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b"Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com\\n\\xa0\\nS3E5 TRANSCRIPT:\\n----more----\\nYucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Yucca.\\xa0\\nMark: And I'm the other one, Mark.\\xa0\\nYucca: And today we're talking about imagination, fantasy and Richard.\\nMark: Right?\\xa0\\nYucca: And we thought this was a, a lovely time to talk about it because for many people we're just coming out of are still really in a season of that, that we associate with new beginnings, with planning, with with planting those seeds for the, for the year to come.\\nMark: Right. Because in many places like yours, Yucca the ground is frozen and there's not a whole lot that you can be doing towards making something new, grow for the rest for the coming year, other than to think about it and imagine the future.\\xa0\\nYucca: And play on it and.\\nMark: And plan, you know, based on your imagined picture of that future, then you can plan the steps to get there.\\nRight. And that is really the human special trick of all of all. I mean, we talk about our thumbs and they're great. Of all the things that humans are particularly capable of and adept at it's our ability to envision the imagined. And that includes the imagined future. and.\\nwhat that means is that we have become creatures who are built around storytelling. There was an anthropologist, I don't remember his name, who, who actually called us homo something. I don't remember what it was, which meant the storytelling ape. Yeah.\\xa0\\nYucca: Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. 'cause that's what we do. Whatever, whatever culture you look at, wherever in the world, we're all telling stories. And we start that at a very, very young age, even before we're, we've really figured out the grammar of our mother language. We're telling stories we're playing.\\nAnd that's, you know, when you look at at mammals mammals, And they play at whatever it is that they need to learn to succeed and survive as an adult. So you look at the low line Cubs and they're wrestling with each other and chasing each other and grabbing each other's tails. Well, humans, yeah, we run around and rough and tumble, but we play make-believe.\\nFrom very, very early on, you know, we're picking up the sock and, you know, the feather and their characters in our minds, and they have incredible stories and personalities and interactions and, and all of that. And, and so that's what we really do. And that's, that's what that's part of what makes us successful.\\nAs a species and as individuals in our species is our ability to tell those stories, imagine, and to share those stories.\\nMark: Yes, exactly. And what this tells us of course is because this is happening at such an early age, is that this really is baked into us. This is, you know, something that comes in at a very low level of our development. And it's essential to us, you know, our ability to understand the idea of causality of action and consequence is, you know, and that things happen along a timeline, right?\\nThat there are, there are actors and those actors do things and those things have consequences. And so there's a result. And that that's the order that things happen. All of those are things that we have to learn, but we get them really early. And one of the things about our capacity for imagination is that our brains are not really built to distinguish the imagined from the. And this is the great paradox with memory, of course, because memories get edited all the time. You know, they, they, every time we retell a story to ourselves things get a little fuzzy around the edges and we just touch them up.\\xa0\\nYucca: Just fill that in.\\xa0\\nMark: Yeah.\\nJust, you know, because we want the memory to be complete. It is not a volitional activity.\\nThere's nothing wrong with it. It's not about being dishonest. It's the way our brains work.\\xa0\\nYucca: Yeah. And it's, it's not really a conscious thing that we're doing. That's it's not like you're choosing, usu"