As humans, we have overcome an incredible obstacle. We can share our experiences with others. We have accomplished this feat via narratives and storytelling that allow others to co-experience what happened to us or what we made up as fiction. Our minds and the ways in which we tell stories are closely attuned to each other. But how does it work? The talk will explore several approaches to narrative processing, including data from the largest story-retelling experiments to date (serial reproduction). It turns out that a set of narrative emotions plays a central role in our narrative thinking. In fact, I will suggest that narratives are made up of short episodes, each offering a rewarding emotion. The goal of the talk is to present a model of the narrative mind that combines narrative emotions and "multiversionality"—our tendency to imagine alternative story developments. The talk will also consider what transformative human experiences are. This will allow us to raise the question of the future of humanity in the age of artificial intelligence. 

Fritz Breithaupt is Provost Professor at Indiana University Bloomington in Cognitive Science and Germanic Studies.

Reception to follow

Organized by the University Lectures Committee and the Department of German Studies with the support of the Institute for German Cultural Studies, the Society for the Humanities, the Cognitive Science Program, The Humanities Lab, and the Departments of Comparative Literature, Linguistics, and Romance Studies