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

by Will Storr

There’s simply no way to understand the human world without stories. They fill our newspapers, our law courts, our sporting arenas, our government debating chambers, our school playgrounds, our computer games, the lyrics to our songs, our private thoughts and public conversations and our waking and sleeping dreams.

Stories are everywhere. Stories are us. It’s story that makes us human.

Still, today, modern nations are principally defined by the stories we tell about our collective selves:

We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode.

The ‘Sacred Flaw Approach’ is a character-first process, an attempt to create a story that mimics the various ways a brain creates a life, and which therefore feels true and fresh, and comes pre-loaded with potential drama.

‘Almost all perception is based on the detection of change’ says the neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott. ‘Our perceptual systems basically don’t work unless there are changes to detect.’ In a stable environment, the brain is relatively calm. But when it detects change, that event is immediately registered as a surge of neural activity.

Ultimately, then, we could say the mission of the brain is this: control.

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.

Humans have an extraordinary thirst for knowledge. Storytellers excite these instincts by creating worlds but stopping short of telling readers everything about them.

The more context we learn about a mystery, the more anxious we become to solve it.

Curiosity is shaped like a lowercase n. It’s at its weakest when people have no idea about the answer to a question and also when entirely convinced they do. The place of maximum curiosity – the zone in which storytellers play – is when people think they have some idea but aren’t quite sure.

In his paper ‘The Psychology of Curiosity’, 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’.

The world we experience as ‘out there’ is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It’s an act of creation by the storytelling brain.

Even sleep is no barrier to the brain’s story-making processes. Dreams feel real because they’re made of the same hallucinated neural models we live inside when awake.

Indeed, just like the stories we tell each other for fun, dream narratives often centre on dramatic, unexpected change.

Because writers are, in effect, generating neural movies in the minds of their readers, they should privilege word order that’s filmic, imagining how their reader’s neural camera will alight upon each component of a sentence.

Active grammar means readers model the scene on the page in the same way that they’d model it if it happened in front of them. It makes for easier and more immersive reading.

A further powerful tool for the model-creating storyteller is the use of specific detail. If writers want their readers to properly model their story-worlds they should take the trouble to describe them as precisely as possible. Precise

One study concluded that, to make vivid scenes, three specific qualities of an ob...

Immersive model worlds can also be summoned by the evocation of the senses. Touches, tastes, scents and sounds can be recreated in the brains of readers as the neural networks associated with these sensations become activated when they see the right words.

Our errors about what others are thinking are a major cause of human drama.

Neuroscientists are building a powerful case that metaphor is far more important to human cognition than has ever been imagined. Many argue 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 simile can be used to create mood.

Turning the confusing and random into a comprehensible story is an essential function of the storytelling brain. We’re surrounded by a tumult of often chaotic information. In order to help us feel in control, brains radically simplify the world with narrative.

The brain sorts through an abundance of information and decides what salient information to include in its stream of consciousness.

This use of narrative to simplify the complex is also true of memory. 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).

When posed with even the deepest questions about reality, human brains tend towards story.

To understand the basis of how the brain turns the super-abundance of information that surrounds it into a simplified story is to understand a critical rule of storytelling. Brain stories have a basic structure of cause and effect.

Cause and effect is a fundamental of how we understand the world. The brain can’t help but make cause and effect connections. It’s automatic.

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.

The issue isn’t simply that scenes without cause and effect tend to be boring. Plots that play too loose with cause and effect risk becoming confusing, because they’re not speaking in the brain’s language.

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.

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.

We’ve discovered where a story begins: with a moment of unexpected change, or with the opening of an information gap, or likely both. As it happens to a protagonist, it happens to the reader or viewer.

Good stories are explorations of the human condition; thrilling voyages into foreign minds.

Correcting our flaws means, first of all, managing the task of actually seeing them.

Identifying and accepting our flaws, and then changing who we are, means breaking down the very structure of our reality before rebuilding it in a new and improved form.

Our beliefs feel personal to us because they are us.

Nobody, however, is right about everything. Nevertheless, the storytelling brain wants to sell us the illusion that we are.

As wrong as we are, we rarely question the reality our brains conjure for us. It is, after all, our ‘reality’. As well as this, the hallucination is functional. Each one of the tiny beliefs that make up our neural model is a little instruction that tells our brain how the outside world works:

These instructions make our environment predictable. They make it controllable. Taken in sum, the vastly intricate web of beliefs can be seen as the brain’s ‘theory of control’. It’s this theory of control that’s often challenged at the story’s start.

The mythologist Joseph Campbell said that ‘the only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections.’

When designing a character, it’s often useful to think of them in terms of their theory of control. How have they learned to control the world? When unexpected change strikes, what’s their automatic go-to tactic for wrestling with the chaos? What’s their default, flawed response? The answer, as we’ve just seen, comes from that character’s core beliefs about reality, the precious and fiercely defended ideas around which they’ve formed their sense of self.

Storytellers can show the personality of their characters in almost everything they do: it’s in their thoughts, dialogue, social behaviours, memories, desires and sadnesses.

Human environments are rich with clues about those who occupy them.

Culture is another route by which characters in life and fiction become the flawed and peculiar people they are.

culture is actually built deeply and directly into our model of the world. It forms part of the neural machinery that constructs our hallucination of reality. Culture distorts and narrows the lens through which we experience life, exerting a potent influence on us,

Such 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.

It’s in our first seven years that culture mostly gets built into our models, honing and particularising our neural realm.