Storythinking is how we have developed inventions, sold products, and explored discoveries from mere glimpses of possibilities to becoming household names. It is also how we can share ideas with others and improve them. By not limiting ourselves to classic “storytelling” settings we can use this style of thinking to discover opportunities that will help increase the scope of a company’s marketing and branding campaign, discover how the sciences can uncover what drives our behaviors, and even begin to have a better understanding about how we can be manipulated by someone else's use of storythinking on us.

Thank you Netgalley for eARC!

I enjoyed the premise and approach of Storythinking. The wide range of texts used demonstrated the vast study that went into developing this argument for Storythinking as opposed to logic. I also enjoyed the history of philosophy used. However the focus on Aristotle became repetitive, the lack of progression either through time or clarity made some sections confusing, at one point making me think that I was rereading when I wasn't. I found the argument for why AI can't use Storythinking well developed and interesting.

Good Book! Found it Engaging and Recommended it to My Husband. I received a NetGalley version of this title for review.

Well Written:

I am not a philosopher, but I have taken several classes in the discipline and my husband minored in it. To be able to connect the philosophy with what the author posed in a way that made sense to me, was really helpful as he explained narrative or story thinking.

Convincing:

By the end of the book I was on board and felt that Storythinking was exceptionally important, and needs to be included in scientific disciplines. It also needs to be legitimized in public thought.

For Advanced Readers:
I will say: I found this book to be a hard read, in that it challenged my thinking in ways that doesn't normally happen to me unless I am taking a graduate level course. So keep that in mind. I am going to have to re-read this book, and I feel that it is valuable enough for a re-read, to really fully grasp it. I am hoping to do that after my husband reads it, because his ability to understand philosophical concepts and ideas, is much more developed than mine.

Ever since the ancient Greek philosophers, western thought has been focused on logic. Everything, it is claimed, can be understood as operations of and, or, or not. It has gotten mankind quite far, but it has limited both progress and creativity. Biologist Angus Fletcher is here to straighten that out and restore the high office of the narrative, in his latest book, Storythinking. It is a most unusual book, plumbing the depths of history to find where philosophy went off the rails, examining neurobiology for insight into creativity, and festooned with stories about great characters all the way through. I can honestly report I’ve never read anything like it. And that’s a good thing.

Biologically, Man is keyed to sight and action. Forcing the brain to assign logical explanations for everything he sees and does has taken tens of thousands of years, and has not proven a thorough answer to much of anything, Fletcher says. If Man could return to his natural self, the result could be a whole new universe of thought and creativity. Instead, we today believe that intelligence itself derives from logic, an empty concept by comparison to what could be. No wonder we think every story has already been told.

He discovered that story wasn’t just for telling, as we have been led to believe. Story was for thinking. It was a way of life, learning, and projecting.

This is not a new discovery. Fletcher found that “MBAs at Harvard University, the globe’s most successfully self-promotional business school, are scrupulously instructed: ‘Telling a story has proven to be a superior way of communicating information, because people process stories differently than they do non-narrative information, such as a simple recitation of facts.’” He says the problem with logic is that it seeks an ideal product, while storythinking seeks an ideal process. Product is a thing; process is becoming. Early literature: Greek, Roman, English – was all about becoming – a hero, a champion, a survivor, a god . A product is dead by comparison.

This sort of logic-seeking, tortured interpretation is not a happy place. Fletcher points out we have a habit of “abstracting practice into the theory of practice.” In an endless attempt to simplify, we overthink to force ourselves into the new box. Where we can never be happy with the results. Because it represents no truth at all. Storythinking, on the other hand leverages “our personal, physical, emotional and intellectual growth. (It is) accelerated by empowering the storythinking of the people around us.” Far from obsolete or redundant, this is Network Effect in action. The more people have at it, the more valuable it becomes to all.

This hammering a square peg into a round hole has lots of unintended side effects, too. For one thing, it demolishes the joys of literature: “By converting literature into language and then interpreting language with semiotics, America’s futuristic curriculum was flattening four-dimensional narratives into two-dimensional propositions that reduced characters to representations and plots to arguments. Behaviors became themes, happenings became meanings, and actions became allegories, expunging much of the psychological activity that Shakespeare and the rest of our global library had been crafted to generate.” Is it any wonder kids won’t read?

Fletcher has his own rules and framework to grow creativity, much more accommodating to the way people are built: Prioritize the exceptional, shift the perspective, and stoke narrative conflict. Out of those parameters, he thinks, far more creative outcomes are possible.

He says there are four elements to story: characters, storyworlds (environments with their own distinct laws as to what can and cannot happen), plots (sequences of action), and narrators (“their why shapes how it is told”). This is certainly not what they taught in my schools.

Logic and metaphysics are simply not equipped for “solving ethical or biological problems such as personal and social growth.” And yet that is what most of the world’s greatest literature is all about. “Logic un-narratives narrative, creating fables with morals, myths with archetypes, heavens with commandments, stories with symbols, media with representations, and other timeless interpretations that evaporate storytelling’s core function: the innovation of action.” Today, you couldn’t sell a book without those qualities evident, cutting off potentially groundbreaking stories at the knees. And finally, logic is artificial, while storythinking is “part of life, and the law of life is growth through variety.” For Fletcher, we have strayed – far.

Having made his points, Fletcher cinches it with: “What our brain’s dual mechanisms thus reveal is that narrative and logic are complementary tools. There’s no way to replace storythinking with deduction or interpretation, any more than there’s a way to replace a hammer with a saw.”

There is a lot on artificial intelligence (AI) in Storythinking, as it seems in most books I’m reading these days. For Fletcher, AI will never overtake human ingenuity, because it simply processes words looking for patterns, on request. He says “Limited data is the province of the narrative, and narrative is the province of our brain’s synaptic machinery.” Human intelligence has a “main source: the plan-generating, hypothesis-imagining, action-inventing neural processes of storythinking.” I’m not at all sure that is correct, as AI seems capable of imitating writers, writing stories in their styles, and in general, being all but indistinguishable from them. And I’m really not sure what would happen if someone tasked AI with outside-the-box thinking.

Notable by its absence in Storythinking is the word reduction. Reductionism has been the logical endpoint of numerous disasters, such as healthcare, for example. Doctors routinely fail to listen, claiming to have reduced the symptoms to a clear and simple diagnosis without further investigation. This goes on in politics, and even in the sciences like physics, where Einstein spent the last half of his life trying to reduce the entire universe in to neat and simple geometric shapes. Yet somehow, Fletcher doesn’t focus on it.

Similarly, he does not venture in mind-expansion through things like psychedelics, which countless creatives employ to break out of the stifling mold of logic and reductionism. Because for all the marvelous connections neurons make to bolster human thinking, there are infinitely more possible connections when not forbidden by logic, efficiency and deduction.

The book ends with an absolutely jampacked Q&A of Fletcher with himself. It is a rapidfire summary answering most of the questions readers might have, imparting at least as much information as the rest of the book. It is a most unusual conclusion to a book, and is worth the price of admission by itself. I guess one should expect no less from someone professing storythinking.

David Wineberg

I had no way to judge if this was a good book or not, as it is a philosophy book, and that’s very far from any of my areas of expertise. However, I did manage to learn a few things from it, and to begin to grasp the author’s concept of storythinking.

The book is written in a fairly accessible and even rather fanciful style; however, the subject matter is necessarily dense. The sections where the author makes a case for storythinking needed all of my concentration, and I’m still not sure if the case was made, not being able to follow all of the philosophical reasoning. However, even there I learnt a lot about the history and basis of Western philosophy, including how the scientific method came about (more in my line of training). From there, the author teaches readers ways to apply storythinking in their lives, some of which seems like it could be useful.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Columbia University Press for the ARC.

The thesis behind this book seems to be that the human mind thinks both logically and narratively. We learn and create by telling ourselves stories. Logic isn't enough.

The book seems to draw mostly from philosophy and myth rather than science. I guess the author was trying to demonstrate the point of the book by using narrative thinking rather than logical thinking? Unfortunately, philosophy and myth aren't all that persuasive when it comes to proving scientific concepts.

I love the idea of narrative thinking. Unless you're a philosopher, this book may not be the best source of information about this field.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

This is an eye opening read for anyone interested in learning how to make their own stories more powerful and enduring. At first glance one might think that this book, based on the word “STORY” in the title, is more suited for a course in Narrative Theory or as required reading in a creative writing class; however, they could not be more wrong. Fletcher clearly shows the full value of understanding ‘storythinking’ is not just something to be considered when creating fictional worlds, but something that can be leveraged when one truly understands the way humankind thinks and shares information. Storythinking, as Fletcher shows, starts with one person’s ‘what if’ moment. Through Storythinking, one ponders and crafts a way of expressing that passing thought in concrete and tangible ways. But, it is precisely at this moment that the story part of thinking is most important. How can you best reach and influence your audience and how can you use your knowledge of how the brain works to ensure that people are seeing the story you are trying to share? Storythinking is how we have developed inventions, sold products, and explored discoveries from mere glimpses of possibilities to becoming household names. Storythinking is how we can share ideas with others and improve them. When you consider how all of this happens, Storythinking becomes obvious and recognized as something that is hardwired into our selves so that when we ponder solutions to problems that don’t yet exist -- we are actually finding viable options for today. For Fletcher, Storythinking is understanding how to see these options and opportunities. By not limiting ourselves to classic “storytelling” settings we can use this style of thinking to discover opportunities that will help increase the scope of a company’s marketing and branding campaign, discover how the sciences can uncover what drives our behaviors, and even begin to have a better understanding about how we can be manipulated by someone else's use of storythinking on us.

The human brain is often equated with a supercomputer. The common understanding is that it is a logical analytical device that interprets data and provides conclusions based on that. But according to Angus Fletcher, our brains are far more than that. In this short volume, he elaborates on the capacity of our brain to storythink—the capacity for narrative building—which is the basis for human innovation and growth.

This book is not what I was expecting. I was hoping for something along the lines of increasing knowledge on creating story, but instead it discusses ancient Greek philosophies from Aristotle and Cicero, while also touching on Neuro Science.

The book brings interesting ideas, but I confess that I constantly got lost while reading it. May be a case of me not being the audience for the book - seems more tailored to a more academic reader than general public

Angus Fletcher has managed to bring something entirely new to the scene: the unreliable academic narrator.

I'm joking. Mostly. This short book (under 200 pages, all in all) contains ten chapters, most of them starting with purple prose and introducing at least one character (sometimes two) who did something or other for science in general or philosophy in particular.

<blockquote>[...] at a new-built library tucked beside a wolf-prowled hill, a wizened polymath unfurled a long papyrus scroll. The polymath was Aristotle, a Macedonian immigrant who'd spent the past decade rambling the Mediterranean, studying Egyptian medicine and Byzantine flowers.</blockquote>

The problem with these descriptions is that I can't tell if they're meant to be factually correct or not. I'd have been inclined to believe them, if I hadn't suddenly become curious about Aristotle's life. I couldn't find anything concrete about Aristotle and Egyptian medicine. And then I wondered what "Byzantine flowers" are, in the context, as the Byzantine Empire was still far in the future. Well, the city of Byzantium existed, so maybe they were flowers from that particular city? Was he studying endemic species, or just hanging around in the place which would one day become Constantinople? (Ok, I might have read too deeply into this.)

And then there are more oddities:

<blockquote>Thanks to the development of assembly language operating systems such as LINUX, computers can be adapted efficiently to a vast range of logical computation.</blockquote>

Why assembly language in particular? Are more modern operating systems written in other programming languages deficient?

<blockquote>Epicurus had then been expelled from the isle of Lesbos, which found even its Sapphic tolerance overtaxed by his iconoclastic life teachings.</blockquote>

Why is this tolerance "Sapphic"? Sappho had been dead for a couple of centuries; had she promoted tolerance? Are we supposed to think of gay women?

...I don't think that's the point. I think this book is meant to enchant the reader, to be magical, to have a suggestive, rich style. Unfortunately, words have meanings, and from the very start, I was very reluctant to take it, and its claim of great innovation, very seriously.

<b>But what is "Storythinking" about?</b>

Hmm. To put it succintly, the thesis is this: cold logic isn't enough; one needs to think creatively. Philosophy has divided logic and narrative apart and set logic on a superior level, and now this wrong needs to be set right.

Angus Fletcher makes an interesting point when he observes that life has evolved through trial and error - not through a uniform reaction to stimuli, but through attempting new things and repeating successful behaviors. And story, which he sees as a non-stable theory about cause and effect, has stayed with us because it's essential to the process of trial and error.

<b>The rest of the book, however, feels like either self-help for philosophers, or philosophy for self-helpers.</b>

Or maybe it's a book that's meant to put philosophers on trial, I don't know. Plato is brought out of his eternal sleep through the revolving door of criticsm and praise for ostracysing poets (aka storytellers) out of his ideal city in "The Republic".

Angus Fletcher points out that storytellers are inventors and innovators, that they help drive society forward, that they teach people how to think - all excellent points! But that revolving door of criticism is revolving for a reason: these arguments have often been reiterated. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote them better in "A Defence of Poetry". And don't quote me on this, because it's been years since I read it, but I think George Putenham's "The Arte of English Poesie" was pretty good, too - and he, too, said that poets were the first priests, prophets, legislators and politicians.

Aside from literary people understandably defending their own domain, I've talked to a philosopher friend who told me that some schools do indeed care a lot about logic, but other schools believe that thinking implies more than logic, too - although, she argues you could kind of agree with Fletcher, in that philosophy has seen itself as above mere "stories".

Anyway, it doesn't matter that much, because Fletcher himself brings out philosophers who "storythink" the way he seems to want them to. I guess they're just not mainstream enough, nor are they doing it explicitly enough.

<b>But what <i>is</i> storythinking and why is he writing a book about it?</b>

Friend, I don't know. I'm not grocking it. It seems to be the process of creativity applied to daily life. It seems to be the process of coming up with theories. It also seems to be about looking into the motivation of literary characters. Every time I think I understand, he says something else, and I'm confused again.

He's not very clear:

<blockquote>Storythinking [is] a more fruitful version of nature's blind mechanism of problem solving and innovation.</blockquote>

I guess storythinking is creativity...? But a smaller subset of it...?

<b>He also has suggestions about how to enhance creativity, some of which I don't understand.</b>

I mean, I understand in the general sense that I can repeat his suggestions to someone who asks - for example, at one point he suggests to imagine a result, then imagine a tool that achieves <i>only that effect</i>. If it fulfils multiple roles, he says, it eventually becomes magical thinking.

What I don't get is the exact logic.

...Wait. Let me find the quote.

<blockquote>Start by imagining what you want to do. Then imagine a behavior or tool that can accomplish that end, reverse-engineering from a new effect to an original cause. This reverse-engineering functions better when you stay specific, pinpointing exactly what you want to achieve and inventing a cause that achieves only that effect. (If you instead imagine a cause that can accomplish multiple effects, you'll drift toward magical thinking and its omnipotent causes: God, symbolism, and the philosopher's stone.)</blockquote>

There. I guess... it's a warning against imagining something too outlandish? Against a grand narrative that's a bit *too* convenient?

But if you're used to thinking outside the box or take his advice a bit too literally, this instruction becomes impossible to follow. Everything can have multiple uses; any idea can have multiple effects. There is never a single potential effect that excludes all other potential effects.

He also advises readers to create in two stages: first imagine new possibilities creatively, then shoot down the bad ones logically. But don't do the two stages together, because they'll get in each other's way. (This reminds me of the "Six Thinkings Hats", but in a simplified form.)

<b>And then there's God. Or rather, there isn't.</b>

The last chapter in the book tried to explain the problem with abandoning logic in favor of thinking - and focused in on criticizing the notion of hell in particular and religion in general.

Well. That's definitely A Choice.

I'm normally wary of using religion as an example in unrelated discussions, because it can derail any point with record speed, and I normally want my point, not my religious stance, to get across.

In this case, I think the point he wanted to make (that unchecked narratives can go very wild) could have been exemplified with conspiracies. Make one up! It's easy! But I guess Angus Fletcher is willing to step on Christian toes and defend his faith as often as he defends his theory.

<i>Many thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.</i>

Angus Fletcher is a biologist and thought leader on creative thinking as it relates to story and the author of titles including The Art of Story (Great Courses), Wonderworks (Simon & Schuster), Creative Thinking: A Field Guide (U.S. Army), and Exercises to Boost Your Team's Creativity (Harvard Business Review).

In Storythinking, Fletcher makes the case that Storythinking is just as if not more important than logical thinking towards finding creative solutions to problems. He draws upon narrative art, modern science, philosophy, deductive cognition and inductive definitions to argue that Storythinking (narrative cognition) can help humankind think in ways that logic simply cannot. At the heart of his assertion is the notion that Storythinking prepares our brains to strategize in chaos and to evolve in uncertainty. He writes: "Because logic can do what story can't, it can't do what story can: process actions." In this way, Fletcher asserts that Storythinking is a natural extension of Darwinian evolution and a mechanism of problem solving and creativity we inherently have and should utilize more intentionally. I really enjoyed his predictions and thoughts on the development of Artificial Intelligence as it relates to logical thinking and Storythinking.

My favorite aspect of the book is the way Fletcher pulls from classic literature in order to drive home his arguments. By studying examples such as Hamlet, the logic of philosophers including Plato and Aristotle, and even Newton's mathematical astronomy among other works, Fletcher reminds readers that our world needs more than data-driven decision making and we need to start valuing the way we naturally think.

Thank you to the author and publisher for the e-arc copy!

I had hoped this book was similar to 'The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human' combined with neuro stuff.
I think Angus has written too much academic texts, or this text is only meant to be read by academics, perhaps who have gotten their Phds (which I do not).
I only got a third of the way in when I decided to dnf this book.
It's a horrid meandering story, that ironically in a book about storytelling, is so hard to follow.
Having done a minor in philosophy I could follow some of his points, but it's like a ball in a pinball machine where he starts to make a point but doesn't finish it.
I love me some big words, but a lot of his sentences are so convoluted and uses every possible difficult word he could think of - "Why are our primeval mechanisms of intelligence so adept at the nascent communication technology of story?", there are so many more ways this example could have been phrased in a more accessible way.
Angus obviously is used to a lot of referencing, but if you read something in chapter 2 or 3 (which were short), you don't need a reminder in chapter four - "It had its roots in the human brain's biological interest in the origins of other people's behaviors (see chapter 2).".
So besides the really hard to read sentences, there were also multiple points where I feel his conclusions were false or skewed for instance: "None of the teachers in D.C. had any doubts about its appropriateness, and with good reason: it reflected the overwhelming consensus of middle school, high school, and college literature instructors across America (and for that matter, Europe."
As a person living in Europe, I can only speak well to the Dutch system, but I can tell you now, it is wildly different from the American system. The Dutch system is focused on drawing conclusion and contextualizing things, even in stories and texts as opposed to a more rigorous system in the US where if you learn enough facts you can pass a test. Besides that most countries in Europe have different school systems per country, so to loop in Europe with the US is just silly.
This book got me worked up and frustrated. I do not recommend it and will not be reading any of their other works.