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

by Will Storr

Whether it’s a sixty-word tabloid piece about a TV star’s tiara falling off or a 350,000-word epic such as Anna Karenina, every story you’ll ever hear amounts to ‘something changed’. Change is endlessly fascinating to brains. ‘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.

Control is why brains are on constant alert for the unexpected. Unexpected change is a portal through which danger arrives to swipe at our throats. Paradoxically, however, change is also an opportunity. It’s the crack in the universe through which the future arrives. Change is hope. Change is promise. It’s our winding path to a more successful tomorrow. When unexpected change strikes we want to know, what does it mean? Is this change for the good or the bad? Unexpected change makes us curious, and curious is how we should feel in the opening movements of an effective story.

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. Those who’ve tried to unravel the secrets of story have long known about the significance of change. Aristotle argued that ‘peripeteia’, a dramatic turning point, is one of the most powerful moments in drama, whilst the story theorist and celebrated commissioner of screen drama John Yorke has written that ‘the image every TV director in fact or fiction always looks for is the close-up of the human face as it registers change.’

Professor George Loewenstein. He writes of a test in which participants were confronted by a grid of squares on a computer screen. They were asked to click five of them. Some participants found that, with each click, another picture of an animal appeared. But a second group saw small component parts of a single animal. With each square they clicked, another part of a greater picture was revealed. This second group were much more likely to keep on clicking squares after the required five, and then keep going until enough of them had been turned that the mystery of the animal’s identity had been solved. 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.’

There is, concluded Loewenstein, a ‘positive relationship between curiosity and knowledge’. 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’.

Take the eye, our dominant sense organ. If you hold out your arm and look at your thumbnail, that’s all you can see in high definition and full colour at once. Colour ends 20 to 30 degrees outside that core and the rest of your sight is fuzzy. You have two lemon-sized blind spots and blink fifteen to twenty times a minute, which blinds you for fully 10 per cent of your waking life. You don’t even see in three dimensions.

‘Evolution shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive,’ the cognitive scientist Professor Donald Hoffman has said. ‘But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be.’

According to Bergen, we start modelling words as soon as we start reading them. We don’t wait until we get to the end of the sentence. This means the order in which writers place their words matters. This is perhaps why transitive construction – Jane gave a Kitten to her Dad – is more effective than the ditransitive – Jane gave her Dad a kitten. Picturing Jane, then the Kitten, then her Dad mimics the real-world action that we, as readers, should be modelling.

For the same reason, active sentence construction – Jane kissed her Dad – is more effective than passive – Dad was kissed by Jane. Witnessing this in real life, Jane’s initial movement would draw our attention and then we’d watch the kiss play out. We wouldn’t be dumbly staring at Dad, waiting for something to happen.

The findings Bergen describes also suggest the reason writers are continually encouraged to ‘show not tell’. As C. S. Lewis implored a young writer in 1956, ‘instead of telling us a thing was “terrible”, describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description.’ The abstract information contained in adjectives such as ‘terrible’ and ‘delightful’ is thin gruel for the model-building brain. In order to experience a character’s terror or delight or rage or panic or sorrow, it has to make a model of it. By building its model of the scene, in all its vivid and specific detail, it experiences what’s happening on the page almost as if it’s actually happening. Only that way will the scene truly rouse our emotions.

Although there’s an admitted absurdity in claiming to be able to quantify human behaviour with such absolute numerical precision, 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.

Scientists used to believe attention was drawn simply to objects that stood out, but recent research suggests we’re more likely to attend to that which we find meaningful. Unfortunately, it’s not yet known precisely what ‘meaningful’ means, in this context, but tests that tracked saccades found, for example, that an untidy shelf attracted more attention than a sun-splashed wall. For me, that untidy shelf hints of human change; of a life in detail; of trouble insinuating itself in a place designed for order. It’s no surprise test-brains were drawn to it. It’s story-stuff, whilst the sun is just a shrug.

Analyses of language reveal the extraordinary fact that we use around one metaphor for every ten seconds of speech or written word. If that sounds like too much, it’s because you’re so used to thinking metaphorically – to speaking of ideas that are ‘conceived’ or rain that is ‘driving’ or rage that is ‘burning’ or people who are ‘dicks’.

Metaphor (and its close sibling, the simile) tends to work on the page in one of two ways. Take this example, from Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World: ‘She washed old plastic bags and hung them on the line to dry, a string of thrifty tame jellyfish floating in the sun.’ 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.

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’. In another, those who read ‘she shouldered the burden’ had neural regions associated with bodily movement activated more than when they read ‘she carried the burden’. This is prose writing that deploys the weapons of poetry. It works because it activates extra neural models that give the language additional meaning and sensation.

Researchers recently tested this idea that clichéd metaphors become ‘worn-out’ by overuse. They scanned people reading sentences that included action-based metaphors (‘they grasped the idea’), some of which were well-worn and others fresh. ‘The more familiar the expression, the less it activated the motor system,’ writes the neuroscientist Professor Benjamin Bergen. ‘In other words, over their careers, metaphorical expressions come to be less and less vivid, less vibrant, at least as measured by how much they drive metaphorical simulations.’

Estimates vary, but it’s believed the brain processes around 11 million bits of information at any given moment, but makes us consciously aware of no more than forty. The brain sorts through an abundance of information and decides what salient information to include in its stream of consciousness.

The brain can’t help but make cause and effect connections. It’s automatic. We can test it now. BANANAS. VOMIT. Here’s the psychologist Professor Daniel Kahneman describing what just happened in your brain: ‘There was no particular reason to do so, but your mind automatically assumed a temporal sequence and a causal connection between the words bananas and vomit, forming a sketchy scenario in which bananas caused the sickness.’

The power of this cause and effect story-making was explored in the early twentieth century by the Soviet filmmakers Vsevolod Pudovkin and Lev Kuleshov, who juxtaposed film of a famous actor’s expressionless face with footage of a bowl of soup, a dead woman in a coffin and a girl playing with a toy bear. They then showed each juxtaposition to an audience. ‘The result was terrific,’ recalled Pudovkin. ‘The public raved about the acting of the artist. They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same.’

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.

When deciding whether to believe something or not, we don’t usually make an even-handed search for evidence. Instead, we hunt for any reason to confirm what our models have instantaneously decided for us. As soon as we find any half-decent evidence to back up our ‘hunch’ we think, ‘Yep, that makes sense.’ And then we stop thinking. This is sometimes known as the ‘makes sense stopping rule’.

In order to make us feel heroic, the brain craftily re-scripts our pasts. What we actually ‘choose’ to remember, and in what form, warps and changes in ways that suit the heroic story it wants to tell. When, in the laboratory, participants split money with anonymous people in ways that they themselves considered unfair, they were found to consistently misremember their own selfish behaviour, even when offered a financial incentive to recall the truth. ‘When people perceive their own actions as selfish,’ the researchers concluded, ‘they can remember having acted more equitably, thus minimising guilt and preserving their self image.’

When researchers tested prisoners on their hero-maker biases, they found them to be largely intact. The inmates considered themselves above average on a range of pro-social characteristics, including kindness and morality. The exception was law-abidingness. There, sitting in prison, serving sentences precisely because they’d made serious contraventions of the law, they were only willing to concede that, on law-abidingness, they scored about average.

As the philosopher of psychology Professor Lisa Bortolotti explains, when we confabulate ‘we tell a story that is fictional, while believing that it is a true story.’ And we’re confabulating all the time.

famous experiments by neuroscientists Professors Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga. Their studies answered a strange question – what would happen if you planted an instruction into a brain and somehow hid it from the narrator? Say, for example, you managed to insert the instruction WALK into a person’s mind. And that person started walking. Without the narrator telling the brain’s owner why they were walking, how would they explain what they were doing? Would they be like a zombie? Would they just shrug?

They showed a card saying WALK to a split-brain patient such that only their left eye saw it. Because of the way the brain’s wired up, this information was sent into the right hemisphere. And, because the wiring between their hemispheres had been cut, that’s where it stayed, hidden away from the narrator. So what happened? The patient stood up and walked. When the experimenters asked him why, he said, ‘I’m going to get a Coke.’ His brain observed what was happening, in his neural realm, and made up a cause-and-effect story to explain it. It confabulated.

When a woman’s silent hemisphere was shown a picture of a pin-up girl she giggled. She blamed it on their ‘funny machine’. When another woman’s silent hemisphere was shown a video of a man being pushed into a fire, she said, ‘I don’t really know why, but I’m kind of scared. I feel jumpy. I think maybe I don’t like this room. Or maybe it’s you. You’re making me nervous. I know I like Dr Gazzaniga, but, right now, I’m scared of him.’

psychologist asks people to explain the causes of their own thoughts and behaviour anymore unless they’re interested in storytelling’. It’s why a neuroscientist colleague of Professor Leonard Mlodinow said that years of psychotherapy had allowed him to construct a helpful story about his feelings, motivations and behaviour, ‘but is it true? Probably not. The real truth lies in structures like my thalamus and hypothalamus, and my amygdala, and I have no conscious access to those no matter how much I introspect.’

In his pioneering classic The Uses of Enchantment the psychoanalyst Professor Bruno Bettelheim argues that making sense of such terrifying transformations is a core function of fairytales. A child can’t consciously accept that an overwhelming mood of anger may make him ‘wish to destroy those on whom he depends for his existence. To understand this would mean he must accept the fact that his own emotions may so overpower him that he does not have control over them – a very scary thought.’

This is how stories kept the tribe together as a functional, cooperating unit. They were essential for our survival. Our brains still operate in this way today. Gossip is a universal human behaviour, with around two-thirds of our conversation being devoted to social topics. The psychologist Professor Susan Engel has extraordinary childhood memories of the novelist Truman Capote visiting her mother for lunches of tasty Beluga caviar and even tastier gossip

Engel has studied the natural emergence of gossip in youngsters and found children as young as four routinely learn information about their family history by listening to their parents talk. At the same age, ‘they also begin, in fledgling form, to gossip themselves’.

Gossip exists to teach us about other people, to tell us who they really are. Most concerns moral infractions: people breaking the rules of the group. Such stories maintain pro-group behaviour by triggering moral outrage, which pushes us to act, either against the ‘characters’ in gossip or in their defence. We enjoy great books or immersive films because they’re activating and exploiting these ancient social emotions. ‘Stories arose out of our intense interest in social monitoring,’ writes the psychologist Professor Brian Boyd.

We’re wired to find selfless behaviour heroic and selfish deeds evil. Selflessness is thought to be the universal basis of all human morality. An analysis of ethnographic accounts of ethics in sixty worldwide groups found they shared these rules: return favours, be courageous, help your group, respect authority, love your family, never steal and be fair, all a variation on ‘don’t put your own selfish interests before that of the tribe’. Even pre-verbal babies show approval of selfless behaviour.

Humans are interested in the status of themselves, and others, to an almost obsessional degree. Studies of gossip in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes find that, just like the stories that fill the newspapers of great cities and nations, it’s dominated by tales of moral infractions by high-status people. Indeed, our preoccupation with the subject stretches back deep into our animal pasts. Even crickets keep a tally of their victories and failures against cricket rivals. Researchers into bird communication have revealed the astonishing fact that not only do ravens listen to the gossip of neighbouring flocks, but they pay especially close attention when it tells of a reversal in another bird’s status.

‘The tendency of chimps to rally for the underdog creates an inherently unstable hierarchy in which the power at the top is shakier than in any monkey group,’ writes the primatologist Professor Frans de Waal. When troop leaders are toppled from their throne, it’s usually because a gang of low-status males has conspired against them. Precisely these patterns of status play haunt human lives and stories. The story theorist Christopher Booker writes of an archetypal narrative form in which low-ranking characters ‘below the line’ conspire to topple the corrupt and dominating powers above it. ‘The point is that the disorder in the upper world cannot be amended without some crucial activity taking place at a lower level,’ he writes. ‘It is from the lower level that life is regenerated and brought back to the upper world

Booker writes, a ‘hero and heroine must represent the perfect coming together of four values: strength, order, feeling and understanding.’ This same combination of characteristics is required in chimp alphas, whose place on top depends on their balancing straightforward dominance with a will (or at least its appearance) to protect those lower on the ladder.

When people in brain scanners read of another’s wealth, popularity, good looks and qualifications, regions involved in the perception of pain became activated. When they read about them suffering a misfortune, they enjoyed a pleasurable spike in their brain’s reward systems.

status men and women were forced out of Jerusalem by King Nebuchadnezzar II. These Judeans journeyed long, and suffered, before finally finding a place to rest in the ancient city of Nippur. But they never forgot their beloved home. In exile, the Judeans determined to keep alive the customs of their people: their moral laws, their rituals, their language, their ways of living, eating and being. In order to do this it was essential that they preserved their stories. Because most of these stories only existed orally, Judean scribes began writing them down on a series of scrolls. As they did, something remarkable happened. The ragbag of ancient myths and fables became connected. The scribes turned them into one complete cause-and-effect-laden tale. It began with the creation of the world and the first humans, Adam and Eve, and continued to include their occupation of Jerusalem.

Stories are tribal propaganda. They control their group, manipulating its members into behaving in ways that benefit it. And it works. A recent study of eighteen hunter-gatherer tribes found almost eighty per cent of their stories contained lessons in how they should behave in their dealings with other people. The groups with the greater proportion of storytellers showed the most pro-social behaviour.

These groups, and their stories of how to behave and gain connection and status, form part of our identity. It’s mostly during adolescence, that period in which we’re composing our ‘grand narrative of self’, that we decide which ‘peer groups’ to join. We seek out people who have similar mental models to us – who have comparable personalities and interests and perceive the world in ways we recognise. Late adolescence sees many choosing a political ideology, left or right – a tribal master-story that fits over our unconscious landscape of feelings and instincts and half-formed suspicions and makes sense of it, suddenly infusing us with a sense of clarity, mission, righteousness and relief. When this happens it can feel as if we’ve encountered revealed truth and our eyes have suddenly been opened. In fact, the opposite has happened. Tribal stories blind us. They allow us to see only half the truth, at best.

But such stories don’t only exploit outrage and tribal humiliation for their power. Many deploy a third incendiary group emotion: disgust. In our evolutionary pasts, the threat from competing groups wouldn’t come only from their potential for violence. They could also be carrying dangerous pathogens that our immune systems hadn’t previously encountered and so couldn’t defend us against. Exposure to carriers of pathogens – in faeces, say, or rotten food – naturally activates feelings of disgust and revulsion. Our tribal brains seem to have developed the cultural tic of thinking of foreign tribes in such a way. This, perhaps, is why children still commonly hold their noses as a way of derogating members of out-groups.

popular conventional stories exploit the power of disgust. Villains from Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort to Beowulf’s Grendel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface have disfigurements that fire these neural networks. In The Twits, Roald Dahl created a typically marvellous confabulation of the disgust principle: ‘If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it.’

It’s often said the genius of Shakespeare lies in his psychological truth. Recent advances in the sciences of the mind show the extraordinary degree to which this is correct. Shakespeare had always been sceptical of ‘accounts, whether psychological or theological, of why people behave the way they do’. In his scepticism he’s been proven entirely correct. As we’ve learned, none of us know why we do what we do – not King Lear, not Iago, not me and not you. Leaving his audiences to guess at the precise causes of a character’s actions enabled the playwright to toy wonderfully with their domesticated brains. There’s little more interesting to most of us than the causes and effects of human behaviour. In making the answer to the dramatic question more mysterious, Shakespeare accessed our infinite wells of curiosity about other people and their oddness, generating a wonderful and enduring obsession with his characters and plays. He also gave us space to insert ourselves into his stories: we wonder, would I ever do such a thing? What could make me?

Researchers asked people to watch videos of scenes that were busy with social interactions, such as film of a school corridor. They then tracked their saccades so they could see which elements the participants’ brains were attending to. Those with ‘past histories of social success’ spent most of their time on people being friendly – smiling, chatting, nodding. But those who’d had high-school experiences of loneliness and social isolation ‘scarcely looked at the positive scenes at all’, writes Prinstein. Instead they spent around eighty per cent of their time looking at people being unfriendly and bullying. ‘It was as if they had watched a completely different movie.’

In Ancient Greece, Aristotle tried to puzzle out the true nature of human happiness. Some posited a ‘hedonic’ form defined by pleasure and the satisfaction of short-term desires. But Aristotle contemptuously dismissed the hedonists, saying that, ‘The life they decide on is a life for grazing animals.’ Instead, he described the idea of ‘eudaemonia’. This is ‘living in a way that fulfils our purpose’, the classicist Professor Helen Morales said. ‘It’s flourishing. Aristotle was saying, “Stop hoping for happiness tomorrow. Happiness is being engaged in the process.”’

Studies elsewhere find that living with a sufficient sense of purpose reduces the risk of depression and strokes and helps addicts recover from addiction. People more likely to agree with statements such as, ‘Some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them,’ have been found to live longer, even when other factors are controlled for. When I asked Cole to define eudaemonia he said it was ‘kind of striving after a noble goal’. ‘So it’s heroic behaviour in a literary sense?’ ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Exactly.’

This narrowing should be especially present at a story’s ignition point. But this is exactly where many stories fail. In order to be maximally compelling, protagonists should be active, the principal causer of effects in the plot that 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.

Thirty years of study led Christopher Booker to assert the existence of seven recurring plots in story. He calls them: Overcoming the Monster; Rags to Riches; The Quest; Voyage and Return; Rebirth; Comedy; and Tragedy. Each plot, he argues, consists of five acts: the call to action, a dream stage in which everything goes well, a frustration stage at which fortunes turn, a descent into nightmarish conflict, and finally a resolution. Following Jung, Booker outlines a character transformation he believes ubiquitous. At the story’s start the protagonist’s personality will be ‘out of balance’. They’ll be too strong or weak in the archetypal masculine traits of strength and order, or the archetypal feminine traits of feeling and understanding. In the happy resolution of the final act, the hero achieves ‘the perfect balance’ of all four traits and finally becomes whole.