We’re all human, and we’re all unique. How do we see through our unique differences to see our fundamental similarities?
The Web of Human Behavior connected the first principles of evolutionary psychology and modern theatre. That shows us a map of human decision making, which we can use to tell our own and other people’s stories, and to understand our own and other people’s stories.
We’ve seen the big picture of how we see our similarities with other people. How do we fit the pieces together subconsciously and feel our similarities with other people? When we empathize with people, how are we comparing them to ourselves?
ACT I
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[110 bpm]
The Web of Human Behavior uses 20 points of reference to outline a framework for people making decisions.
We can work through it for different people to see how their differences and similarities lead them to make different or similar decisions. But when we meet someone and feel like we have important things in common with them in spite of our differences, we aren’t comparing our life stories to each other because we don’t know enough about the other person to be able to do that.
So what are we doing instead?
In a word, empathy.
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The field of social neurology is devoted to the study of how people’s brains function when they interact with each other. Empathy is a big part of that.
Social neurologists have discovered what they call mirror neurons, which are brain cells whose primary function is to imitate the emotions of other people. They’ve made many other valuable discoveries surrounding that. But I’m not going to get into that because learning about neurology doesn’t really help you in real life.
I’m a theatre artist. I’ve spent a career working in an industry that’s built on empathy… In a way you can see play out in everyday life.
The kind of empathy you hear about most is what psychologists call emotional empathy. That means feeling the same way someone else does.
If you see a friend of yours and you can tell right away that they’re happy, that makes you happy, even though you don’t know why they’re happy. If you see your friend is sad, that makes you worried, because you can tell something is wrong, even though you don’t know what.
There’s also cognitive empathy. That means understanding why someone feels the way they do, even though you don’t feel the same way they do.
If your friend’s mom died yesterday, but your mom is fine, you can’t really understand what they’re going through, but you do know they’re going to feel really bad for a long time.
There’s also affective empathy. That means showing someone that you care how they feel, regardless of how you feel.
Salespeople use this one all the time. If you just imitate someone else’s body language, you make them believe that you feel the same way they do. That makes them more receptive to whatever you say. And to whatever you try to sell them.
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Theatre combines all of these. Then it uses them in ways most people have never heard of before.
You start with cognitive empathy. You read through the script and identify all the things that make the characters feel one way or another. You get an idea of who the characters are by what they’re trying to do in the play and how they react to the things that happen to them.
Then it’s emotional empathy. You take everything you know about your character, and how the things that affect them make them feel, and you figure out how to feel all those feelings.
Then it’s affective empathy. When you get used to how all those feelings make your body feel, you keep the feelings in your body, but you can turn down the emotional feelings. You know enough about how your character feels that you can show it now mostly by muscle memory.
You need to be a lot more fluid with your emotions than your character would be. If the audience sees your character in one scene, and then the next scene they see you in is a few hours later, or the next day or the next week in the story, for you it’s only a few minutes from one to the other. So you have to be able to shift gears with the emotions you play a lot faster than your character would.
Chorus
Emotional empathy.
Cognitive empathy.
Affective empathy.
ACT II
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We’re interested in the first two parts of that here.
How do we recognize, whether consciously or subconsciously, the things that affect other people? And how can we get better at recognizing them?
Now that we’ve seen the entire Web of Human Behavior, let’s go back and look at it another way. You’ve already seen all the pieces of the answer to the empathy question. You just didn’t realize it.
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The first step in the Web is our two instincts. All life forms react to their surroundings in ways that are consistent with survival and reproduction. To say that we have instincts for doing those things is just to say that we use our brains to do the same basic things that plants and fungus do without brains.
Our instincts for survival and reproduction are a yes or no question. If we have them, we’re a life form. If we don’t have them, we’re not alive.
There are no degrees of one person having more or less of survival or reproductive instincts than someone else on this level. They’re like light switches. If you’re alive, your survival and reproductive instincts are turned on. So we can say those are constant values.
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The next level is our three basic mental abilities of memory, imagination, and communication. All animals have brains, and all brains do these three basic things. This is basic zoology.
Again, these are constants. If you don’t have the basic ability to do these three things, you’re not alive. Or maybe you’re in a coma. That’s not to say that people in comas aren’t alive. But people in comas can’t survive and reproduce on their own.
These three mental abilities are what turn our biochemistry for survival and reproduction into instincts. The combination of these five traits lets us anticipate things that can affect us and lets us move our bodies to react to them.
But again, we aren’t talking about degrees of ability here. Some people have better memories or imaginations than other people, and some people are better at communicating than other people. We will talk about different degrees of ability, but that’s on on another level. On this level we’re still talking about constants.
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These five traits create the list of nine motivations.
Survival,
safety,
sex,
family,
social,
self gratification,
self actualization,
self fulfillment, and
fulfillment of self fulfillment.
These are what scientists call emergent properties, where the interaction of those first five traits create nine patterns of behavior. These are nine basic ways we use our three mental abilities to try to satisfy our two instincts.
Again, we’re only talking about the presence of our nine motivations on this level. We’re not talking about people having different degrees of motivations. We’re not talking about some people wanting some things more than other people want them. We will talk about that. But on this level we’re still talking about constants.
Scene 5
All 14 of these items are constants. That means they’re all traits of humanity. The fact that you’re a living human means you have all 14 of these things.
Now we’ve sketched a picture of what people do and why they do those things. We started with general biology and zoology, and now we’ve worked our way through to a picture of what it means to be human mentally. We’re not talking about what it means to be unique individuals yet, but we’ve moved past talking about humans as one animal species among many, and past talking about humans as a physical description.
Now we can condense these 14 constants into one constant. This one constant represents the mental lives of every living person who isn’t in a coma.
I call this v, for value. The way Stanislavski explained it, everyone always pursues whatever they value in life.
Chorus
V, for value.
Everyone always pursues whatever they value in life
ACT III
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The next level is the variables. Abilities, environment, skills, personal history, cultural background, and goals.
Abilities are characteristics.
Characteristics are what make the members of a species different from each other. This includes different levels of ability in memory, imagination, and communication.
Goals includes different priorities among our motivations. We have different goals partly because of our different mental characteristics. Now we are talking about unique individuals.
Now think about what I’ve said about subconsciousness and motivations. People always make
[-2 bpm]
the best decisions
we can think of
in the situations
we’re in
for ourselves
and the people
and things
we care about.
Right at this moment, you are making decisions. The ones you notice are conscious decisions.
For every decision you make, whether consciously or subconsciously, all the mental processes in your brain come together to tell you that’s the best decision to make. To perceive a course of action to be the best is to choose it.
We think of perceiving and choosing as two different things, because when we talk about doing those things consciously, those words mean two different things. But when we talk about subconscious decisions, they are the same thing. When you perceive a course of action to be the best, you choose it automatically.
And even when we’re talking about conscious perceptions and decisions, think about what that means. When you say that you perceive one course of action to be the best but you haven’t decided on it yet, you’re actually still thinking about whether it’s the best course of action or not. Because when you decide that one course of action is the best, and you’re thoroughly convinced of it, there isn’t any choice left to make, because that’s the obvious choice of what to do.
When you can see two courses of action and you have to pick one but you don’t like either of them, it means you can imagine a course of action you would like.
If you’re in jail and your choices are to eat the jail food or to have nothing to eat, you hate both of those choices because you can imagine eating food you would like.
Then you make one of those choices and you still hate it, because you can still imagine eating food you like, even though you don’t have a way to get any.
Every time you make a decision you don’t like, it means you couldn’t see any way to get to a decision you would like, so you picked what felt to you like the best decision you could make out of all the choices you didn’t like. You still made
the best decision
you could think of
in the situation
you were in.
You might think I’m trying to disprove free will or freedom of choice, but I’m not. I’m just clarifying how we make choices.
Whether we do it consciously or subconsciously…
To perceive a course of action to be the best is to choose it.
Another way to say that is…
The motivations we feel equal the decisions we make.
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We have a sketch of the mental life of humans, where two instincts and three mental abilities give us nine motivations we pursue.
We have a sketch of the mental life of individuals, where six factors that affect all of us affect each of us differently.
That means as individuals we react to six basic unique factors because of 14 basic factors we all have in common.
That means everything each of us does on the variables level leads back to the constants levels.
Let’s look at the variables list again.
Let’s call abilities a.
Let’s call environment e.
Those two cover most of zoology, where individuals make different decisions because they use their different characteristics in their changing environments.
Skills, personal history, cultural background, and goals all overlap with each other.
Let’s lump them all together now as ideas and call them i.
To perceive a course of action to be the best is to choose it.
As humans, we all want the same nine things, and we all have the same five reasons for wanting them.
As individuals, we use three basic things to try to get what we want. Our abilities, our environments, and our ideas.
As humans we’re all trying to reach the same outcomes, and as individuals we each make decisions to try to get there.
We each use our different variables to pursue the same constant.
So we can say that v = aei.
People always use their abilities and ideas in their environments to pursue what they value in life.
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You feel that in yourself where every decision you make is affected by the abilities, environment, and ideas that you have.
You might recognize that in other people from the same direction. If you already see them as someone like you, you recognize that their motivations are the same as yours. Then you see how their decisions are affected by the abilities, environment, and ideas they have.
If you don’t know the other person that well, you can work through this in the opposite direction. If you can see the abilities, environment, and ideas the other person made their decision with, you can figure out what their motivations were.
Forensic psychologists, archeologists, and mental health professionals use a person’s patterns of decision making to understand their motivations.
Journalists, novelists, and filmmakers work in the other direction. They show their audiences patterns of people’s decision making to get them to understand their motivations.
If you can see a big enough piece of someone else’s life, you can see that they want the same basic things you want.
Chorus
Abilities a.
Environment e.
Ideas i.
V = aei.
People always use their abilities and ideas in their environments to pursue what they value.
ACT IV
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If we take v = aei another step, it shows how personal growth and cultural evolution happen.
As people pursue their motivations with the abilities, environments, and ideas they have, they can change their abilities, environments, and ideas. That changes the decisions they make in the future by changing their decision making factors.
If you like making music, you can learn to make music on your own. You can sing. You can invent your own musical instruments. If you can buy an instrument, you can learn even better.
If you take music lessons, you learn ideas that help you make music better. If you watch videos or read books, magazines, or websites about making music, you can learn more ideas that way.
As you get more practice, you’ll build up strength, endurance, and dexterity in the muscles you use to play, which improves your abilities.
If you buy more instruments and equipment, you’re adding those things to your environment, which will make it easier for you to practice.
The more you practice, the more ideas you learn.
And so on.
If other people are each going through that process on their own, they can each learn to be good musicians. Then if you all get together you can form a band or an orchestra.
If you all work together, you can learn complicated ideas from each other, which you wouldn’t learn by working with beginning-level musicians. The longer you work together the more you learn. You learn new skills for playing music by yourself, and you learn new ways to play music together.
Then when new musicians join the group, they can learn the ideas that you and the other original band members figured out on your own.
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Now substitute anything else people do and any other reason they come together, and it’s the same basic story.
Every country in the world began with some people moving to that land, using their abilities to figure out how to live in that environment, and passing what they learned down to the next generation. They changed the environment by building houses, farms, roads, towns, and so on to make it easier for them to live there, and by making tools, clothes, and other smaller things to help them. They passed those things, and the ideas of how to make them, down to future generations.
As time went by they developed more complex ideas, like traditions, artistic and musical styles, a shared sense of identity, religions, structures of government, rules or laws, and so on. They used their abilities in their environment and started getting something they wanted. They thought of ideas that way. Then they used their abilities and ideas in their environment and got more of what they wanted.
As that process continued, their ideas kept evolving, they changed their environment, and they might’ve even changed their abilities. But every step in that process is an interaction among the same four factors as every other step in the process.
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Whether we’re talking about a band or a symphony orchestra, where people have been playing together for years, or we’re talking about a country where people have lived together for centuries, people have shared feelings because of their shared experience, and that’s an important part of what holds the group together.
That’s emotional empathy. This is where personal history turns into cultural background.
From the outside looking in, you won’t share in the emotional empathy because you don’t share the experiences it’s based on. But you can use cognitive empathy to see that the history of any band or country is a history of people using their abilities and ideas in their environments to pursue what they value, where they develop new ideas in the process. And to see how people’s shared feelings about going through that process together is a big part of what makes that band or country what it is today.
ACT V
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V is the first of the first principles of evolutionary psychology, that all human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to maximize the survival rates of his or her genes. That’s the first principle that tells us what actually happens. The other two, that most of human mental activity is subconscious and that all human mental activity evolved in or before the stone age, just tell us how to see through the two biggest obstacles to recognizing the first one.
Psychology and philosophy are two ways that people think about thinking. The fundamental challenge there is that it means using conscious thought to study all of our conscious and subconscious mental activity, including the parts you’re using for thinking about the other parts. That gets complicated sometimes.
Over the millennia, people have found many different ways of thinking about everything people think about. They’ve found many different starting points, each of which works well for focusing on different things. They’re all different ways of looking at the same thing, but they don’t sound that way at first. If you don’t think of it that way, it sounds like we’re just jumping from talking about one thing to talking about another whenever we feel like it.
V = aei is a way of defining what we’re trying to understand to remind ourselves what we’re trying to understand, to keep ourselves from getting distracted by our own thought processes.
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A, e, and i are the three categories of factors that affect our behavior. If we’re talking about people, we’re automatically talking about people thinking, feeling, and doing things. But there are so many parts to that, it’s easy to get distracted by focusing on too small a piece of the picture.
Whenever you ask anyone a question, the answer they give you beings with things they’re thinking about consciously. So you’re already focusing on something that’s too small to show you the whole picture.
V = aei is the outline of the whole picture. If you start by thinking of people in terms of how subconsciousness builds up to consciousness, the things people talk about fill in parts of the picture.
V is the level of your subconsciousness that comes from having a human body. A, e, and i are the parts of your subconsciousness that make you use your abilities and ideas in your environment, even when you don’t realize you’re doing it. Those are the parts of your subconsciousness that make you an individual.
Consciousness is what happens in between your subconscious humanity and your subconscious individuality. That’s where you think about your life and decide what to do.
If you’re looking for consciousness in the equation, that means it’s the equals sign. When you ask someone a question and they answer you in words, whatever words they think of are built up from what makes them, and you, and everyone else a human, and what makes them unique.
That’s a better way of hearing what the other person is trying to say than cutting and pasting their words into life as you know it.
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From the beginning of this series I’ve been talking about people always making
the best decisions
we can think of
in the situations
we’re in,
for ourselves
and the people
and things
we care about.
That’s another way of saying v = aei. You aren’t one side of the equation or the other. You’re the whole equation. And so is everyone else.
We can say that v = aei is everything you are, or everything you feel, or everything you think about. Those are all different ways of talking about who you are. Those are all ways your humanity and your uniqueness come together.
If you want to talk about philosophy, we can say v = aei is your soul or your spirit or your energy. Those are all ways of talking about people’s humanity and their uniqueness coming together too.
Soul is the part of you that’s permanent, that nothing can change and no one can take away. You have a human soul because you’re fundamentally human. At the same time, you have your own soul, because you’re unique.
The idea of spirit starts with you being human and being unique, but focuses on how you adapt to the big picture of your life. Soul is what you’re born with. Spirit is how you grow and change at your deepest level. If your soul is the foundation of who you are, your spirit is the house you build on the foundation.
Energy is what happens around you because you’re there, even if you can’t figure out why it happens. I guess that would be the electricity in the house.
Have you ever known anyone who was so positive that any time they walk into a room, the whole room gets more positive? You’ve seen it happen so many time that you know it’s your friend who makes it happen, even though you don’t know how. People always use their abilities and ideas in their environments to pursue what they value, and people always make things happen in the process, even if you can only see part of what happens.
And are we talking about just one person, or everyone all at once, or a group of people somewhere in between?
It’s all of those things. As individuals we each use our abilities and ideas in our environments to pursue what we value, and every group of people is made up of people who each are doing that.
So v = aei is you living your life, and you forming a band with three of your friends, and you living in America, and you living on Planet Earth, all at the same time.
Remember, I’m not claiming I’ve just discovered everything people have ever done. This is just an easy way to remind ourselves that every story about people has the same four underlying themes. The story is what happens in between universal human traits and each person’s unique combination of abilities, environment, and ideas.
ACT VI
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Now we come to the reason for writing v = aei as a mathematical equation.
Individually v, a, e, and i are unmeasurable. But together they always balance out. The motivations you feel equal the decisions you make. V is what you feel from the inside. Aei is what that looks like from the outside.
Here’s one thing that shows us. Since v is a constant, that means your v today is the same as it was 10 years ago, and the same as it was when you were born. If we compare you today with you when you were in kindergarten, we can say that v = v. You have the same 14 traits of instincts, mental abilities, and motivations as you always have.
You think differently about most of your motivations when you’re 15 than you did when you were 5, and you think differently about many of them when you’re 25, 35, 45, or 75. But those are the same traits manifesting themselves at different times of your life. Because you have the same body structure and brain structure for your whole life. You don’t turn into a different person every 10 years.
Since v = aei, and for you today and you in kindergarten v = v, that means we can say that between you now and you in kindergarten, aei = aei. Since your instincts, basic mental abilities, and motivations are the same, that means the way you used your abilities and ideas in your environment to pursue your motivations must be equivalent.
We can look at high school students and see people living their lives, and we can look at kindergarteners and see people living their lives, even though we don’t expect them to do the same things. There’s nothing mysterious about that. They’re all using their abilities and ideas in their environment to pursue what they value.
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Now here’s where it gets interesting.
Since we know that v = aei for every individual, and that v = v between individuals, that means that between two different people aei = aei.
Between you and someone in another part of the world, v = v, so aei = aei. You’re both living your lives, using your abilities and ideas in your environments to pursue what you value.
Between you and someone who lived 1,000 years ago, v = v, so aei = aei. You’re both living your lives, using your abilities and ideas in your environments to pursue what you value.
There’s nothing mysterious about that either.
But that also means that between you and anyone else, from any part of the world, at any time in history, no matter how different they are from you, v = v, so aei = aei. You’re both using your abilities and ideas in your environment to pursue the same nine motivations for the same five reasons.
For some reason, things start to get confusing now. It’s easy to not see the similarity between two people if you compare one decision they each make. Or if you compare one day of their lives to each other. But the more of their lives you compare to each other, the easier it is to see the similarities, and how the different decisions they make are the result of them acting upon the same motivations in different circumstances.
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Science depends on math. Math is everywhere.
Every time you make a decision that one thing is better than another, you’re comparing amounts of something to each other, even if you don’t know how to measure their values in numbers, or even how to describe the values you’re comparing in words. That means you’re doing the math subconsciously.
The Theory of Evolution is the discovery that turned the philosophy of naturalism into the science of biology because it was the discovery that explains and predicts the patterns of evolution as a pattern among numbers. The differential survival rate of genes is the math of evolution.
Evolutionary psychology takes that another step, to how people’s subconscious perception of that pattern of numbers affects the decisions they make.
The best decision
you can think of
in the situation
you’re in,
for yourself
and the people
and things
you care about,
is always the one that you perceive to give your genes the highest survival rate.
Modern theatre simply takes that one more step, which the study of empathy is confirming.
Empathy is the recognition of that decision making process in other people.
Scene 4
The history of every person in the world, and every country and nationality in the world, is the same story: People made
the best decisions
they could think of
in the situations
they were in
for themselves
and the people
and things
they cared about
,
every step of the way.
This might sound so obvious it doesn’t seem like a discovery. But think about how many ways people have looked at each other and not noticed this, and it turns out it’s not obvious after all.
If it was obvious that everyone’s life is the same story playing out in different circumstances, racism wouldn’t exist. Sexism wouldn’t exist. Homophobia and transphobia wouldn’t exist. Classism, ageism, and ableism wouldn’t exist. Wherever one person looks at another and decides that the outcome of that person’s life is inferior to their own, it’s not obvious that the underlying themes of our lives are the same.
If you’re White, it’s easy to look at a photograph of European immigrants standing in line on Ellis Isle, waiting to come into the United States, and think they’re people like you, living their lives.
When you see paintings or photos of Native Americans from early in their contact with White people, do you think the same thing? Or do you feel it’s different somehow? Do you feel like there’s something going on there that you don’t understand?
It’s still people living their lives. It’s still people using their abilities and ideas in their environment to pursue the same things that you value in life.
What you don’t understand about what’s happening is how their environmental factors affected them differently, and how they developed their ideas because of it. But that’s all stuff you can learn about.
If you’re White, it’s easy to look at pictures of Black people being sold in slave auctions and feel like there’s more to it somehow than what you can see.
Yes, there’s more to it than what you see.
Black people felt very differently about coming to America than your ancestors did. You don’t have anything in your family history that compares to it.
Also, the White people in the picture feel very differently about what’s happening than anything you’ve ever felt. No one today can relate directly to how those White people felt, because no one alive today has ever been to a slave auction in the US.
But again, the fact that you don’t completely understand what’s happening in that picture doesn’t mean nobody understands it. It just means you’re missing some pieces of the puzzle. And again, those are things you can learn about.
If you feel that the most important parts of Black and Native history are somehow shrouded in mystery, how does that affect how you feel about Black and Native people today? If you see people today who look like their mysterious ancestors, how does that make you feel about them? Doesn’t that mean there’s something mysterious about them too?
But again, we’re all just people living our lives.
Whatever gaps you have in your understanding of that are things you can learn.
This might seem like leftist political propaganda, but it’s not. This is simply a statement of the facts that as members of the human species we all have the same motivations, we try to fulfill them in different circumstances, and we develop different ideas in the process. Those facts are more compatible with some political ideologies than they are with others.
ACT VII
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The purpose of the Web of Human Behavior and Empathy Formula is the same as for any scientific theory: To explain and predict a process in the natural world using the smallest possible number of words.
The first principles of evolutionary psychology, that
all human behavior is the
product of
the attempt by the
individual to
maximize the
survival rate of
his or her genes, that
the majority of human mental activity is subconscious, and that
all of human mental activity evolved in or before the stone age,
were a good foundation for a branch of science. But they don’t explain it in terms most of the public can readily understand.
How successful do you think a politician’s election campaign would be if he used words in his campaign slogans that 80% of the voters needed to look up in a dictionary? The first principles of evolutionary psychology explain and predict a process in terms that people who already know a lot about science can understand, but that’s a relatively small number of people.
Also, the first principles of evolutionary psychology don’t lead to further information in units that are easy to use.
Step 1 in understanding evo-psych is understanding the three sentences that lay its foundation.
Step 2 is reading entire books that have been written about what those sentences lead to.
Step 1 in understanding it this way is people always make
the best decisions
they can think of
in the situations
they’re in
for themselves
and the people
and things
they care about.
Step 2 is the Empathy Formula, which clarifies that we all value the same things, and we pursue them differently because of our different abilities, environments, and ideas.
Step 3 is the Web of Human Behavior, which outlines how our two instincts and three basic mental abilities lead to all of our different types of motivations.
Step 4 is watching movies and watching people in real life and seeing it play out.
Step 5 is talking to other people, now that you have an idea of what you’re talking about, and now that you can talk about it in words other people know.
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Throughout this series I’ve told you about books you can read to learn more about each topic. I couldn’t do that for the Web of Human Behavior or the Empathy Formula because I’ve never heard of anyone else putting them together like this in a book before.
But all we’ve been talking about here is how the founder of modern theatre figured out how to replicate people living their lives, and how much evolutionary psychologists have figured out about people living their lives, by building up from zoology. Then I translated between the two.
Ironically, I meet a lot of scientists and artists who aren’t impressed by these discoveries, because they aren’t surprised that another group of people has discovered the same things they have. Great writers have been writing stories about internally consistent main characters, which connect their personalities with their situations and their goals, for thousands of years. Theatre artists have followed that all the way down to people’s body language moment by moment, and biologists and psychologists have followed it all the way to the evolution of genes.
You can’t learn more about this in a book. But you can learn more about it in a building.
If your high school has a biology teacher and a theatre teacher, you could get both of them to listen to this series, and then you could get them in a room together to talk about it.
If you really want to make things interesting, you could get an English teacher, a history teacher, and a health teacher in on it too.
You have all the basic information you need right there in one building. All you have to do is fit it together.