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

by Will Storr

Because humans crave control, infants whose caregivers behave unpredictably can grow up in a constant state of anxious high alert.

We’re literally blind to that which the brain ignores. If it sends the eye to only the distressing elements around us, that’s all we’ll see. If it spins cause-and-effect tales of violence and threat and prejudice about actually harmless events, that’s what we’ll experience. This is how the hallucinated reality in which we live at the centre can be dramatically different to that of the person we’re standing right next to. We all exist in different worlds. And whether that world feels friendly or hostile depends, in significant part, on what happened to us as children.

Because origin damage happens when our models are still being built, the flaws it creates become incorporated into who we are. They’re internalised. The self-justifying hero-maker narrative then gets to work telling us we’re not partial or mistaken at all – we’re right. We see evidence to support this false belief everywhere, and we deny, forget or dismiss any counter-evidence. Experience after experience seems to confirm our rightness. We grow up looking out of this broken model of the world that feels absolutely clear and real, despite its warps and fissures.

If this deep, identity-forming belief turns out to be wrong, then who the hell are we? The dramatic question has been triggered. The story has begun. Finding out who we are, and who we need to become, means accepting the challenge that story offers us. Are we brave enough to change? This is the question a plot, and a life, asks of each us.

‘What we ask of the theatre is the spectacle of a will striving towards a goal.’ Fundamental to successful stories and successful lives is the fact that we don’t passively endure the chaos that erupts around us. These events challenge us. They generate a desire. This desire makes us act. This is how change summons us into the adventure of the story, and how an ignition point sprouts a plot.

Goal-direction is the foundational mechanism on top of which all our other urges are built.

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.

Goal-direction is so important to human cognition that when information about it is absent we can enter a state of bafflement.

the hero-making brain wants us to feel as if we’re constantly moving towards something better.

these goal-related responses form the peaks and troughs of story’s rollercoaster, and they do so using a language millions of years older than words.

if a person pursuing one of these ‘core’ projects was a bit like an archetypal hero battling through a three-act narrative of crisis-struggle-resolution he said, ‘Yes. A thousand times yes.’

Humans are built for story. When we push ourselves towards a tough yet meaningful goal, we thrive. Our reward systems spike not when we achieve what we’re after but when we’re in pursuit of it. It’s the pursuit that makes a life and the pursuit that makes a plot. Without a goal to follow and at least some sense we’re getting closer to it, there is only disappointment, depression and despair. A living death.

In order to be maximally compelling, protagonists should be active, the principal causer of effects in the plot that follows.

A character in a drama who isn’t reacting, making decisions, choosing and trying somehow to impose control on the chaos isn’t truly a protagonist. Without action, the answer to the dramatic question never really changes. Who they are is who they always were, but slowly, dully sinking.

The job of the plot is to plot against the protagonist. Its causes and effects always revolve around some sort of story event – an episode that brings the character into a new psychological realm. Once they’re in this hostile and alien place, their flawed theory of control is tested and retested, often to breaking point and beyond.

One compelling analysis of story structure was carried out by publishing executive Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers of Stanford University’s Literary Lab, whose algorithm was set to work on 20,000 novels and taught itself to predict a New York Times bestseller with an accuracy of 80 per cent. Fascinatingly, the resulting data supported the life’s work of Christopher Booker, whose seven basic plots did, indeed, emerge. What also emerged was an indication of what people are most curious to read about. The ‘most frequently occurring and important theme’ of bestsellers was ‘human closeness and human connection’, an apposite interest for a hyper-social species.

a plot should serve to orchestrate a symphony of changes. It’s change that obsesses brains and keeps them engaged.

A gripping plot is one that keeps asking the dramatic question. It uses its story event to repeatedly change and gradually break the protagonist’s model of who they are and how the world works before rebuilding it. This requires pressure. These models are tough. They run to the core of the character’s identity. If they’re going to crack, the protagonist needs to hurl themselves at the drama.

In archetypal storytelling, especially as it emerges in fairytales, myths and Hollywood movies, this event often takes the form of some life-or-death challenge or fight in which the protagonist comes face-to-face with all they most dread. This occurence on the surface is symbolic of what’s taking place in the second, subconscious layer of the story. Because the story event has been designed to strike at the core of this character’s identity, the thing they need to change is precisely that which is hardest. The flawed models they’re required to shatter run so deep that it takes an act of almost supernatural strength and courage to finally change them for good.

The psychologist and story theorist Professor Jordan Peterson talks of the mythic trope in which a hero makes final battle with a dragon that’s hoarding treasure. ‘You confront it in order to get what it has to offer you. The probability is that’s going to be intensely dangerous and push you right to the limit. But you don’t get the gold without the dragon. That’s a very, very strange idea. But it seems to be accurate.’ That gold is your the reward for accepting the fight of your life. But you only get it if you answer story’s dramatic question correctly: ‘I’m going to be someone better.’

If all story is change then it naturally follows that a story ends when the change finally stops.

Brains love control. It’s their heaven.

In tragedies such as Lolita, the protagonist answers the dramatic question by deciding not to become someone better. Rather than discovering and fixing their flaws they embrace them yet further. This causes them to enter a catastrophic spiral of model-defending behaviour that loosens their control over the external world more and more, leading to inevitable humiliation, ostracisation or death. Such an ending transmits the profoundly comforting signal, to the reader, that divine justice truly exists and is inescapable, and that there’s control in the chaos after all.

His internal model of the world has been recognised as wrong and the reader is left in the lovely glow of the implication that his ability to control the external world will be improved and, as a result, he’ll receive the golden treasure

Story is a form of play that allows us to feel we’ve lost control without actually placing us in danger. It’s a rollercoaster, but not one made from ramps, rails and steel wheels, but from love, hope, dread, curiosity, status play, constriction, release, unexpected change and moral outrage. Story is a thrill-ride of control.

As the story sends us on its thrilling rollercoaster of control, our bodies respond accordingly, experiencing its events: heart rate goes up, blood vessels dilate, changing activations of neurochemicals such as cortisol and oxytocin have powerful effects on our emotional states. We can become so replaced by the storyteller’s simulated model-world that we miss our train stop or forget to go to sleep. Psychologists call this state ‘transportation’.

‘Research has demonstrated that the transported “traveller” can return changed by the journey,’ write the authors of a meta-analysis of 132 studies of narrative transportation. ‘The transformation that narrative transportation achieves is persuasion of the story-receiver.’

The historian Professor Lynn Hunt argues that the birth of the novel helped precipitate the invention of human rights. Prior to the eighteenth century, it was unusual for someone to think to empathise with a member of a different class, nationality or gender. God put us in our rightful place, and that was simply that.

Transportation changes people, and then it changes the world.

Psychologists have examined the effects of storytelling on our perceptions of tribal ‘others’. One study had a group of white Americans viewing a sitcom, Little Mosque on the Prairie, that represented Muslims as friendly and relatable. Compared to a control group (who watched Friends) they ended up with ‘more positive attitudes towards Arabs’ on various tests – changes that persisted when re-tested a month later.

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

The gift of story is wisdom.

The lesson of story is that we have no idea how wrong we are. Discovering the fragile parts of our neural models means listening for their cry. When we become irrationally emotional and defensive, we’re often betraying the parts of us that require the most aggressive protection.

Facing these flaws and fixing them will be the fight of our lives. To accept story’s challenge and win is to be a hero.

The consolation of story is truth.

To enter the flawed mind of another is to be reassured that it’s not only us. It’s not only us who are broken; it’s not only us who are conflicted; it’s not only us who are confused; it’s not only us who have dark thoughts and bitter regrets and feel possessed, at times, by hateful selves. It’s not only us who are scared. The magic of story is its ability to connect mind with mind in a manner that’s unrivalled even by love. Story’s gift is the hope that we might not be quite so alone, in that dark bone vault, after all.