The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better

by Will Storr

the favourite son of his father, the gang boss Vito, who dreamed of his growing up to become not a mobster but a US ‘senator or governor’.

The Corleone family comes under attack.

The ignition point is that wonderful moment in the narrative when we find ourselves sitting up.

the ignition point doesn’t have to happen immediately, but my advice would be not to take too long about it. The Godfather’s ignition point is the attempted assassination of Michael’s father, Vito, by rival New York mafia figures.

He acts characteristically and as his sacred flaw would predict. He’s calm, pliant and well-behaved, agreeing that he shouldn’t get ‘mixed up’ in the events directly, and

obediently placing calls for Sonny.

Michael’s characteristic passivity does not tame the chaos. Unarmed, he visits his father Vito in hospital to find his police guard has vanished.

When the corrupt cop shows up, Michael angrily berates him. The cop insults him and beats him in front of a crowd. The effect of Michael’s fidelity to his old theory of control? Pain, humiliation and his father in imminent danger of death. It’s not working. So who is Michael going to be?

When Michael gets home, word reaches the family that the rival mob boss and the corrupt cop have requested a meeting with him – as a respectable, honest and non-dangerous representative of the Corleones – so they can negotiate.

His offer now accepted, an experienced mobster teaches him how to kill at close range, thus introducing Michael to the rules of this new psychological world.

right in the middle of the standard five-act plot the protagonist transforms, taking on a new and ‘improved’ theory of control. And yet this so-called improvement triggers an overwhelming surge in chaos. It didn’t make sense. Surely a new and improved

self should solve their problem and tame the chaos? Why would becoming better make matters worse? (It’s worth underlining again, in the case of characters such as the antihero Michael Corleone, ‘better’ doesn’t mean ‘more moral’ as much as it does ‘better able to tame the chaos’.)

that its purpose isn’t only to tell a character how to get

what they want. It also tells them how to avoid what they don’t want. It’s partly protective. It

then, in act three, he abandons his theory of control completely by committing a double murder. What’s the result? The protection it had offered him, in the form of control over bad things, vanishes. Michael’s killing of the senior cop brings publicity and unprecedented heat onto all of the New York mob families, and they collectively round on the Corleones, seeking revenge.

we need to see, at the end of all the chaos and drama, who your protagonist really is.

The final minutes of The Godfather show precisely this. Michael is at his nephew’s christening, at which he’s being appointed the little boy’s godfather. As he takes his solemn vows, his men, on his orders, kill the family’s enemies one

by one. Af...

se...

Michael watches impassively as his brother-in-law (whose child’s christening he’s just left, and who’s been revealed as the ‘trait...

Who is Michael going to be? An honest, upstanding family man? Or a dishonest gangster? The film’s closing exchange takes the form of the dramatic question being asked and then answered for its final time.

‘Almost all perception is based on the detection of change’:

In a stable environment, the brain is relatively calm:

every one of them is as complex as a city:

speeds of up to 120 metres per second: The Brain, Michael O’Shea

150,000 to 180,000 kms of

synaptic ...

‘There’s no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it’:

There is a natural inclination to resolve information gaps:

Mystery, he’s said, ‘is the catalyst for imagination’:

Consider that whole beautiful world around you, with all

If you hold out your arm and look at your thumbnail:

the rest of your sight is fuzzy:

blink 15 to 20 times a minute: ‘Why Do We Blink so Frequently?’, Joseph Stromberg, Smithsonian, 24 Dec 2012. four to five saccades every second: Susan Blackmore, Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2005) p. 57. Modern filmmakers mimic saccadic behaviour: T. J. Smith, D. Levin & J. E. Cutting, ‘A window on reality: Perceiving edited moving images’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2012, Vol. 21, pp. 107–113. Half didn’t spot a man in a gorilla suit walk directly into the middle of the screen: Daniel J. Simons, Christopher F. Chabris, Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events,

‘Inattentional blindness for

gun during a simulated police vehicle stop’, Cognitive Research: Principles

less than one ten trillionth of light spectrum:

Evolution shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive’

‘You can thank your fruit-hunting ancestors for your color vision’,

Dreams feel real:

to explain a ‘myoclonic jerk’:

The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall (HMH, 2012) p. 82. seems to have caught people in the act of ‘watching’ the

models of stories: Louder than Words,

Surprisingly, related studies suggest the brain doesn’t make much distinction between stories told in the first (‘I’) and third singular persons (‘he’ or ‘she’). Given sufficient context, it tends to take the ‘observer perspe...

It ‘appears to modulate what part of an evoked sim...

to make vivid scenes, three

specific qualities: ‘Differential engagement of brain regions within a “core” network during scene construction’,

Only that way: A final lesson from the model-making brain is that simplicity is also crucial. The human beam of attention is narrow. ‘Everything about our hominin past,’ writes the

neurobiologist Professor Robert Sapolsky, ‘has honed us to be responsive to one face at a time.’ We have hunter-gatherer brains, specialised to focus on a single moving prey animal, a single ripe fruit or a single tribal confederate. This narrowness is why stories often begin simply, from the perspective of one person, or are centred around one problem.

physical strength as much as halving: ‘The Domestication of Human’,