The Science of Storytelling

To help us feel in control of the outside world, our brains lull us into believing things that aren’t true.

The storytelling brain enters a state of war. It assigns the opposing group purely selfish motives. It hears their most powerful arguments in a particular mode of spiteful lawyerliness, seeking to misrepresent or discard what they have to say. It uses the most appalling transgressions of their very worst members as a brush to smear them all. It takes its individuals and erases their depth and diversity. It turns them into outlines

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.

We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode. The brain creates a world for us to live in and populates it with allies and villains. It turns the chaos and bleakness of reality into a simple, hopeful tale, and at the centre it places its star – wonderful, precious me – who it sets on a series of goals that become the plots of our lives. Story is what brain does. It is a ‘story processor’, writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, ‘not a logic processor’.

Because humiliation is such an apocalyptic punishment, watching villains being punished this way can feel rapturous. As we’re a tribal people with tribal brains, it doesn’t count as humiliation unless other members of the tribe are aware of it. As Professor William Flesch writes, ‘We may hate the villain, but our hatred is meaningless. We want him unmasked to people in his world.’

It’s hard to conceive of an effective story that doesn’t rely on some form of status movement to squeeze our primal emotions, seize our attention, drive our hatred or earn our empathy.

we ultimately want to know is its answer – who is he? The surprising discovery that’s been waiting for us, at the destination of our long journey into our evolutionary past, is that all story is gossip.

Selfless versus selfish is storified as hero versus villain.

Stories arose out of our intense interest in social monitoring,’ writes the psychologist Professor Brian Boyd. They work by ‘riveting our attention to social information’, whether in the form of gossip or screenplay or books, which typically tell of ‘heightened versions of the behaviours we naturally monitor’.

With their neural model of the world increasingly foundering, they enter a subconscious state of panic and disorder.
As their models fracture and break down, previously repressed wills, thoughts and versions of self rise up and become dominant. This can be seen as the brain’s experiments in novel ways of controlling its environment. They might find themselves behaving in ways they weren’t expecting, as Arturo Bandini did when he unexpectedly turned stalker.