
Merely factual information tends to activate your language processing centres. Stories, by contrast, stimulate much larger areas in our brains, including not just the language centre but also those parts that are responsible for visual and motor processing, as well as our sensory cortex.*
Anna Katharina Schaffner
We need myths that will help us identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe.**
Karen Armstrong
Truth is often deeper than we believe.
The truth about you and me will not be revealed
in facts and figures alone, but
in the stories we create for ourselves and each other,
How we use our imagination matters:
We use our imagination not to escape
from reality but to join it,
And this exhilarates us because
of the distance between and apprehension of
the real.^
Time and again we will discover our deeper truth in
our interactions with those who are quite different to us,
Not only present truth, but also future truth.
*Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self-Development;
**Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth;
^Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good.