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Honest Lies

A thin man straightens his coat, fixes his hair, and opens the door to a small cafe. He sits

at his usual table and smiles back at the usual waitress as he makes his order.

Following the many times reiterated sounds of “coffee and toast” he opens his mouth

again. This time for a question, whose absense hangs in the air. The waitress waits for a bemused

moment before disappearing into the back, letting the man eat, drink, and leave in disappointed

silence.

What can be truer than reality? More accurate than certainty? The answer is so strange it

might be ironically labeled as something you “can’t make up”. Fiction, like the paragraph above,

has the unique ability to reflect the real world in a way which teachers and textbooks cannot.

Ernest Hemingway exemplified this in his famous shortest of short stories “For sale: baby shoes,

never worn” where he, with an expertly chosen combination of six words, manages to describe

and convey a devastating tale of a poor family who suffered a tragedy and has been forced to sell

the items they preemptively bought for their expected child. I have never experienced a

miscarriage, but now I can feel the cold detachment one must take on to deal with practical

problems after such a disaster because of the words Hemingway uses.

These choices––what words to say, what images to show––directly affect the way the

audience perceives the story; shoot someone from above and they come across as weak, describe

them as fixing their appearance and they appear nervous.

Stories have an immediate and powerful effect on the people who experience them. But

why does this happen? Being able to understand how these tales can be so profound allows the

storyteller to curate their content to create exactly the desired affect, an extremely powerful tool

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by any measure, which is why I have decided to explore the question: why do stories

empathetically affect their audiences the way they do?

The answer is simple: stories affect us so much because they share It. The explanation is

not so easy.

It has been with us since the first ape stepped out of the trees, at once more pervasive and

harder to quantify than the dark matter between the stars. It has been described something of

which there is “nothing more ancient” (Descartes)––a universal constant flitting throughout the

history of the human race like a ghost which cannot be seen, heard, or smelled, only felt by those

privileged enough to experience It’s presence.

One example of such an esteemed individual can be found almost three thousand years

ago. A bearded, curly-haired blind man, living on the coast of Asia Minor, who put to word a

series of poems whose existence not only bore the future of storytelling in the Western World,

but the methods through which those stories will convey their message.

The Iliad and The Odyssey are famous for their depictions of war, betrayal, love, and

great perseverance set against the conflict of the Trojan War. But Homer’s motivation did not

end with telling a religiously-influenced story about a war; his stories have very real and

prevalent rhetorical purposes; Gods and strongest soldiers are shown as vain and petty, while the

most likable characters find themselves killed and dragged around the city of Troy by their

ankles. These are merely flashes of It’s face under the masks of image and metaphor.

What about these works makes them so widely appealing as to become staples of

Western civilization? The answer comes from one of It’s facets: separation. Humans are like cars

on a highway––all going in the same direction, only feeling the effects of the other’s actions,

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never knowing the reasons behind them, distanced by windshields of words and expressions.

People believe they understand each other but deep down clear knowledge of someone else’s

thoughts, feelings, and motivations is impossible. Dr. Tania Singer did a study where she used

functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure the pain response in people when

witnessing their partner receiving an electric shock. Her conclusion, published in the article

“Empathy for Pain Involves the Affective but not Sensory Components of Pain” showed that

empathy does not “activate the entire pain-matrix, but is based on activation of those second-

order representations containing the subjective active dimension of pain” (Singer). Singer’s

research showed witnessing pain in others results in activity in the parts of the pain-matrix (the

areas of the brain which work together to create the human experience of pain) commonly

associated with humans’ awareness of their physical selves. This lets people understand pain in

others, but prevents them from actually feeling it. By describing the thoughts, feelings, and

motivations of the characters in his stories, Homer allows the audience to become them, close the

separation. Suzanne Keen comes to a similar conclusion in her book Empathy and the Novel, that

humans may feel more accurate empathy towards fiction characters whose perspectives they read

than they do towards each other. In addition, a study done monitoring the vagus nerve while

subjects experienced engaging narratives with characters they connected to found the subjects

produced a significant amount of oxytocin. Oxytocin is the chemical commonly associated with

feelings of trust or kindness (“Why Inspiring Stories Make us React”). By reading, humans are

allowing themselves to step inside another’s car for a couple of hours, even if the car in question

does not actually exist.

It touches many places, many people. One could argue truly living derives from

experiencing such a contact. Being able to communicate this experience and transfer It, however

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indirectly, is a power few have ever mastered. “These violent delights have violent ends”

(Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet) is a quote from perhaps the most gifted of these

communicators. With six words, Shakespeare gathers the entirety of hedonism and both defines

and criticizes it, managing to take everything from a child who scrapes his knee from running too

wildly on a playground to an overdosing heroin addict and lump them all together in one great

clump of underlying realness. And this is just one of the more famous examples. “Stars hide your

fires, let not light see my black and deep desires, the eye wink at the hand, yet let that be which

the eye fears, when it is done, to see” (Shakespeare, Macbeth) is just another in the long list of

such wisdoms found in his plays. This one perfectly encapsulates temptation and guilty pleasures

in a sentence whose explanation holds greater length than the statement itself. When reading

such phrases, one immediately relates them back to a time in life when they experienced the

subject in action. In so doing, Shakespeare has closed the gap of understanding between his

reality and the reader’s with his words as the middleman.

There is another aspect to author-to-audience communication than words themselves, and

it comes from the way in which they are presented. Live performance adds a whole new layer to

this prose on top of that which can be extracted from mere reading. John Litten, author of over

thirty plays and the current drama teacher at Northgate High School says “It’s a human based

medium” when asked why he enjoys theater so much. “I think it captures something in our inner

spirit... I’ve noticed that with my theatrical experiences, I walk away changed”. There is

something to be said here which goes deeper than any fMRI scan ever could. By having such

words performed live in front of an audience, Shakespeare has added a massive amount of

humanity to their meaning. These new connotations vary greatly from production to production,

actor to actor, or even show to show. Each experience is unique and this uniqueness makes them

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that much more meaningful to the audience––when viewing a real person on the stage, one

watches and thinks “that could be me”, giving the words an entirely different dimension of

relatability. To quote Mr. Litten once more: “When I can look somebody now in the eyes and I

can see something more inside of them, that just moves me so much”.

One of the most recently developed mediums comes from the combination of almost

every art form predating it. Writing, acting, music, photography, painting, and even sculpture

amalgamate in what is known as film. Movies have, in the past century, been some of the most

widely consumed stories; there are few things as culturally prominent in the modern world as

Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. As Laura Taylor, filmmaker and documentarian, says: “Film is a

more public medium than books…People are seeing similar things at the same time so people

talk about it. But books, everybody’s reading different things at different times”. Jacob R.

Drucker, a student at Harvard, writes, “It plays an active role in shaping our collective

consciousness”. To say a single movie could change the mindset of millions of viewers would be

a massive overstatement, but the subtle subconscious effect on the audience is something just as

powerful, and much more pragmatic.

When it comes to film not only is the audience more likely to go see the same thing at the

same time, they are also likely to be thinking similarly. Uri Hasson concludes: “brains of

different individuals show a highly significant tendency to act in unison during the free viewing

of a complex scene” (Hasson, “Intersubject Synchronization”). Using fMRI scans, Hasson found

viewers of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly had an almost 45% high intersubject correlation

(ISC) in the neocortex (Hasson, “Neurocinematics”). Meaning the folded tissue of the brain

showed 45% similar activity for the duration of the scan among the subjects. The study went on

to find that higher ISC levels were found when the subjects were viewing master filmmakers like

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Alfred Hitchcock and Sergio Leone. Furthurmore, eye tracking revealed the same films which

showed high ISC levels also correlated to a highly concentrated viewing area (all of the viewers

looked at the same spot on the screen at the same time). The reason for this can be boiled down

to techniques such as framing and editing which filmmakers use to “tell” the audience where to

look. If everyone who watches a movie looks at the same spot and thinks the same thing, they are

provided a common feeling, not only between the creator and the audience, as with Shakespeare,

but among the audience as well.

Stories, in whatever medium they are told, allow people to reach into each other’s soul

and place there artifacts, wisdom, pieces of It. The way in which this is done is what differs

between these methods. Books allow humans to feel empathy through the process of describing a

perspective most are not otherwise capable of understanding. Theater does this through the

human connection which comes with live performance. And movies are capable of using visual

techniques to control the viewer’s thoughts. But what about the reality of it all? Why are real

emotions felt towards something the audience knows is completely made up? It is impossible to

completely suspend disbelief, yet people still feel sad when somebody dies onscreen or happy

when a couple they support finally gets together. The answer comes from different activity in

different parts of the brain. The frontal lobe deals with logical thought, and the limbic system is

responsible for emotions. The former knows what it is consuming––some made up story which

has not, nor will ever, happen. But the latter does not (Millar). This means we can understood

that a story is fake but feel real emotions as a result of it.

But talking about how neurons in the brain fire or what chemical is released during a

narrative is like tap-dancing about architecture. How do these stories affect humans as people?

Not as sacks of electrons looking for a place to rest, but as real living, feeling creatures? The

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answer could change for everybody. But it is undeniable that stories have proved to be conduits

of wisdom, ways of having expierences and feeling things never otherwise felt in real life––little

pieces of It communicated from one human to another through a conduit of words, images, and

sound.

The “It” described throughout this paper is the truth. Something which can never be fully

understood. Scientists may believe such truth is only obtainable through experimenation and

documentation, through MRI scans and statistics, but such factual knowledge is only half the

truth’s infinite coin. The other half: emotion. Knowing one is as mutually exclusive from

knowing the other as quantifying the speed or position of an electron. Like light which acts like a

particle when viewed, and like a wave when out from under the boot of observation, emotional

reality fails to follow any rule or law, but is as fluid and ever changing as the human spirit.

René Descartes uses postulates and deductions in his famous Meditations On First

Philosophy to show the reader’s own conciousness as the only thing they can be sure exists. As

Descartes says: “I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally

concieve it”. While this may or may not be true, the principle is still undeniable when applied

human interactions; there is no way to know exactly what somebody is thinking or feeling

because we live our whole lives inside our own heads. Yellow could look different to two

different people. An action, atrocious to one, might be completely reasonable to another, such is

the fallability of humanity’s view of the world. But there might be something which we can truly

share between us. Richard Bach says it best in his book Illusions, “The image is a dream. The

beauty is real”. Such beauty derives from the truth and may be the only thing every human can

experience equally. It’s communication is what allows us to understand one another on a level

beyond the tangible. Stories empathetically affect their audiences because they form bridges of

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common understanding. Bridges which span the gap between storyteller and audience and carry

truth and beauty, commonly understood by all those who view It.

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Works Cited

Bach, Richard. Illusions: the Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. Cornerstone, 2001.

Descartes René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Bobbs-Merrill, 1960.

Drucker, Jacob R. “Watching, Not Reading.” Harvard Crimson , 9 Nov. 2014, “The Harvard

Crimson.” The Harvard Crimson, www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/11/9/movies-books

harvard/.

Hasson, U. “Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision.” Science,

vol. 303, no. 5664, 2004, pp. 1634–1640., doi:10.1126/science.1089506.

Hasson, Uri, et al. “Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film.” Projections, vol. 2, no. 1,

2008, pp. 1–26., doi:10.3167/proj.2008.020102.

Hemingway, Ernest. “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.”

Homer, et al. The Illiad .. Pub. by J. Johnston, & Sharpe & Hailes; Print., by S. Hamilton, 1810.

Homer, and Peter Green. The Odyssey. University of California Press, 2018.

Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Litten, John. Personal interview. 8 March 2019.

Millar, Aaron. "Your brain on movies: why stories on screen can feel so real." Odyssey, Mar.

2014, p. 6+. Student Resources In Context. Accessed 30 Jan, 2019.

Shakespeare, William, et al. Romeo and Juliet. Penguin Books, 2015.

Shakespeare, William, and Bernard Groom. Macbeth. Oxford University Press, 1995.

Singer, T. “Empathy for Pain Involves the Affective but Not Sensory Components of Pain.”

Science, vol. 303, no. 5661, 2004, pp. 1157–1162., doi:10.1126/science.1093535.

Taylor, Laura. Personal interview. 21 February 2019.

“Why Inspiring Stories Make Us React: The Neuroscience of Narrative.” The Temperamental

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Thread, 2 Feb. 2015

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