Innate Storytelling

Early descriptions of culture as a part of Darwinianevolution were ignored or rejected by literarycritics and discredited through public disapproval,but have seen renewed interest during the last twodecades. Evolutionary psychology, anthropology,neuroscience, formalism, and Darwinist literatureindependently suggest cultural displays that stem,unrecognized, from innate mental processes. Tropes,narrative forms and functions, and myth may beduplicated between apparently unrelated cultures.Sectors of the brain that activate during languageuse, biographical storytelling, and fictivestorytelling have been identified through modernimaging. These disparate sources suggest not onlythat the human mind encodes perceived reality intonarrative to as an aid to understanding, but alsothat the narrative falls into a predictable template.Campbell's monomyth may be an exemplar of aninstinctive template for human storytelling.