Fiction, whether in the form of storytelling or plays, has a particular attraction for us: we repeatedly return to it and are willing to invest money and time in doing so. Why this is so is an evolutionary enigma that has been surprisingly underexplored. We hypothesize that emotionally arousing drama, in particular, triggers the same neurobiological mechanism (the endorphin system, reflected in increased pain thresholds) that underpins anthropoid primate and human social bonding. We show that, compared to subjects who watch an emotionally neutral film, subjects who watch an emotionally arousing film have increased pain thresholds and an increased sense of group bonding.

The reading of fiction has been found to confer benefits, including increased empathy and understanding of others. Among ongoing research questions are those of how people engage in imagined worlds while keeping in touch with the currently perceived world, as well as how far stories were important in human evolution and how the brain is involved understanding them.

A notable intellectual development of the past decade or two has been the ever-growing interest in human consciousness and the workings of the mind. Sometimes grouped under the umbrella term ‘cognitive sciences’, diverse disciplines such as neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, computer science, and linguistics have all made major contributions to our understanding of the human mind and brain; and the large number of popular science books published in this area show that this can be an engrossing topic for the layperson as much as for experts. In this article we want to explore, at a rather general and non-technical level, how this focus on matters of cognition can help us think about an aspect of Greek tragedy.

No abstract