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When we’re reading, hearing or watching a story we deploy our theory-of-mind skills by automatically making hallucinatory models of the minds of its characters.
Some authors model the minds of their own characters with such force that they hear them talk.
some research suggests strangers read another’s thoughts and feelings with an accuracy of just 20 per cent. Friends and lovers? A mere 35 per cent. Our errors about what others are thinking are a major cause of human drama.
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As we move through life, wrongly predicting what people are thinking and how they’ll react when we try to control them, we haplessly trigger feuds and fights and misunderstandings that fire devastating spirals of unexpected change into our social worlds.
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Comedy, whether by William Shakespeare or John Cleese and Connie Booth, is often built on such mistakes.
well-imagined characters always have theories about the minds of other characters and – because this is drama – those theories will often be wrong. This wrongness will lead...
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‘I start by asking: What does A think B is thinking about A? It sounds complicated (and it is) but this is the very essence of giving some densit...
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As the eye darts about, building up its story world for you to live inside, the brain’s choosy about where it tells it to look. We’re attracted to change, of course, but also to other salient details.
The director Stephen Spielberg is famous for his use of salient detail to create drama.
we see two cups of water on a car dashboard, deep rumbles from the ground sending rings over their liquid surface. We cut between the faces of the passengers, each slowly registering change. Then we see the rear-view mirror vibrating with the stomping of the beast.
In exactly this way, storytellers stretch time, and thereby build suspense, by packing in extra saccadic moments and detail.
Just as human worlds are haunted with minds and faces, they’re haunted with memories. We think of the act of ‘seeing’ as the simple detection of colour, movement and shape. But we see with our pasts.
we have neural models of park benches, dinosaurs, Israel, ice cream, models of everything – and each of those is packed with associations from our own personal histories.
We see both the thing itself and all that we associate with it. We feel it too. Everything our attention rests upon triggers a sensation,
All these feelings reduce to just two impulses: advance and withdraw.
A character in fiction, like a character in life, inhabits their own unique hallucinated world in which everything they see and touch comes with its own unique personal meaning.
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Neuroscientists are building a powerful case that metaphor is far more important to human cognition than has ever been imagined.
it’s the fundamental way that brains understand abstract concepts, such as love, joy, society and economy. It’s simply not possible to comprehend these ideas in any useful sense, then, without attaching them to concepts that have physical properties: things that bloom and warm and stretch and shrink.
Metaphor (and its close sibling, the simile) tends to work on the pag...
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Cunningham has nudged us into more vividly modelling his story.
Brain scans illustrate the second, more powerful, use of metaphor. When participants in one study read the words ‘he had a rough day’, their neural regions involved in feeling textures became more activated, compared with those who read ‘he had a bad day’.
It works because it activates extra neural models that give the language additional meaning and sensation.
‘I tried to move away from him and take my own weight, but the pain came roaring back like a train in a tunnel.’ This finely judged metaphor is enough to make you wince.
Metaphor and simile can be used to create mood.
Orwell was even right when he wrote about writing. ‘A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image,’
warning against the use of that ‘huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.’
‘The more familiar the expression, the less it activated the motor system,’
Turning the confusing and random into a comprehensible story is an essential function of the storytelling brain.
Human memory is ‘episodic’ (we tend to experience our messy pasts as a highly simplified sequences of causes and effects) and ‘autobiographical’ (those connected episodes are imbued with personal and moral meaning).
we have a brain that’s expert at constructing ‘elaborate theories and explanations about what is happening in the world and why,’ he’s talking principally about the neocortex.
These theories and explanations often take the form of stories.
a critical rule of storytelling. Brain stories have a basic structure of cause and effect.
your mind automatically assumed a temporal sequence and a causal connection
It’s cause and effect that powers curiosity. Human brains and human stories ask, ‘Why did that happen? And what’s going to happen next?’
Every scene in a compelling story is a cause that triggers our childlike curiosity about its potential effects.
With each new development an information gap opens up which creates a tantalising yearning for what’s coming next.
This is how best selling page-turners and blockbusting scripts generate their addictive force. They have a relentless adherence to forward motion, one thing leading to another...
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the scene must be dramatic. It must start because the hero has a problem, and it must culminate with the hero finding him or herself either thwarted or educated that another way exists.’
‘You want all your scenes to have a “because” between them, and not an “and then”.’ Brains struggle with ‘and then’.
Change in mass-market story is quick and clear and easily understandable, while in high literature it’s often slow and ambiguous and demands plenty of work from the reader, who has to ponder and de-code the connections for themself.
But all storytellers, no matter who their intended audience, should beware of over-tightening their narratives. While it’s dangerous to leave readers feeling confused and abandoned, it’s just as risky to over-explain. Causes and effects should be shown rather than told; suggested rather than explained. If they’re not, curiosity will be extinguished and readers and viewers will become bored.
These gaps in explanation are the places in story in which they insert themselves: their preconceptions; their values; their memories; their connections; their emotions – all become an active part of the story.
We’ve discovered where a story begins: with a moment of unexpected change, or with the opening of an information gap, or likely both.
We typically follow the consequences of the dramatic change as they ripple out from the start of the story in a pattern of causes and effects whose logic will be just ambiguous enough to keep us curious.
Being a domesticated species, we’re most interested of all in the cause and effect of other people. We’re endlessly curious about them.
What are they thinking? What are they plotting? Who do they love? Who do they hate? What are their secrets? What matters to them? Why does it matter? Are they an ally? Are they a threat? Why did they do that irrational, unpredictable, dangerous, incredible thing?
Those characters, when we meet them on page one, are never perfect. What arouses our curiosity about them, and provides them with a dramatic battle to fight, is not their achievements or their winning smile. It’s their flaws.
These distortions in our cognition make us flawed.
At the start of a story, we’ll often meet a protagonist who is flawed in some closely defined way.
The mistakes they’re making about the world will help us empathise with them.
