This is Your Brain on Stories
Peter wore a green felt hat with the long feather of a pheasant. “Don’t I look like Robin Hood?” he asked, then sprinted off into the forests of Sherwood. I surveyed the hills. Little John, one of my students not much larger than a sack of flour, kept cover with a rain of arrows. In the distance a few girls laughed, wearing gowns only they could see.
If you have ever watched children act out a story, you have observed something exceptional about human behavior and cognition, something no other creature can do. A neighborhood dog, for example, happened to be with us that morning. It had fun running with the kids, but it wasn’t in Sherwood, and it never saw itself as part of a merry band of robbers.
The children, on the other hand, moved their bodies and limbs in tandem with the story in their minds – even when they knew it wasn’t true. The story was enmeshed in their flesh and blood behavior. True and false was irrelevant, yet the story had real consequences.
Adults aren’t much different. Under the influence of the Tooth Fairy, men and women have been known to perform strange rituals at night. These acts often feel important. They have a place in our real lives. Yet they make little sense to a dog or cat unable to comprehend the story behind the behavior.
Santa Claus, Noah’s Ark, Romeo and Juliette – under the influence of such stories, countless humans have undertaken difficult, strange, or daring deeds. The truth is usually of little consequence, yet the meaning is profound. This link between story, meaning, and behavior is so universal (anthropologists observe it in every culture on the planet) that we often fail to notice, like missing Sherwood Forest for the trees.
“Story is for a human as water is for a fish,” writes Jonathan Gottschall in The Storytelling Animal. Gottschall is one of several researchers working on a complete theory of storytelling. Why, he asks, do stories wield so much significance in our lives – in our entertainment, culture, and religion? According to him, they are the very medium in which we live, breathe, and think.
Today, some of the best scientists in the world are unraveling the link between storytelling and the human brain – giving us more power than ever before over the stories that influence our thoughts, emotions, and behavior. For the first time ever we are able to ask questions like: Why is it that our brains understand and create stories? And why can’t dogs do it? Or can they?
Questions like these are hard to comprehend because we cannot think outside of our mental landscape. Stories are an integral component of who we are, and they have been for many thousands of years. We cannot fathom a mind that cannot understand a story. So we might formulate the question another way: Did our ancestors, like modern dogs, once lack this crucial ability? If so, when did it develop? And why?
The Science Behind the Story
Scientists have long known that stories benefit our cognitive and emotional health. They help us remember information, build empathy, and simulate life events. But it is only recently that Gottschall and a few others have started to piece together a complete picture of storytelling’s place in the human species.
This article will introduce you to some of the psychologists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary theorists working on that frontier. It will also allow you to observe some of the key patterns arising in your own mind. That’s why we began with the lens of a children’s story – because it’s safe. The quaint or pleasant quality of child’s play allows us to observe the pattern without getting triggered. Once we recognize the forces at play, we have a chance to see how stories (and storytellers) influence some of the most sacred things in our adult lives – things like family, nation, religion, even the very concepts of belonging and self.
“The most powerful person in the world,” said Steve Jobs, “is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation to come.” To reckon with the gravity of that statement, this article will look at how stories take up residence in our minds, and what happens when they depart. This is your brain on stories.
The Man in the Moon
Have you ever walked into a forest and mistaken a branch on the ground for a snake? Maybe you jumped, then laughed at yourself as you quickly realized it was harmless. Or maybe you looked at the clouds, then turned to a friend and pointed out the face you see.
Do you see the face?
Most of us see these kinds of things from time to time. Scientists call it pareidolia, mistaking a random collection of objects for something more meaningful. At one point, psychologists thought this was a sign of illness, but most now agree that it is an adaptive behavior, meaning it has an evolutionary benefit, and it’s been observed in animals and computers as well.
Why is it adaptive? Because when you mistake a branch for a snake, you laugh and feel foolish. But if you mistake a snake for a branch, you don’t give the menace proper attention. Sometimes you get bitten. You can even die.
100,000 years ago, the people who slightly over-recognized the presence of deadly or nutritious creatures tended to survive and reproduce, making them our ancestors. The humans who under-recognized threats and food didn’t survive to produce offspring, making them no one’s ancestors. This difference may have been slight, but it was enough for natural selection to act upon, and it’s why today we all inherit this funny ability to see faces in the clouds.
Pareidolia can be experienced in all of our senses. Many people hear their phone chirp or ring even when it’s in another building. Unexpected sensations on our skin can make us jump and quake as if some icky bug has landed there. Insects, like snakes, are one of the most common vectors of poison and illness, so these actions, while goofy, are not unwise.
Seeing faces (like in the moon) is perhaps the most common form of pareidolia, because faces have long been one of the most important messengers for humans from infanthood to old age. Other people are by far more dangerous (or beneficial) to us than snakes and bugs, and it’s to our advantage to recognize them – even if that leads us to over-recognize them, like this :0)
Pareidolia Helps us Define Cognition
Instances of pareidolia are examples of what psychologists call cognition, and most of us just call thoughts. We think we see a snake, so we jump. We hear the phone ring, then reach for our pocket. We see a face hidden in the hills of Mars and wonder who put it there.
A NASA image from Mars in which many people see a face.
Of course, it’s much more common that our cognitions are valid. We do encounter snakes and bugs, phones do ring, and most of the faces we see give us important information about a person’s mood, intentions, and so on.
Like Gottschall’s fish in water, the cognition (or recognition) of a face or creature is usually so obvious that we don’t see them as an action of our brain. That’s why it’s helpful to identify something by its malfunction – it sheds light on the entire phenomenon. It can be hard to define health, but a common cold is easy to recognize and gives us perspective on what we mean by health. Just so, errors of cognition like pareidolia make it easier to understand the role cognition plays in our daily lives.
Cognition Isn’t an Isolated Experience, It’s Continuous
To understand storytelling, we have to understand the rate of cognition, not just the isolated experience. We can start by picturing one instance of cognition, true or otherwise, as a point on a graph. For example, we see a branch and think it’s a snake. That’s one point, one cognition. Then we see our mother’s face and recognize fear in her expression. That’s another point, one cognition.
To connect these cognitive dots, we draw a line. And because our minds work rapidly, even simultaneously cognating multiple instances, we can draw a line through multiple points in real time. This is a rudimentary form of storytelling: a sequence of cognitions through multiple instances over time. Mom is scared because she thought she saw a snake. Notice that the truth of the matter isn’t necessarily important (the snake is actually a stick).
If you can bear with the math analogy, stick with the graph for a second. If you harken back to high school algebra, you may recall that the slope of a line describes its rate of change. In calculus, we call this the first derivative. The first derivative of location (a point) is velocity (the rate of change). This gives us a very useful analogy for storytelling and narration – it is the first derivative of cognition.
Truth Isn’t Our Primary Concern
We know that some stories are true. We also know that some are false. But most of the time we’re not concerned with the difference. Some of the false stories are even our favorites – like Robin Hood or Noah’s Ark. Regardless of whether they occurred in real life, these stories have meaning for us. We like the idea of animals climbing two-by-two into Noah’s Ark, or a merry band of robbers equalizing the playing field. Many of us enjoy seeing the man in the moon.
“Humans are inclined to see narratives where there are none,” says The Atlantic, “because it can afford meaning to our lives.” Like pareidolia, it is less important whether a story is true or not as whether it is effective. Like my students physically moving their bodies through the make-believe forests of Sherwood, an effective story like Robin Hood, Noah’s Ark, or the theory of evolution can have enormous consequences on the very real behavior of humans.
Storytelling is Automatic
In 1944, Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel conducted a groundbreaking experiment in storytelling and psychology. Thirty-four people were shown a short film in which two triangles and a circle moved across the screen. The entire film, barely longer than a minute, is nothing but geometric shapes moving across a blank background.
After the film, thirty-three of the people described what they saw in terms of a story. The circle was “worried,” the little triangle was “innocent,” the big triangle was “blinded by rage.” Only one person said that all he saw were shapes. This simple experiment has been repeated for millions of viewers, and you too can watch it yourself and see what you think.
What this experiment reveals is that our minds are conditioned to see a story even when no such thing exists – just like pareidolia! If we place the NASA photograph of Mars next to a still image from the film, we have an excellent example of pareidolia next to a “true” cognition of geometric shapes. But when we play the film (stringing instances of cognition in a line through time) we cannot help but see the first derivative – a story.
A “false” cognition of a face and a “true” cognition of shapes.
The Evolution of Storytelling as a Form of Cognition
Just like pareidolia helps shed light on healthy instances of cognition, the “false” story in Heider’s and Simmel’s video helps open our eyes to the role storytelling has in our daily lives.
Scientists have known for decades that storytelling has remarkable benefits: it helps us remember information, focus attention, build empathy, and so on. At the same time, anthropologists and mythologists have documented the stories at the root of every one of our major cultural institutions. Stories like Robin Hood, Noah’s Ark, The First Thanksgiving, and Wonder Woman fulfill critical roles in our religions, nations, and within our very selves.
“There have been great societies that did not use the wheel,” writes Ursula K. Le Guin, “but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” The Huron legend of The Sky Tree, the Hindu Vedas, the Hawaiian stories of Maui and Pele – these stories helped form the ancient roots of powerful cultures.
It’s only recently, however, that a handful of scientists have begun stringing the research together into a comprehensive theory of storytelling’s place in all Homo sapiens. Brian Boyd, author of On the Origin of Stories, puts the subject into an evolutionary perspective. He asks the question: Why would any two people tell a story when both teller and told know it plainly to be false?
It’s a provocative question. Stories in books, movies, and conversations are our primary entertainment, so we often just think they’re creative and fun. As a result, we tend to focus on the content. Boyd puts a new twist on it by asking - what’s the advantage to the species? Is it an adaptive trait (like pareidolia), or just an eccentric byproduct of an overstimulated mind? The answer, he believes, is that our ancestors evolved to tell stories not just to have fun at night, but because it was an increasingly effective social tool that helped people share valuable information, regulate social roles, and define cultural values.
This is no puny hammer. Groups of humans, Boyd reminds us, have always out-competed individuals and more loosely organized bands of people. His theory suggests that stories – meaning the ability to communicate, understand, and think them – were an essential ingredient in forming the super glue that held together the social fabric of our ancestors and allowed them to survive.
Historian Yuval Noah Harari gives storytelling even more emphasis in his influential and provocative books Sapiens and Homo Deus. Chapter 2 of Sapiens is dedicated exclusively to this point, and both books repeatedly refer back to its central message. In it, he describes the cognitive revolution that occurred some 70,000 years ago that transformed humans from “an animal of no significance” (his words) into world explorers and technology buffs.
Anatomically, he notes, there’s little difference between Homo sapiens today and 100,000 years ago. At the time, there were several other human species still alive on our planet (Neanderthals, Denisovans, and more), all of whom had similar tools, the use of fire, and other traits we think of as uniquely human. Homo sapiens, says Harari, were not particularly better or more well-suited to the climate, and even appear to have had some weaknesses (like smaller brains) compared to Neanderthals.
For over 30,000 years Homo sapiens remained a small population of relatively insignificant creatures – an animal of no significance. Then something dramatic happened about 70,000 years ago. Suddenly, we observe an enormous change in human tools and behavior, and the subsequent and rapid extinction of all other human species, as well as the extinction of many of the largest animal species on earth (i.e. wooly mammoths in the arctic, huge flightless birds (moas) in New Zealand, and three species of camel in North America).
Scientists call this the cognitive revolution. With no obvious change in anatomy, humans suddenly display remarkably sophisticated skills, quickly disperse into every possible landmass on the planet, and produce art, buildings, and cultures still visible today. What happened?
The lack of anatomical change leads scientists to believe something happened within in the cognitive structure of the mind – not the physical size or structure of the brain. What was it? According to Harari, it was “fiction.” The ability to tell stories and share common myths, says Harari, gave our ancestors an ability previously unseen on Earth, something Neanderthals and other early humans did not possess.
Prior to this cognitive development, all animals, if they could communicate at all, communicated merely about what was real. Once Homo sapiens evolved the ability to communicate about what was false, the face of the earth was forever changed. Our ancestors could now think and speak about things that did not exist – new tools, for example, or mythical structures (stories) that gave them a sense of belonging. Stories created culture.
I’ll pause to acknowledge that evolution, itself told in the form of a story, is but one lens we can use to make sense of the world. It is not crucial that Harari’s evolutionary history is true, just like the story of Adam and Eve is not merely a matter of historic truth. The question is whether it is effective. Humans of different persuasions can easily get trapped in an argument here, and I wish both to acknowledge and avoid that. It is my opinion that this evolutionary lens is not better than, say, a religious lens, but it is effective – because it helps us understand the role that storytelling has in our modern lives. Today, stories are still at the center of our mental lives, even if the stories themselves frequently change. Comprehending the role fiction and storytelling have in our lives gives us leverage over the story – rather than vice versa, the story having leverage over us.
David Sloan Wilson, one of the most respected voices on evolutionary theory in the United States, shares a similar view in Darwin’s Cathedral. Religious stories, he suggests, may have led to the success of our species in exactly the way Boyd and Harari propose – by providing a powerful social glue that allowed supergroups of humans to form and easily disseminate knowledge and skill.
Without the storytelling skill, humans were forced to organize within the relatively small society of family and hunting groups – like Neanderthals. The natural distrust of outgroups (which we still possess) prevented such people from forming larger social networks. As a result, information and technology was kept within small subgroups, and the rate of growth and development was slow – on a genetic timescale.
Common myths and stories broke down these barriers and allowed larger and larger groups of humans to trust one another. The cooperation within these larger groups yielded unheard of technological growth and power, something Neanderthals and non-storytelling humans just couldn’t compete with.
This is the cognitive revolution our ancestors experienced 70,000 years ago, and while the outer world may have experienced big changes since then – our mental landscape remains much the same. How do we form the important social groups that dominate and regulate our lives? Shared experiences are important, but we can only share experiences with a couple hundred people at most. Sharing common stories in our churches, our nations, our neighborhoods, and whatever cultural groups we happen to be a part of, allows us to communicate and cooperate with a vastly larger pool of humans.
This is why a story like Robin Hood can be told and retold by billions of people in different places and times. It’s why, when meeting someone new at a dinner party, you suddenly feel closer and more comfortable when you learn that you both love Star Wars. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true. It has social value.
It also explains why scientists continually publish research about the benefits of storytelling on our cognitive and emotional health. Our minds, if we accept the theories of Boyd, Harari, and Wilson, evolved to make sense of the world through this very medium. Whether it happened one million or 70,000 years ago is largely irrelevant. What matters is that it worked, and it is still working within us today.
Stories and Information
So, let’s look at how stories help our minds process information. In 1969, Gordon Bower and Michal Clark at Stanford University created a simple memory test. Participants were asked to memorize a set of ten words. Some were invited to remember the words in any order they liked, while others were asked to create a story that contained all the words in the list. When later asked to recall the words, the participants who had created stories remembered 6 to 7 times as many words as the others. That’s a 600-700% increase in memory.
Imagine that list of ten words as ten still images from Heider’s and Simmel’s geometry video. If we looked at ten photos from that film, each an instance of cognition, we would probably see little more than a few shapes in different locations. We probably wouldn’t make anything more of it, and we would have a hard time recalling the experience – it would be of little significance to us.
But if we imagine the same words strung together in a story, true or otherwise, we encounter exactly what we do in the film. Suddenly, the still images come alive and we register it as a story. And what else do we do? We remember it – by orders of magnitude better than a collection of facts or still images. What’s more, once we “get it” – that is, once we cognate it – we’re able to tell other people about it. We communicate. That’s why millions of people have now watched Heider’s and Simmel’s film.
Ice Cream for Your Brain
The excitement we feel when listening to a good story can be likened to the flavor of ice cream on our tongues. It tells our bodies to pay attention. Full of calories, sugar, and fat, ice cream is one of the most nourishing foods on the planet. Again, it helps to understand this through an evolutionary lens, and drop the modern story of weight loss and health often associated with the words ice cream. For our ancestors 70,000 years ago, ice cream would have been a no-brainer. That’s why we feel pleasure when we taste it. It tells us there is nutrition and calories here. We do not get the same experience chewing grass, because our bodies can’t digest it.
This is what storytelling does for our brains. It helps us focus on information our bodies can digest. Like ice cream, today we need to be thoughtful about how much and what kinds of stories we put into our bodies. But unlike the ice cream metaphor, it’s not the content of a story that is so nourishing, but the means of delivery. Storytelling is how our brains prefer to think.
Theories from Boyd, Harari, and others have turned the perspective of storytelling on its head. They help us see Sherwood Forest (storytelling cognition), not the trees (individual stories). Instead of asking why we like any particular story, we begin to see that stories are the very medium in which we think, just like Gottschall’s fish. In fact, we are so saturated with stories that, like pareidolia, we sometimes need unhealthy or “false” instances in order to reveal the ocean of stories in which we live and breathe every day.
Storytelling Mimics Neural Architecture
There may be a simple reason why storytelling is so effective: the neural architecture of the human brain. The neurons inside our brains form connections with many thousands of others, making the brain a vast web of interconnected cells. The activity of our minds mirrors this connectivity, and anytime we bring to mind a particular thought – be it a memory, a word, an image, or fantasy – we introduce a cascade of correlated ideas, most of them unconscious.
Psychologists call this priming. When you read the word eat, says Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, you are temporarily more likely to complete the word fragment so_p with the word soup than soap, for example. Psychologists say that the word eat primed the solution soup, and there is a lot of research into how certain words influence our answers to important decisions, like what to buy or who to vote for.
But priming isn’t a one-way street. Kahneman says that primed ideas have an ability to prime other ideas, “like ripples on a pond.” Priming effects can even cross modalities, so that holding a pencil between one’s teeth (smiling) tends to make cartoons seem funnier.
What studies on priming demonstrate is that cognition is called to mind via association, not isolation. This is exactly what we might expect given the web-like neural structure of our physical brains, where any individual neuron might be connected to tens of thousands of others. And it’s the same reason why ten words are more memorable when strung together into a story than packaged on their own. The story takes advantage of our associative architecture, allowing us to find, or remember, any individual component a little more easily because we have a larger path network back to the original target.
This may be why our ancestors evolved to tell stories in the first place. Like constellations for our brains, stories tie instances of cognition together into associated strings, making it easier for us to navigate back to important information and share it. If you’ve ever found yourself bewildered by the immensity of the night sky, you might understand why our ancestors fabricated the constellations of the zodiac. It matters not whether Orion is real or fake. He helps us find our way.
Storytelling Synchronizes Brains
But the information, or content, is just one aspect of a shared story. The evolutionary theories indicate that the social experience of shared stories (true or otherwise) is even more influential. Uri Hasson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University, helps us understand why. In his TED Talk “Your Brain on Communication,” he describes a series of innovative experiments he and his team conducted in his lab. In the first, participants were placed in an fMRI scanner as they listened to a story.
Before the story began, the brain waves in the auditory cortex of participants (the brain region associated with hearing and cognition) varied widely, as one might expect of random strangers. But when the story began, their brain waves immediately began to synchronize.
Hasson refers to this as neural entrainment, and likens it to a set of metronomes clicking at different rates that, when placed on a common balance, begin to synchronize and eventually click all at the same rate. This is what the story did for the people in his experiment - it made their minds click at the same rate.
But it doesn’t end there. In further experiments, Hasson demonstrated that the speaker’s brain also displayed the same synchronization. In fact, both Russian and English speakers, when hearing the same story but in their own mother tongues, showed the same synchronization in their brains. It all clicked.
What this indicates is that the meaning, not merely the sounds or words, was consistent from listener to listener, speaker to listener, and even across languages. Written evaluations from participants after the experiment confirmed that each understood the story in much the same way.
Stories Are More Than Just Words
When Hasson broke down the story into its individual components (fragmented words of the story played in reverse), participants showed synchronization in the brain regions that process words and their meanings, but failed to produce synchronization in brain regions associated with higher orders of cognition. The words were understood, but the larger meaning was not shared.
Again, we can liken this to the still images in the Heidel and Simmel film, or the list of ten random words in Bower’s and Clark’s experiment. On their own these words or images have limited cognitive value, but when strung together into a story, more brain regions get recruited. The experience becomes more meaningful, memorable, and easier to share.
Storytelling is About Connection
Piecing together the research and theories of Heidel, Simmel, Boyd, Harari, Kahneman, Hasson, and others, helps us develop a very robust perspective on storytelling’s place in our lives today. Storytelling is entertaining for a very good reason – it is our medium of information, behavior, and social trust. Like Gottschall’s fish, or the air we breathe, it pervades everything we think and do.
Storytelling, of course, isn’t the only medium. There’s no reason to get zealous. The intimacy of touch, song, parentage, and shared food are just a few examples of other mediums in which humans navigate these important social realms. But there is little question left that storytelling is a singularly important skill. More importantly, every single person is a storyteller.
In the modern world we are surrounded by stories, perhaps more than ever before. And not just from friends and family – we receive them in books, movies, podcasts, and so on. This can cause some of us to believe that storytelling is a skill for experts. Our own storytelling skills seem to pale in comparison. But this is like believing that the abundance of marathon runners is reason enough to stop walking.
Placing storytelling within a cognitive and evolutionary framework helps us recognize the role stories play in our minds – and those of our children. We know that some stories are true. We also know that some are false. Either way, they have a significant impact on our behavior, our cultures, our education, and even things like our emotions and self-esteem. The internal stories about self wield tremendous influence over who we think we are and what we are to become. Learning to recognize these stories – and leverage some control over them – is perhaps one of the most important things we can do for ourselves and our kids.
The View from On High
“I’m bored,” Peter told me, just moments before he had put on his green felt cap and run off into Sherwood. The kids had all been a little wonky after lunch. They were finding it difficult to play together. The trees were the same trees they had seen a thousand times, the grass the same grass. Sticks were just sticks. “Let’s play Robin Hood,” Stephen suggested, destined to become Little John. Suddenly everyone’s eyes lit up.
If you have ever had the opportunity to watch a story descend into the minds and hearts of a band of humans, you will recognize its power. Sticks and dirt remain exactly the same, but everything of consequence has changed. The loose weave in the social fabric suddenly becomes tightly bound. This is the takeaway – real things remain exactly as they are, but stories, whether true or otherwise, change real things. They make humans act differently, and often with a much stronger sense of common purpose.
We entered this forest through the innocent eyes of children. This was done purposefully because there was danger lurking in Sherwood the entire time. From our new vantage point, we have the opportunity to recognize that humans of all ages do exactly what children do. We make the forest of our lives come alive with new meaning via the invisible objects in our minds. Some stories are true. Some are false. Both are effective. Both can be wielded with delicate and loving hands, and both can be used to spread hate. It is worth taking notice.