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

by Will Storr

Story is what brain does. It is a ‘story processor’, writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, ‘not a logic processor’. Story emerges from human minds as naturally as breath emerges from between human lips. You don’t have to be a genius to master it. You’re already doing it. Becoming better at telling stories is simply a matter of peering inwards, at the mind itself, and asking how it does it.

I suspect it’s this belief in plot as a magic formula that’s responsible for the clinical feel from which modern stories sometimes suffer. But a plot can never work in isolation. This is why I believe the focus on plot should be shifted onto character. It’s people, not events, that we’re naturally interested in. It’s the plight of specific, flawed and fascinating individuals that makes us cheer, weep and ram our heads into the sofa cushion. The surface events of the plot are critical, of course, and its structure ought to be present, functional and disciplined. But it’s only there to support its cast.

This is what storytellers do. They create moments of unexpected change that seize the attention of their protagonists and, by extension, their readers and viewers.

Brains, concluded the researchers, seem to become spontaneously curious when presented with an ‘information set’ they realise is incomplete. ‘There is a natural inclination to resolve information gaps,’ wrote Loewenstein, ‘even for questions of no importance.’

The place of maximum curiosity – the zone in which storytellers play – is when people think they have some idea but aren’t quite sure.

Loewenstein breaks down four ways of involuntarily inducing curiosity in humans: (1) the ‘posing of a question or presentation of a puzzle’; (2) ‘exposure to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution’; (3) ‘the violation of expectations that triggers a search for an explanation’; (4) knowledge of ‘possession of information by someone else’.

For earlier humans that roamed hostile environments, aggression and physicality had been critical. But the more cooperative we became, the less useful these traits proved. When we started living in settled communities, they grew especially troublesome. There, it would’ve been the people who were better at getting along with others, rather than the physically dominant, who’d have been more successful.

This metaphor works principally by opening an information gap. It asks the brain a question: how can a plastic bag be a jellyfish? To find the answer, we imagine the scene. Cunningham has nudged us into more vividly modelling his story.

People should be free to anticipate what’s coming next and able to insert their own feelings and interpretations into why that just happened and what it all means. 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. No storyteller can ever transplant their neural world perfectly into another’s mind. Rather, their two worlds mesh. Only by the reader insinuating themselves into a work can it create a resonance that has the power to shake them as only art can.

cultural norms are incorporated into our models in childhood, a period in which the brain is rapidly working out who it needs to be in order to best control its particular environment.

Smart people are mostly better at finding ways to ‘prove’ they’re right and tend to be no better at detecting their wrongness.

who better to fool us – to know exactly what to say to beguile us into believing our most incendiary and partisan instincts are morally justified – than our own mind?

Researchers have found that violence and cruelty has four general causes: greed and ambition; sadism; high self-esteem and moral idealism. Popular belief and clichéd stories tend to have it that greed and sadism are dominant. In fact, they’re vanishingly small. It’s actually high self-esteem and moral idealism – convictions of personal and moral superiority – that drive most acts of evil.

monitor’. When a character behaves selflessly, and puts the needs of the group before their own, we experience a deep primal craving to see them recognised by the group as a hero and hailed. When a character behaves selfishly, putting their own needs before that of the group, we feel a monstrous urge to see their punishment.

The groups with the greater proportion of storytellers showed the most pro-social behaviour.

networks. Stories work on multiple evolved systems in the brain and a skilled storyteller activates these networks like the conductor of an orchestra, a little trill of moral outrage here, a fanfare of status play over there, a tintinnabulation of tribal identification, a rumble of threatening antagonism, a tantara of wit, a parp of sexual allure, a crescendo of unfair trouble, a warping and wefting hum as the dramatic question is posed and reposed in new and interesting ways – all instruments by which masses of brains can be captivated and manipulated.

when he was working on Hamlet, Shakespeare decided to try artfully excising such neat and reassuring explanations. In previous versions of the play, Hamlet’s ‘madness’ had been tactical and fake, a ruse to buy time and foster the appearance of harm lessness. But in Shakespeare’s version, his suicidal madness is actually real

Another study found 67 per cent of male participants and 25 per cent of female participants so desperate to make things happen in a room that was empty of stimulus, except for an electric-shock machine, that they started giving themselves painful shocks. Humans do things. They act. We can’t help it.

Without Brunetière’s will striving towards a goal being present in the scene of a story, there’s no drama, only description.

follows. Textual analyses reveal the words ‘do’, ‘need’ and ‘want’ appear twice as often in novels that feature in the New York Times bestseller list as those that don’t.

many stories have a point, just prior to their resolution, in which the hero endures some deeply significant test. For one final, decisive time, they’re posed the dramatic question. It’s the moment they have to decide, once and for all, whether or not to become someone new.

Control, as we’ve already discovered, is the ultimate mission of the brain. Our hero-making cognition always wants to make us feel as if we have more of it than we actually do.

All of us are in search of writers who somehow capture the distinct music made by the agonies in our heads.

Story, then, is both tribal propaganda and the cure for tribal propaganda.