Dartmouth Events

The Narrative Mind
Fritz Breithaupt, Indiana University Bloomington
May 9, 2022, 4:30 pm
Moore B03
Free and open to the public

Life is experienced more intensely when we are enmeshed in stories – I narrate, therefore I am. But it is not only our own lives that are heightened by narratives; through narratives we are also able to transform individual experience into shared experience. To achieve this, our brains and the ways in which we tell stories must be attuned to each other. But how exactly does this happen? And what makes a story a good story?

In this talk, I will present data from serial reproduction studies (aka telephone games) to examine which aspects of narratives are dropped or transformed and which features remain at the core of narratives in transmission chains. The goal of the talk is to present a model of narrative thinking that combines three aspects of narrative processing, namely narrative emotions, multiversional processing, and the thinking in small episodes.

Fritz Breithaupt is provost professor of Cognitive Science and Germanic Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. His latest book is The dark sides of empathy (2019). He leads the Experimental Humanities Lab to study empathy and narrative thinking.

Sponsored by the Dartmouth Cognitive Science Program