We want to believe (in stories). Fiction and human brain as an anthropological parameter (An artist view)

Our mind works putting data together and watching them. From those compositions, new data are created. How do we create the composition? By stories. Our brain, in its factory settings, understands the language of stories, even before knowing words.

This theory about the mind and its learning way is part of the work of Jerome Bruner, a great American psychologist who's contribution in cognitive learning theory in educational psychology is still alive. Bruner's  theory of the narrative construction of reality had a great influence in various disciplines but I think it is still not fully considered (and latest decades of research about human mind chose mostly other directions, as far as I know).

Anyway. What I'm talking about in this article is a relationship between a well know concept in literature - the Suspension of Disbelief - and that assumed factory setting of our brain.

Suspension of disbelief is a concept coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge but mostly used later in Philosophy, Psycology and Literary Theory. Psychological critic Norman Holland proposed a model based on neurosciences: the narrative pattern could switch temporarely  off in our brain the systems for acting or planning to act, letting the mind focused on the structure of the story. (See here.)

What is interesting for me, as an artist and a writer, is the role of stories in the development of the individual - not just in the early years but also for full-grown men. Believing is sweet, is heartwarming, is soothing and comfortable. And, as regards stories, is our first way of learning from other human beings. 

Mankind is bound to stories. Anyway, I like this hypothesis. And each man has his background in stories. 

I think that a classification of human groups on the basis of the stories each one learned would be an interesting research, expecially considering how many stories we share in all the West culture since the mass media boom.

But, you know, I'm just a painter. :) I'm just thinking about how art - images - have to be bond to stories too. Not stories made of words, not linear stories: image are concretions of meaning. They are able to carry and tell many potential tales, each one of them.