Gottschall's The Storytelling Animal

The Preface is another way of introducing the introduction. This is where he states his argument as well, "The Storytelling Animal is about the way explorers from the sciences and humanities are using new tools, new ways of thinking, to open up the vast terra incognito of Neverland. It's about the way that stories from TV commercials to daydreams to the burlesque spectacle of professionals wrestling saturate our lives"(Gottschall xvii). How stories make us human. We tell stories in all types of ways. Everything we see, hear, feel and experience is a story. Weather its fiction, non-fiction, in a daydream, or in nightmares. This helps us understand the conflicts in our lives and to be prepared if one day it came to reality. It opens up with a
2,000 per day, we daydream and each one is about fourteen seconds. We can daydream during the things we do everyday such as, doing homework, listening to someone talk, walking somewhere, or getting dressed early in the morning. Towards the end, Gottschall was comparing imagination to reality. He thinks humans don't need to tell stories to survive. All you need is to eat and sleep. He thinks it is a waste of energy. We tell stories all the time; our brains are always telling us stories even when we are sleeping. The whole world has it’s own story. Stories aren’t just important to understanding the world; they are how we understand every bit of the world. Stories are everywhere, from children’s point of view to adult’s point of view. “Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds” (Gottschall 4). Building up stories can help us a lot throughout life. It can help decide the big dilemmas, or organize the chaos in our lives. Researchers say we dream all night and keep dreaming when we wake. Storytellers can get us into trouble, always adding and changing