We are a species of learners. Our ability to learn from our experience, abstract that learning, and use it to change our environment is our peculiar adaptation that helps us survive. Birds fly, fish swim, and we learn.
There’s more to it, of course. We also have opposable thumbs and a strong desire to build (and destroy), but learning is at the heart of our success. And a critical component of our ability to learn is our imagination. We have a strong desire for things to make sense; we want to understand. At the same time, we’re hampered by the limitations of our senses. Our senses give us a very incomplete picture of the world we live in. So we’ve learned to fill in the gaps in our knowledge with stories.
The mythologies of ancient peoples are a good example of how we fill in the gaps. We don’t understand lightning, so we imagine a great god forging lightning bolts in the sky and another god throwing them to the ground, aimed especially at those who have displeased them.
Our need to imagine gods running the natural world has largely been replaced by the knowledge we’ve gained through science. We understand what lightning is and how the planets and stars seem to move in the night sky. It would seem that these kinds of stories are no longer part of our daily lives, but we still use mythologies to explain things we don’t understand.
Some of our modern mythologies aren’t that far removed from those of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Some folks still try to understand the course of their lives according to the positions of the stars the moment they were born. For others, aliens are shaping the future of our planet.
Most of our mythologies, however, are more mundane, and they are very personal to us. They come into play whenever we try to interpret the behavior of another person. We talk to our boss and based on the look on her face, we create a story about what she’s thinking. That story may actually be what’s she’s thinking, or it may have no resemplance at all to her thoughts.
Since we cannot read other people’s thoughts directly, we are forced to imagine them.
