THE ROLE OF STORYTELLING IN COGNITION

Have you ever taken a walk 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 in it.

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. When you do the opposite and mistake a snake for a branch, sometimes you get bitten. You can even die.

Pareidolia can be experienced in all of our senses. Many people hear their phone ring when in fact it’s not even in the room.

Seeing faces – in the moon, say, or knots in a pine board – is one of the most common forms of pareidolia. That’s because faces are one of the most important messengers for humans from infanthood to old age. 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.

Of course, it’s much more common that our cognitions are valid. We do encounter snakes, phones do ring, and most of the faces we see give us important information about a person’s mood, intentions, and so on.

The cognition of our senses and social interactions are usually so obvious that we don’t recognize them as actions of the mind. 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, the 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

Imagine each instance of cognition, healthy or otherwise, as a point or a dot on a blackboard. We see a branch and think it’s a snake. That’s one point, one cognition. We see our mother’s face and we recognize that she looks scared. That’s another point, one cognition.

To connect these points, we need to 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 called storytelling: a sequence of cognitions through multiple instances over time: Mom is scared because she thought she saw a snake.

If you’re mathematically inclined, you’ll recognize that the first derivative of location (a point) is velocity (the slope of a line). Just so, the first derivative of cognition is storytelling.

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. We love Noah’s Ark, regardless of whether it actually occurred. It has meaning for us. We love cars that transform into autonomous heroes. 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.”

Storytelling is Automatic

In 1944, Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel conducted an interesting experiment. Thirty-four college students were shown a short film in which two triangles and a circle moved across the screen. Afterward, thirty-three of the students described the film in terms of a story. The circle was “worried,” the little triangle was “innocent,” the big triangle was “blinded by rage.” Only one student said that all he saw were shapes. Try it for yourself.

What this experiment reveals is that our minds are conditioned to see a story, even when no such thing exists, just like we’re conditioned to see a face in the moon or on Mars. If we place the NASA photograph from above 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 into a line through time) we cannot help but see a story.

Storytelling is 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 share information, focus attention, build empathy, and so on. Stories are also at the root of all our cultural institutions. They fulfill critical roles in our nations, religions, cultures, neighborhoods, and families. Storytelling - it’s everywhere.

It’s only recently, however, that a handful of scientists have begun to piece together a comprehensive theory of storytelling. Brian Boyd, author of On the Origin of Stories, puts it 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 are our primary entertainment, so we often just think they’re creative and fun. Boyd asks - what’s the advantage to the species? Is it an adaptive trait, or just an eccentric byproduct of an overstimulated mind? The answer he suggests mirrors what we experience today: our ancestors evolved to tell stories because it was an effective social tool that helped them regulate social roles and define cultural values.

Groups of humans have always out-competed individuals and more loosely organized bands of people. Boyd suggests that stories, and the ability to understand them, were an essential ingredient in forming the social glue that led to our ancestors’ survival.

Historian Yuval Noah Harari makes a similar point in his bestselling book Sapiens, even devoting his entire second chapter to it. In it, he describes the cognitive revolution that occurred some 70,000 years ago that transformed humans from a largely unremarkable species with oversized brains and hands into world explorers and technology buffs. Anatomically there’s little difference, he says, between Homo sapiens today and a hundred thousand years ago, but during that transformative period we observe a large change in behavior. Why? This is due to many factors, of course, but Harari singles out one of primary importance: “Fiction.” The ability to tell stories and share common myths.

This might be why we like Noah’s Ark. (David Sloan Wilson) It doesn’t matter whether it’s true. It has social value. It’s also why scientists continually publish research about the benefits of storytelling on our cognitive and mental health. It may be that our minds evolved to make sense of the world through the medium of story.

Stories and Information

Let’s look at an example: How stories help us remember information. In 1969, Gordon Bower and Michal Clark at Stanford created a test. Participants were asked to remember 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 students who had created stories remembered 6 to 7 times as many words as the others. That’s a 600% increase in memory.

Imagine a list of ten words as ten still images from Heider’s and Simmel’s video. If we looked at either as instances of cognition, we might see nothing more than a few words or shapes in different locations. We probably wouldn’t make anything more of it, and we would have a hard time remembering them.

Now imagine those words strung together with a story, true or otherwise. This is what we encounter in the film, and when we see it we automatically register it as a story. What else do we do? We remember it, by orders of magnitude better than a collection of 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.

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, word, image, or fantasy – we introduce a cascade of correlated ideas, most of them unconscious.

We see evidence of this in what psychologists call 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 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 – it takes advantage of our associative architecture.

This may be why we evolved to tell stories in the first place. They are like constellations for our brains, tying 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 been bewildered by the immensity of the night sky, you might understand why our ancestors created the constellations in the zodiac. It matters not one bit whether Orion was a real hunter. He helps us find our way.

Storytelling Synchronizes Brains

Uri Hasson is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. 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 cortices of participants (the brain regions associated with hearing and cognition) varied widely, as one would expect of two random strangers on the street. 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 makes their minds click at the same rate.

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 in their mother tongues, showed a synchronization in their brains.

Written evaluations from participants after the experiment revealed that both English and Russian speakers understood the story in much the same way, albeit through different words, demonstrating that the meaning and synchronization brought about by storytelling is consistent even across multiple languages!

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.

We could liken this to the still images in the Heidel and Simmel film, or the list of ten random words given to participants in Bower’s and Clark’s experiment. On their own these words or images have a 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.