Neuroscience Researcher (France & Lebanon) who took part in the conference 04:
Storytelling: the Business of All?
https://youtu.be/5Zdo_VLnPmc
en français
Samah Karaki is a French-Lebanese neuroscientist. She founded and heads the Social Brain Institute (SBI), an association that uses knowledge from cognitive science to manage environmental and social issues.
Her first book, “Le talent est une fiction” (Talent is a fiction), was published in 2023 on the label Nouveaux Jours, by Lattès (Le Livre de Poche, 2024). She deconstructs the mythology surrounding individual success stories.
— an interview by Vassili Silovic, Writer and Director of documentary films, recorded at Les Champs Libres (Rennes) in December 2023 in the framework of the serie "What stories for our time?".
Samah Karaki
The narrative, with empathy.
« The creative act is actually to swim against my own current. » Accept the complexity of the story to accept the other.
We are all storytellers and what I mean by that is that the minute we open our eyes to the world, we are perceiving and creating images and meanings. The difficulty is to perceive the world differently from what I already stored as perceptions. It's easy for me to talk about the pains that I've experienced, to talk about the pains that are similar to the ones that I've experienced. What's more difficult is to be able to get into the perspective of someone that I don't know, of a group of people that I don't know, that I don't have shared experiences with.
The creative act is actually to swim against my own current, in a way, my own flow. And maybe, if I tell it this way, it sounds like something that comes with effort. But it could come from effort if I decide actively to look inside my thoughts and think: "What would you say? How would you behave? What would be the reasons that would make you behave the way that I am considering wrong?" And it could also come from the implicit knowledge that I can get through knowing you, through just the act of meeting and listening. And it comes with love, I should also love your story. It doesn't sound like effort when we're listening to loved ones. This is how I understand love: that I consider you as a complex person, I consider your story as complex as I could consider mine.
« Fiction can help me look at the external reasons that make people behave the way they do. And enlarges my empathy scale... » The story: a shortcut to the existence and reality of the other.
I'm not doing it as a gift. I'm not living it as a gift. I'm doing it because I am sincerely open and interested in what you have to say. It doesn't happen if I don't meet you if I don't ask you questions, if I don't see you living around. And this can happen through literature, that I am delving into the reality of someone else. And the ability of fiction, actually, on us, that enlarges the perspective that we have of the world, because we kind of have a shortcut towards the existence and the reality of others.
The neuroscience and cognitive science, we have something called the fundamental attribution error. That when I behave, I see my behaviours with the external conditions. I explain my behaviours, putting them in the centre of conditions that led me to do stuff. But I have less compassion for others because I don't see clearly the conditions, the external conditions. I attribute to their behaviour’s internal reasons,
