Without the constant experience of emotionally charged stories, our memories would be captive to the current mood.I would like to offer an extra observation, to add to Benzon's argument. Stories – as well as poems and plays – allow us to experience a wide range of desires and feelings in an arena where our personal lives are secure and protected, where our experience is socially approved. My argument is that this communal experience of stories helps us to create neural circuits that give us the ability to recall a wide range of experience without our having to be in a neurochemical state approximating that which mediated that experience. These depictions thus enable people to recall a wider range of experience than usual and, because they tend to discuss stories with others, or experience them in social settings, these experiences also have social implications. He then argues that in stories people experience depictions of many desires and many emotions. Benzon's new idea is that, in the ordinary course of events, people are thus partly cut off from large parts of their autobiographical selves. The second step in Benzon's proposal derives from the finding that memories are often mood dependent: people tend to recall autobiographical memories of when they were happy when they are happy once again, and they best recall memories of loss and failure when they are sad. So literary art tends to come from people who are concerned with their emotions-especially negative ones-and they tend to share these emotions with others, perhaps to help allay them. We found that fiction writers were far more preoccupied with emotions, especially negative emotions, than were physicists. We compared the ways in which writers of fiction and physicists talk about themselves and their work in interviews. I have turned the Romantics' idea of art as the expression and exploration of emotions into a small set of psychological hypotheses (Oatley, 2003), which Maja Djikic, Jordan Peterson and I (2006) have started to test. It is a more specific, and evolutionarily based, version of a general idea of the Romantics (as hinted at in the title of Benzon's post in The Valve) that art functions to explore and thus help to assimilate and understand emotions.
More recently, and inspired by Pinker’s own The Stuff of Thought, I argued that story-telling allows us to share perceptions, feelings, and values that we cannot talk about.Benzon's proposal is a productive one. Music reduced anxiety in the group and thereby made it more fit to encounter real challenges and dangers. Benzon thinks art, including music, is adaptive, and that it has an important function of reducing anxieties that are hard to express to others.
The first is to disagree with Steven Pinker who thinks that liking art has no evolutionary significance. In a post of 9 May in The Valve, entitled "Emotion recollected in tranquillity" (click here to read it) Bill Benzon a frequent and welcome contributor to OnFiction put forward a fascinating and original hypothesis about the role of art in our lives.
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