The Story of the Future is a Story with Soul

Star Trek is the example, but the future is the story. Why is it that stories like Star Trek (made by coffee shop novelists and Hollywood producers) are the visions of the future we remember, and not the considered forecasts of scientists and professional futurists?

Stories in general were denigrated as fancy lying, until recent decades, when a prominent psychologist and a philosopher found they could unlock empathy and inspire moral imagination, even in medical and law students.

Others began to see even more basic functions for story. Neuroscientists realized that human memories are stored in stories, and soon, that all thinking involves stories. "Narrative imagining-story-is the fundamental instrument of thought," writes Mark Turner, a neuroscientist, cognitive scientist as well as a Professor of English. " Rational capacities depend on it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining."

"Knowledge is stories," wrote Roger C. Shank, former director of Yale's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Narrative is explanation, and explanations are narratives. So in the age of science, writes William Irwin Thompson, "Science is the storytelling of our time. By telling stories about our origins, from the big bang to the African savanna, science is really telling stories about what and where we are and where we want to go from here."

But not all stories are created equal. As we know, some stories are better than others. That becomes clear when we go back to the future.

MORE HERE