ideasthesia

Sign in Subscribe

Ryan Collison

I write about cool science and share it here.

Vast web of interconnected narrative nodes with scale-free topology

Computational Mythology: Network Analysis and Distant Reading of Mythic Corpora

For most of human history, studying mythology meant close reading of individual texts: immersing yourself in the Iliad, analyzing the Popol Vuh, interpreting the Bhagavad Gita. Scholars spent careers mastering single traditions. Then computational tools arrived. And suddenly you could ask: what patterns emerge when you analyze every Greek myth

Narrative state machine as sequence of connected function-nodes

Propp's Morphology: Narrative as State Machine

In 1928, Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp did something radical: he analyzed 100 Russian fairy tales and discovered they were all telling the same story with different surface details. Not metaphorically the same—structurally identical, following the same sequence of functions in the same order. Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale

Hero's journey as state-space trajectory through transformation zones

The Hero's Journey as Coherence Template: Why Campbell Was Onto Something

Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth”—the idea that all hero stories share a common structure—gets attacked from two directions. Folklorists say he overgeneralized, flattening cultural diversity into a simplistic Western template. Postmodern critics say he was a colonizer projecting his own narrative preferences onto indigenous traditions. Both critiques have merit.

Archetypal forms as high-dimensional attractors in narrative space

Archetypal Compression: What the Hero, the Trickster, and the Shadow Actually Encode

Carl Jung believed archetypes lived in a “collective unconscious”—inherited psychic structures passed down through some quasi-mystical mechanism beyond biology. Modern Jungians often talk about archetypes as if they’re Platonic forms existing in a transcendent realm, with individual myths as imperfect reflections. This makes archetypes sound like woo.

Agency detection seeing faces and intention in natural patterns

Hyperactive Agency Detection: Why We See Minds Everywhere

You’re alone in your house at night. You hear a creak upstairs. Instantly, your mind generates hypotheses: Someone’s up there. An intruder. A ghost. Statistically, it’s almost certainly the house settling, thermal expansion of wood, or wind through a gap. But your brain doesn’t go there

Cognitive filter with minimally counterintuitive concepts catching on attention membrane

Why Myths Stick: The Cognitive Science of Minimally Counterintuitive Concepts

A talking snake. A virgin birth. A man who lives inside a whale. Zeus turning into a swan to seduce a woman. The Buddha being born from his mother’s side. Egyptian gods with human bodies and animal heads. Every mythology is packed with these reality violations. And for centuries,

Narrative compression with mythic figures abstracted to archetypal glyphs

Myths Are Not Primitive Science: What Stories Actually Do for Brains

When anthropologists first encountered indigenous creation myths in the 19th century, they made a mistake that would contaminate scholarship for generations. They assumed myths were failed attempts at scientific explanation—primitive efforts to answer questions like “where did the sun come from?” or “why do seasons change?” The implicit narrative: