. That's why he lives here in a museum.

• 17:18Eugene Mirman?

  That's reasonable. Could you have a Bigfoot and a rabbi in the same book?

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:23Eugene Mirman?

  Yes! Get ready to read my book, Bigfoot and the Rabbi.

• 17:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there are limits to how far you could take it. But is this the talent of the storyteller, uh, it's himself, his or herself? Is there a limit? Is that limited by your talents to convey it? Because we have Silent and Rusty, who love physics, and then he says, I'm gonna make you walk a half inch over the ground. Now I gotta make that plausible.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But he's got some, he's got some street cred, some science, he's got the chops.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To even attempt that.

• 18:00Eugene Mirman?

  I think it wouldn't be a problem to float half an inch over a toilet, by the way.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Well, great writers like Salman Rushdie do it, and so do writers of sort of what you might call popular trash, who write horror stories and murder stories and mystery stories with implausible elements to it.

• 18:18Eugene Mirman?

  You leave Angela Lansbury out of this.

• 18:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, do you guys, when you, I mean, you analyze this, right? So, you're not, you're not just out there writing, you're analyzing. So, when you think of a story arc, is there a, is there a formula that you imagine for this?

• 18:35Speaker 02

  I do, yeah.

• 18:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You do?

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Absolutely, yeah. It's not the hero's journey, it's not a very formulaic sort of thing, but it's something very fascinating. When you travel around the world through story traditions, you find all this variety, but you also find uniformity. What's a story? A story always, always, always has a character. The character's always has a predicament, some sort of trouble, some sort of problem, and they attempt to solve it. Stories are problem-solution narratives, and there's usually some sort of moralistic element to it, but there is a sort of cross-cultural pattern.

• 19:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, these are the, so the archetypes of your, of, these are the, the components that you bring together. And does that mean you could know in advance whether a story will be a bestseller?

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Uh, no.

• 19:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, well.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  People are terrible, people are, those are necessary components, but they're not sufficient components for, for a bestseller.

• 19:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 19:31Eugene Mirman?

  Are there characters in Fifty Shades of Grey?

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Eugene, do you, in your craft?

• 19:38Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Professional comedian.

• 19:40Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so, you have, you got principles that, do your jokes have to have a point? I didn't mean that the way it sounded.

• 19:48Eugene Mirman?

  No, I think that, yeah, it has to have, uh, yeah, it has to have a point, it has to be clear, even if it's somehow fantastical. It still has its own rules.

• 19:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you don't think of it as being formulaic, though?

• 19:58Eugene Mirman?

  Well, no, I think you, well, you think of it as being formulaic, and then you, uh, make it seem like it isn't.

• 20:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, there you go.

• 20:06Eugene Mirman?

  Jokes are, are wonderful lies.

• 20:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, yeah, I like that.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  That is where the art comes in. That is where the art comes in. We're endlessly varying the same old, basic patterns. Joke tellers are doing it, novelists are doing it. And the art comes, the story craft comes from concealing what you're up to.

• 20:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's beautiful. Well, coming up, more on the science of storytelling when StarTalk returns.

• 20:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History. And we're featuring my interview with the celebrated novelist Solomon Rushdie. And he's a master of the genre called magical realism. And it injects supernatural elements in what would otherwise be an ordinary world. And so I asked him, how that kind of storytelling works? Let's check it out. When you invoke magical realism, are you influenced by what might be possible technologically or scientifically? Or does it just, you just make it up and there it is without any reference to reality?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Well, some of each is the answer. I mean, I think the problem with the way in which people hear the phrase "magic realism" is that when they hear it, they hear magic and they don't hear realism. You know, and so they think of it as just pure fantasy writing, which it's not. I mean, I think that when that kind of writing succeeds, it's because it is very deeply rooted in a vision of the real world. And then out of that, there arise, let's say, intensified metaphorical moments, you know? But they're always about real human relations and the way in which things actually are.

• 22:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jonathan, tell me about magical realism.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Well, it's a realistic storytelling with magic in it.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Like Teen Wolf.

• 22:11Eugene Mirman?

  Teen Wolf, like where it's like high school problems, but also he's a wolf.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:14Eugene Mirman?

  And maybe he'll surf on a van.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  So is Teen Wolf magical realism? All these genre things are very blurry. They're not like species, they all blend together.

• 22:23Eugene Mirman?

  So if like, two wizards are kissing and then they get mad at each other and one runs away, that's like, that's magical realism? Does there have to be lightning or something, or magic, fireballs? No? How much of...

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I bet that, that face is a no face, okay?

• 22:38Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, so wizards kissing is not magical realism?

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Sounds pretty magical to me.

• 22:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's high in the magic and low on the real part. So, what is this notion of it playing an evolutionary role?

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Storytelling?

• 22:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, you know, this is kind of hard for us to get our heads around because most of us go into stories because they're fun.

• 22:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  And we think of them as escapism.

• 22:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  We go there, we get to take a little vacation from our lives.

• 23:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not trying to get deep about it, it's an escape.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Yes, um, but I think we evolved to delight in stories, actually because they're so utilitarian. Stories were humanity's first great technology for storing sort of vital cultural information, freezing it in the amber of the story, and being able to make it transmissible across generations. It's hard to imagine human cultures actually coming into being without, without stories.

• 23:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So stories obviously long predated writing.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And for many, for some cultures in the world today, stories still matter as the only means of communicating from one generation to the next.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  Fewer and fewer, but probably yes.

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, what you're suggesting then is the stories, for them, are not simply escapist entertainment, they are messages passed through generations.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:51Eugene Mirman?

  Until it's written down and turned into religion.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Yes, but, but also...

• 23:55Eugene Mirman?

  And then it's like, uh-oh.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  But also for us too. I think it's easy to see that for, for instance, ancient tribal people's story fulfilled that role. They were communicating values, ideals, messages, a sense of tribal identity. The leap is, and I think that is, stories are still doing this today.

• 24:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how much of a story, stories' role historically, if not today, has been to try to create sense out of the disorder and complexity of life?

• 24:23Speaker 02

  I think

• 24:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By just simplifying it?

• 24:25Speaker 02

  I think it's a massive part of it. It's a, you know, story is a, is above all, a meaningful structuring of information.

• 24:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  So, story, what

• 24:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, it's just random information in front of you. How you can't even carry it as a coherent whole?

• 24:39Speaker 02

  We have trouble tolerating incoherence and chaos. And story is how we converted into something ordered, orderly and comforting.

• 24:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's this term I came across in researching this? Uh, uh, uh, homo fictis?

• 24:51Speaker 02

  So homo sapien is a pretty good definition for our species.

• 24:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  It means wise man. But if you're paying attention to politics, we don't seem all that wise and rational, uh, most of the time. Homo fictis, fiction man, story man, I think that's about equally accurate. Man is a storytelling animal.

• 25:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what role would you say spirituality has in this? Because so many stories, the ones that stay with us the longest, uh, in, in, in particular, the ones that become the foundations of religious texts.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, religions are made out of stories. Uh, for me, they're made out of fiction stories.

• 25:25Eugene Mirman?

  What?

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Yes. And

• 25:28Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, but like, would you, are you saying even like, so you think Hermes isn't real?

• 25:33Speaker 02

  I don't think he's real.

• 25:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, I don't think so.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  But, but the

• 25:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think so either.

• 25:36Eugene Mirman?

  You both don't think Hermes is real? Now I've heard everything.

• 25:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so, so I asked Solomon Rushdie about this. And what, how does he justify and draw his deep sense of sort of the supernatural? And even spirituality in his storytelling? Let's check it out. Since your books are so successful and so, uh, celebrated, it must mean, just by empirically, it must mean you're reaching people at a deeper level than just, oh, let me find the next novel to read.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hope so.

• 26:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you are, that means this, this referencing to spirituality is deep and a fundamental part of what it is to be human.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Well, it's a part of it. It's a part of it that I thought was, was fading, but seems to have made quite a comeback. Uh, which is the return of religion to a kind of central role in public affairs. And, you know, I think greatly to our disadvantage.

• 26:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fine, but you write

• 26:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the spiritual soul of the reader.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Well, you have to engage, look.

• 26:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that means you're admitting it's there. It's in there, it's in people.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  How can one not admit it? I mean, if you're gonna write about the world as it is, you can't only write about people who think like you.

• 26:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Otherwise, otherwise it's going to be a very narrow fictional world, you know. What I do think is that we have a sense of ourselves, which is more than just skin and flesh and skin and bone, you know. And I don't think you have to be religious or supernaturally inclined to think that. And, and I think that imaginative, creative side of us, the side of us which is not contained in our physicality, you know, is something which literature has always explored.

• 27:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jonathan, is that the best literature or the most compelling that's out there? The ones that touch our spiritual soul?

• 27:34Speaker 02

  I don't know, I don't know. I mean, it's a value judgment, you know, and so different strokes for different folks.

• 27:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean empirically, if like, the Bible is the best selling work of all time, then this is not a debatable point.

• 27:45Eugene Mirman?

  But it's also had a lot of time to sell. I think if you compare it to how Thriller did, you'd be like, oh, give Thriller a little more time.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Well, to me, you know, religion is probably the ultimate expression of stories' dominion over the human mind. So whether you believe that Hermes is real or not, so let's say you believe in the Greek religion, you still think everybody else's religions are made out of stories.

• 28:10Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  So based upon what these sacred stories say, we regulate all the aspects of our lives if we truly believe in them.

• 28:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but there's a difference then between taking such a story literally, Hermes as a literal god, or anything that you have in a religious text as literal, and otherwise thinking of it as a story that has a lesson.

• 28:30Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 28:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you have these characters that help the storyteller communicate a lesson that you then walk away with.

• 28:36Eugene Mirman?

  Maybe if you wanna find love, turn yourself into a goose. You do what you think is right.

• 28:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I mean, I guess I'm asking you.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:44Eugene Mirman?

  Swan.

• 28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At what point do you say this is the reality of how you think and feel?

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it taps something deeply spiritual that is fundamentally in our DNA. And at what point are you saying, "This is another tool to tell a cool story." That where the point is not the truth of the story, but the message and the morality of the of the of the consequences to the characters.

• 29:11Eugene Mirman?

  Where do the Smurfs start and morality ends?

• 29:16Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, so I can read Homer. I can read the Iliad and the Odyssey. I don't believe in any of the things that Homer believed in. I don't believe in any of those gods.

• 29:23Eugene Mirman?

  Even Rosie Finger Dawn?

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Are real. I don't believe in her, but still the story works for me and the lessons and the and the deep wisdom of the story works. It's still there.

• 29:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, would you say there's a connection between a spiritual feeling and creativity itself?

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Uh, not for me. I don't know what to say to that. I think that there's a feeling, for instance, going back to Homer, and you've obviously read your Homer.

• 29:48Eugene Mirman?

  Just the first sentence.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, so, but the first sentence of the Iliad is different.

• 29:52Eugene Mirman?

  So, who knows?

• 29:52Speaker 02

  The first sentence of the Iliad is, "Sing through me, muse, of the rage of Achilles." And so Homer is saying that my, I'm just, I'm just opening my mouth and a goddess is literally singing through me. It's a divine inspiration. It's deeply spiritual. And I think creativity feels spiritual to people because oftentimes that that that perfect line, that perfect insight, just pops into your head.

• 30:16Eugene Mirman?

  I believe that's the same way Air Force One became a movie.

• 30:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, popped in a man. So, it's, so it's fascinating you say that, because what you're saying is if we do not otherwise have our confidence in our own capacity to come up with a new idea, and you wake up in the morning and a new idea pops into your head, and if you happen to be religious or or otherwise spiritual, you will be sure somebody put that in.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  You do not feel like the author of it. It just appeared there. It was created in your unconscious brain and it kind of filtered up into the into consciousness.

• 30:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, can you imagine there's some evolutionary value to this?

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a scientist of creativity I like named Barry Kaufman. And he talks about the mind, creativity being a partnership of two neural networks. One is the executive network, that's basically you, that's a conscious mind. The other is the unconscious mind, he calls it the imaginative network. And the imaginative network is a wild, crazy, bohemian, whose job is to churn out creative variation. The executive mind then filters through that, separates wheat and chaff, and takes that cloud castle and does the sweaty work of making it real.

• 31:35Eugene Mirman?

  I love a cloud castle.

• 31:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up, we continue our scientific search into the power of storytelling when StarTalk returns.

• 31:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the Hall of the Universe of the American Museum of Natural History. We're featuring my interview with celebrated novelist Solomon Resti. And I had to ask him about the power of fiction to change the way we think. So let's check it out.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  I don't like preachy fiction, you know? I don't like fiction that tells me what to think. I like fiction that allows me to work out what I think about the world I'm being shown, you know? And I think that what I want to do, or hope to do, is to create that world that the reader likes being in, you know, wants to inhabit. And while the reader is in that world, the reader may well be challenged to rethink or to understand things in a different way, or to admit other possibilities, et cetera, you know? But the great thing about literature is I think it does change people. I think it changes readers, you know, one reader at a time. But neither the writer nor the reader knows when it's going to happen.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's deep. So Jonathan, how would you compare the power of fiction to change your ideas and values relative to nonfiction? And the reason why I ask is, when you go to a movie, they make it a point based on a real story.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Sure do.

• 33:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They want to, they, they, that's upfront.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not, this is not just fiction, this is real. So, it seems to me that has some currency.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  It does.

• 33:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But at the end of the day, what, and what do your studies tell you?

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Stories are more persuasive. Uh, so, stories have really impressive cognitive power. So, in normal waking life, for instance, we're, we're, our minds are flitting all over the place all the time. You have about a hundred daydreams per hour. But when you're in a good story, a story you love, your favorite TV show, let's say, you have approximately zero daydreams per hour. Your mind goes totally still.

• 33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it's a good story?

• 33:53Speaker 02

  If it's good, and pays rapt attention, sometimes for hours on end. This is impressive. It means, story is a kind of drug. It reliably lulls us into an altered state of consciousness.

• 34:03Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, meaning you literally normally have just like, your brain is going everywhere?

• 34:07Speaker 02

  It's everywhere.

• 34:08Eugene Mirman?

  Hundreds of daydreams?

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Per hour.

• 34:10Eugene Mirman?

  Per hour?

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Per hour.

• 34:11Eugene Mirman?

  And then if you're watching?

• 34:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have at least that many, and I'm thinking about everything.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 34:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh yeah.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, but, but when you're in the story, your hyper mind goes utterly still. And it's not just a state of high attention, it's also a state of high suggestibility. People are more open-minded when they're inside Storyland, both for better and for worse.

• 34:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It pries you open, and says, let me get inside, and now, I, I, the story, I'm personifying the story, completely control your love, your hate, your emotions, your empathy, your sympathies.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if I'm a good writer, and I'm a good storyteller, oh my gosh, you are putty in my hands.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  It's, it's, you, you are wielding massive power. You're like a witch. You wave your, your, your-

• 35:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tom Clancy, America's witch.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  But you wave your pen like a wand, it casts a spell. The spell allows you to enter, just like you said, into other people's brains, change how they think, change how they feel, change how they act.

• 35:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, there's nothing about this that I could possibly disagree with because it sounds like it makes complete sense. But it would be good if we had actual physiological data in support of what feels obvious. And so, we actually have a researcher at Michigan State University named Natalie Phillips, who's studying the effect of stories on the brain, the neurophysiology of this. We have her standing by right now, live, on video call. Natalie, are you there? Hi Natalie. Hello.

• 35:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, so you are a assistant professor of English and-

• 35:52Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 35:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And affiliated faculty in cognitive science.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 35:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool. I'd never heard of this field called literary neuroscience. Like, what is that?

• 36:03Speaker 04

  It's a term that I came up with to describe my work.

• 36:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have people hooked up to MRI, functional MRI, and they read fiction, and then you watch what happens in their brain?

• 36:17Speaker 04

  Exactly. So, the biggest surprise of the study so far was that instead of seeing activation in brain regions that are associated with reading and attention, we're seeing activation in regions far beyond this. We found widespread, almost global activation for individual subjects, which shifts depending on what people are paying attention to as they read. And to some degree, maybe this shouldn't have been such a big surprise, because reading a novel involves losing yourself in a fictional world. And these images aren't being provided for us, like in film. So, we have to create them for ourselves.

• 36:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so that's interesting. So, well-written story can activate parts of your brain that you are a participant in, in ways that if your imagination is not invoked, it's just not there.

• 37:09Speaker 04

  Right. And we can begin to actually track these moments, and the moments when people are actually getting caught by fiction, and drawn in, and immersed, and sort of drawn into that, right, to inhabit that fictional world.

• 37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well Natalie, thank you for being on StarTalk and sharing this insight with us. Okay, coming up, we'll take your questions about the science of storytelling. Next, on StarTalk.

• 37:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. From the American Museum of Natural History, right here in the heart of New York City. And we're talking about the science of storytelling. Right now, we're going straight into a fan favorite part of our show called Cosmic Queries. This is the part, we solicit questions from our fanbase on this topic, and they come in. I haven't seen them, Eugene has them, she's gonna read them. I probably don't know any of these answers, they'll all go to you.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The questions will go to you.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  I'll do my best.

• 38:11Eugene Mirman?

  Get ready.

• 38:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 38:12Eugene Mirman?

  I'll try to take a few.

• 38:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:16Eugene Mirman?

  Don Rim asks, from Facebook, he asks, "One of my favorite quotes is, 'We live in the condensation of our imagination.' Is this true?"

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Yes, that's true. I'd say that we live in stories. We live in stories all day long.

• 38:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But stories are condensations of...

• 38:32Speaker 02

  And they are, they are. And we dream in stories all night long. We all have life stories we use to sort of organize our lives and make them meaningful. So yeah, actually, that's true.

• 38:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it true that if you can't actually make a meaningful story, you make any kind of story at all? And that's where you get a weird story? Because your brain, that was the best your brain could do?

• 38:52Speaker 02

  Absolutely, we confabulate.

• 38:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Confabulate, I like that.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  We just can't, we just can't do without one.

• 38:55Eugene Mirman?

  And that's how we have Twin Peaks?

• 38:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're good, good answer. Next one.

• 39:00Eugene Mirman?

  Michael Goldfinch, from Facebook, asks, "Is the ability to lie, a trait which has proved to have large evolutionary benefits, the reason we have the capability to tell stories?"

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Huh, that's a good question. Uh, I'm interested in the way that we lie to ourselves in our stories. We make up stories about ourselves that are wildly optimistic about our own personal qualities.

• 39:23Eugene Mirman?

  Like how good I am at karate?

• 39:25Speaker 02

  How good you are at most things.

• 39:26Eugene Mirman?

  Oh.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  According to the...

• 39:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No! Whoa!

• 39:30Eugene Mirman?

  Sounds fair.

• 39:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh!

• 39:32Eugene Mirman?

  First of all, let me just point this out there, not very good at karate. So that's one thing, pretty realistic.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  According to the science, the science, you probably believe you're above average at almost everything.

• 39:41Eugene Mirman?

  Really?

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everyone thinks they're above average.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  Everyone thinks they're above average.

• 39:44Eugene Mirman?

  Let me just say this, I'm not above average at soccer. I mean, unless you're throwing in babies, then I'm much better than babies.

• 39:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you have the power to lie, you have the power to have a conversation with yourself by creating a reality that is different from the one you actually react to.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that a fair assessment?

• 40:01Speaker 02

  I suppose so.

• 40:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back to the person's question.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About the ability to lie being a fundamental part of being able to tell a story that's not real, but somehow you want to believe it.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  Yes, I think that's true. And with the addition that we lie best when we can lie to ourselves as well.

• 40:15Eugene Mirman?

  So if I don't think I'm above average in a bunch of... Yeah. In a bunch of random traits, does that mean that I am really great at assessing stuff?

• 40:27Speaker 02

  Are you sure you're not really good at karate? Because I would have fought.

• 40:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next question, go.

• 40:33Eugene Mirman?

  All right. Pretty good at karate. Steven Applegate from Twitter asks, "How soon will society accept the full immersion of augmented reality as true life that is not discernible from fiction?"

• 40:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Boy, I, uh...

• 40:51Eugene Mirman?

  Seven years?

• 40:52Speaker 02

  I just...

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, just augmented reality, as I understand it from Pokemon...

• 40:58Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. Go?

• 40:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go, yeah, is... Is that the reality that you experience has been supplemented

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  by some sensory encounter with things that other people put in play.

• 41:12Eugene Mirman?

  But I think it's even more. It's like you have glasses and when you look here, you see a chess set. And eventually it'll be that you physically do this and you can feel the piece. While Pokemon Go, I think, is on your phone. So I think augmented reality is the... is like...

• 41:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's fully in your head.

• 41:27Eugene Mirman?

  You put on a thing and there's like people crawling over stuff that's physically in the room.

• 41:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does that put novelists out of business?

• 41:33Eugene Mirman?

  I hope.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  I think my... If you've ever been in an Oculus Rift situation...

• 41:38Eugene Mirman?

  Are you hitting on us?

• 41:40Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I just did it for the first time.

• 41:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oculus Rift, was that one of the Transformers?

• 41:44Speaker 02

  No, it's a virtual reality headset.

• 41:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, I know.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  And, uh... But I took it off. I had the whole experience. I took it off afterwards and I said, "This would change the world and destroy it." Uh, because it's just so powerful and it's still early days. And pretty soon, the story worlds that we will enter into through that machine are going to be so much better than the real world that we'll never want to leave.

• 42:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's going to be the novel of the future?

• 42:10Speaker 02

  It's going to be... Yes, I think so. I think so. Yeah. It's incredibly powerful.

• 42:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But getting back to Natalie's point, that...

• 42:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it's things you see, then you don't get to imagine it.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's doing a lot of the work for you.

• 42:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  So, Dean Austin is trying to create a virtual reality. Oculus Rift is just doing it for you.

• 42:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, just doing it all.

• 42:32Eugene Mirman?

  I can't wait to be in that world looking for love.

• 42:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, coming up. Author, extraordinaire Solomon Resti defends rationalism in a post-factual world.

• 42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to Startalk. From the American Museum of Natural History. We're featuring my interview with novelist Solomon Resti. And you know, he writes about fantastical worlds. But his view on society is decidedly rationalist. So I asked for his outlook on rationalism, especially in today's political climate. Let's check it out.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  I think we have a real battle on our hands. And I think we live in a time of irrationality. And a time in which, as we've been seeing, there's a kind of, almost a suspicion of people who know things.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  That if you know something, you're called an elitist.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  And I think it's very worrying to live in this, you know, post-factual world. I think it's, you know, Stephen Colbert invented the term "truthiness." And I think we live in that kind of world in which if something sounds kind of truthy, it's as true as something that's actually true. And I think one needs to hold on to the sense that there actually are facts. And that science, in fact, exists. And that the world is not simply a mishmash of conflicting prejudices.

• 44:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jonathan, you study the science of stories and how do we or should we distinguish fact from fiction?

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Well, it's hard for us, especially if non-facts are embedded well in stories. Because as I said before, we are very, very good at suspending disbelief. We're very, very open-minded. Another way of saying that is gullible.

• 44:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're susceptible, right.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Gullible when the story is good. So this is a real problem for us. This is why I was saying that homo sapien is kind of not the greatest name for our species because we're not really that wise, we're not really that rational, we're not really that logical most of the time.

• 44:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we doomed?

• 44:54Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I think, you know, I think we've, well, in a sense we are.

• 44:59Eugene Mirman?

  We don't eat each other often.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  We don't, but you know, there's a sense in which I think we're all learning right now that we don't really have narratives. The narratives have us. We'd like to think that we form our narratives out of fact, but I think it's truer to say that we have our pre-existing narratives and we let those narratives choose and shape the facts that we are going to believe in.

• 45:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is terrifying.

• 45:24Eugene Mirman?

  How do we function? We basically lie to ourselves all day long and then we believe a bunch of myths and then somehow we still have to go to work and raise kids and then we don't know math, except you, who obviously does a lot of math.

• 45:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So does that mean good storytelling will always override rationality?

• 45:44Speaker 02

  It seems so. It seems so. It's very, very hard to find data that will argue someone out of their favorite stories, their most deeply-held stories. The only way to beat a bad story seems to be with a better story. Now, it doesn't mean that it can't be data in that story.

• 46:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're bumming me out, man.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 46:03Eugene Mirman?

  Maybe you haven't met Jeff the Math God.

• 46:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what we need?

• 46:07Speaker 02

  But part of how you convince people, and part of why you're such a good science educator, is you are embedding facts and information within really good stories.

• 46:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm trying to do that.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there's nothing wrong with that and there's nothing

• 46:22Eugene Mirman?

  There's something right with it.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Negative about that, there's something very right about that, yeah.

• 46:25Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's got me thinking. I remember growing up jealous of creative artists because they had no bounds to what they could or wanted to create. Whereas I, as a scientist, was constrained by the laws of the universe that I did not yet know. So I don't even see the boundaries yet until I trip on them. But then as I got older, I realized that the artist is not writing out of infinite possibilities because successful art is the art that actually touches us. Touches us in some fundamental way.

• 47:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other art doesn't touch us and it gets forgotten, lost, omitted from our historical reckoning of what has mattered to us in civilization. Okay, well, here's what I wonder. If our only hope of combating stories that are infused with false information that could derail civilization, if our only hope is to come up with a better story that is infused with facts and knowledge and insight into the actual world, then our limits are the universe itself. And I'm reminded of a quote by J.B.S. Haldane, who said, "The universe is not only stranger than we have imagined, it may be

• 47:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  stranger than we can imagine." So quite the contrary to my thoughts growing up, that I'm constrained as a scientist and the artist has no limits. Maybe it is the universe that has no limits and it is the artist that is constrained. And if that's the case, if we draw the future stories from the universe and they're infused with a reality, that may be our best hope to trump the stories that are coming out that are filled with lies. Ladies and gentlemen, that's a bit of the cosmic perspective. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 48:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As always, I bid you to keep looking up.