Logic, Creativity, and the Limits of AI: How Humans Think in Ways Machines Never Will

You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show. Hey everybody, it's Michael Shermer and it's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show. My guest today, the returning champion, Angus Fletcher. He's a professor of story science. at Ohio State's Project Narrative, the world's leading academic think tank for the study of how stories work.

He started off in neuroscience, working for four years in a University of Michigan med school neurophysiology lab. He started his research thinking that the human brain worked like a computer, but began to re then began to realize that the brain is more like a storytelling machine. From there he shifted his focus and went to Yale to get his PhD in literature, where he studied Shakespeare, of course. Then he moved to Stanford University where he met story makers from Pixar and saw that they were using many of the same techniques that Shakespeare used, which were also adopted by Steve Jobs. From there he went to Hollywood and wrote screenplays for major networks and studios, as you do after you get your PhD in literature.

Uh, and then he wrote his first book, Wonderworks, the 25 most powerful inventions in the history of literature, which he appeared on this show a couple years ago to discuss. And in 2023, it was rewarded awarded the Commendation Medal by the U.S. Army for his groundbreaking research with U.S. Army special operations into what is called primal intelligence, which is the title of his new book. Here it is, primal intelligence.

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