[MailleQuiMaille]

Well…if you present stories, for sure we gonna make chapters out of it. Or beats, even.

I wonder what the results would have been if people were showed documentary footage with no narration ? But my suspicion is that just like we sometimes see human faces in places they clearly don’t belong, structuring information in a story format (beginning, middle, end with rises and falls in between) is an intrinsic part of how we process.

Maybe it’s not so much that we like stories, but that we see stories everywhere and the more information takes this digest form, the more we feel at ease ?

[HarHarVeryFunny]

We always predict as well we can - that's just how the brain works. Even without narration we'll be subconsciously comparing what we're seeing to past experiences and using those experiences to predict what comes next at various levels of abstraction.

I highly doubt we have any intrinsic bias towards perceiving things as following a story template, since our DNA has been shaped by nature, not stories. The major bias we do have, encoded in the way that our brain works, is just that nature is largely predictable on various scales - next time will be the same as last time - and this bias is what causes us to predict and perceive/segment current experience based on past experience.

[MailleQuiMaille]

>our DNA has been shaped by nature, not stories. Interesting point, I believe the opposite. Or, let's say, that stories have much more impact that DNA on our behaviour/thinking models.

Religion, money, appartenance to a tribe outside of immediate family, all of that are stories that we adhere to. Hell, look at kamikazes : a group of people willingly destroying themselves (and therefore, their DNA) for the perceived well-being of a larger imaginary group, "their countrymen".

No, I believe animals can and do predict their environment, but we differ because we can adhere to a layer of information that is on top of what we can observe : call it collective subconscious or myths, but this is information that helps us do more.