David Breeden is speaking all week about “Story Science”.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and Wisdom summer version, which means we’re meeting live on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10:00 at 9:00 a.m. Central Time. And this week, the subject has been neuroscience and what that tells us about our brains and how we think or how we are conscious. Yesterday, or on Tuesday, I mentioned a book that was kind of foundational in that, and it’s called “Buddha’s Brain” by Rick Hansen and Richard Mendius. And it really began talking about the idea of mindfulness as a neuroscientific concept rather than a religious concept. The claim of the book is that we can have the same kind of brains if we work on it, that all those famous holy people have. Well, you know, it’s according to how much you’re willing to work on it. But they also do talk about things such as the development of the brain, which it does appear to have developed from what we call the lizard brain up to a squirrel brain or something like that, and then a monkey brain and then the human brain. Our brain is like onions. They have layer upon layer from an evolutionary perspective. And that is how we get to the place where we have the kind of consciousness that we have nowadays. I want to look a little bit at a story today to kind of talk about what I began talking about on Tuesday, which was the idea of how we remember story and store story and develop this.

Now, you may have heard of this story. Richard Montanez was a janitor at a Frito-Lay factory. He was an immigrant from Mexico. And he had a brilliant idea about Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. And he began to try to sell that idea to the corporate wonks up up the ladder who tried to refuse him. And then finally he convinced them. And happy ending, now he is an executive at Frito-Lay Corporation in Texas. One problem with the story, which is, it’s not true. The Los Angeles Times began to reveal the actual story. And it says here from this is from Sam Dean, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. “For the last decade, Richard Montanez has been telling the story of how he invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. The world has been eating it up.” And then it goes through the story that I just reported to you. Well, even guess what? There’s even going to be a movie, a Hollywood movie based on his story. It’s not going to come out in 2020 as the original plan, covid, et cetera. Now, it’s going to probably come out sometime this year. It has been filming recently and it’s about this rags to riches story. Well, the problem with it, again, is that it’s not true story. The reporter for the Los Angeles Times went to the Frito-Lay Corporation and asked them about this, and they said, we value Richard’s many contributions to our company, especially his insights into Hispanic consumers.

But we do not credit the creation of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos or any flamin’ hot products to him. Then the producers of his biopic, despite being informed of the problems with that story, continued to cast the movie. And indeed they’re working on it now. Well, this is an interesting way to look at story, because if I ask you about this story a year from now, if we did a little experiment, what would you remember about what I’ve just told you? Would it be that a Mexican immigrant claimed to have invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, actually did it, and then it became a big controversy. But what would you remember about it? It would probably be the bit about this underdog,