Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence

Fletcher (Wonderworks), an English professor at Ohio State University, makes a stimulating if uneven case for the importance of what he calls “storythinking,” a mode of cognition through which humans conceive of new possibilities and envision cause and effect relationships. Contrasting storythinking with logic, he explains somewhat opaquely that the latter works by “correlational reasoning” (“this equals that”) and the former by “causal speculation” (“this causes that”). He laments that philosophy has long valued logic over such alternative forms of knowing as stories, telling how Plato denigrated narrative as mere “imitation” and early 20th-century Cambridge literature professor I.A. Richards applied semiotics to fiction, hoping to make literary analysis as rigorous as the hard sciences. One of narrative’s primary virtues, Fletcher suggests, is that it doesn’t need to proceed from data and can instead imagine wholly new worlds, though he acknowledges stories also have downsides, including the ability to distort reality through “elision, bias, and outright fabrication.” Examining the benefits of narrative intrigues, but the lack of examples illustrating how storythinking works and differs from other forms of cognition will leave readers struggling to follow along. There’s some meaty ideas, but they’re let down by the execution. (June)