How do stories affect the brain?
When was the last time someone told you a story? I’m not talking about the last time someone sat you down and once-upon-a-timed you. I mean when was the last time someone transferred information out of their noggin and into yours through the medium of a story?
If you’ve had even a single conversation today, you’ve probably heard a story without you even registering it. Because, since the dawn of humanity, stories have been an integral part of our cultural fabric. From ancient dirges to modern novels and films to watercooler gossip (we should really rename that now a hefty chunk of office goss gets transmitted via Teams*). Storytelling has always captivated our imaginations. It’s shaped our understanding of the world around us, and has taught us lessons on how to behave in society.
But have you ever, like me, wondered why, exactly, stories hold such a profound sway over us? Pondered over whether our fascination with narrative is innate or learned? Wondered whether stories transcend cultural barriers? Or if there are corners of the world untouched by the magic of narrative?
If you yearn to know how stories affect the brain, and why that cerebral impact has ingrained narrative so deeply into humanity, read on! Today, we’re delving into the science of storytelling. We'll explore how narratives influence our brains, emotions and behaviours. Let’s go.
The neuroscience behind the story
Neuroscientific research exploring storytelling only started to gain traction in the early 2000s. Which makes it pretty new, by scientific timescales. The availability of tools like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) machines have broadened the precision with which we can examine the brain’s response to narratives.
Those tools have shown that when we engage with a compelling story our brains undergo a complex series of processes that contribute to our immersion in a narrative.
An article in Cerebral Cortex magazine details how stories affect more parts of the brain than one might expect. This includes the language processing regions that decode words into meaning, which are called Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. But stories also engage the sensory cortex, the motor cortex, and the pre-frontal cortex in turn - the bits responsible for processing sensory information, generating mental imagery, and making sense of social interactions.
By activating these areas, stories create a vivid mental simulation of the events and emotions of a narrative. This leads to a heightened sense of presence and engagement for a listener. It’s as if we’re actually living the experiences portrayed in a story, blurring the lines between reality and fiction.**
But new neuroscientific research has gone further than showing which bits of the brain light up during storytelling.
The synchronicity of shared stories
New experiments confirm what storytellers have always instinctively known: narratives bring people together.
When we share stories, our steadfastly separate brains begin, automatically, to follow the same patterns. This study showed stories cause the brainwaves of teller and listener to synchronise. Princeton University professor of psychology Uri Hasson found that our brains have developed a specific “common neural protocol” that allows us to use this “brain coupling” to share information. His discoveries were confirmed across two experiments.
In the first experiment, Hasson covered his participant’s head in fMRI electrodes and scanned their brain during a bit of chit chat. He did this for each participant. Then Hasson tried to find similarities in the brainwaves emitted by their auditory cortices. That’s the bit of the brain that processes sounds as they come in. Obviously, there were very minimal similarities. The waves followed no particular pattern. Here’s a picture demonstrating the divergence of those waves.
Image credit: Uri Hasson
Then, Hasson repeated the same experiment. But this time he told each participant the same story. As soon as the storytelling started, the neural responses across every participant locked in. And then they began traversing the same pattern.
That synchronicity extended across all the language areas of the brain. But, more interesting, Hasson also recorded it deep in the higher-order regions. That includes:
the frontal cortex (responsible for executive function, decision-making and personality)
the parietal cortex (responsible for sensory processing and spatial awareness).
Here’s an illustration showing how aligned the waves were between each participant’s brain.
Image credit: Uri Hasson
Neuroscientists have several names for this phenomenon. “Neural coupling”, “neural entrainment”, “pairing”, and “neural synchrony” are a few. Unnecessarily confusing, I know. I’m going to use “pairing” throughout this article, for the purposes of clarity.
Pairing clearly demonstrates that when a storyteller and their audience really understand one another (i.e. when they’re on the same wavelength***), their brains’ responses become coupled and remarkably similar.
And the paired brains of two people will become increasingly entrenched as they continue to trade stories back and forth. Which, if you continued it ad infinitum, could feasibly lead to two people having completely homogenous brains. Which, understandably, scares Hasson. And me.
“Today, too many of us live in echo chambers where we’re exposed to the same perspective day after day. We should all be concerned as a society if we lose our common ground and lose the ability to communicate effectively and share our views with people who are different than us.”
His solution to this potential storytelling scourge is simple. Everyone should try to experience immersive, empathetic neural pairing with as many unique people as they can. And they should aim to hit across as many varied backgrounds as possible.
“I think the most important thing is just to keep being coupled to other people, to keep communicating with them and to keep spreading ideas. Because the sum of all of us together, coupled, is far greater than the sum of our parts.”
Sensible stuff.
Curiosity may kill cats, but it’s great for humans
So, with Hasson’s research, we now have a pretty decent understanding of which little lightbulbs in our brain flash and crackle when we hear stories. But that still doesn’t really explain why we’re so mad about narratives.
So let’s look how stories affect the brain from a more psychological position. Some researchers believe that our attraction to stories isn’t based on their neural impact. Instead, it stems instead from humanity’s inbuilt curiosity.
A well-crafted narrative entices us all. The mystery. The questions it sparks. The plot twists that keep us on the edges of our seats. This curiosity-driving engagement keeps our brains actively seeking info and solutions as the story is being told, and ignites our problem solving skills. All things that the human brain was designed to do for fun.
Research conducted by psychologist Dr Paul Silvia at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro suggests that curiosity enhances learning and memory. Curiosity, according to Silvia, is a peculiarly human trait.
“If anything defines the human condition, it is our ability to immerse ourselves in inane and nonsensical things”
That curiosity, Silvia thinks (and I agree), has been the key to the success of our species.
“Like all the basic emotions, interest is innate, in the sense of being unlearned and universal – people are not taught to be curious. And like all emotions, interest accomplishes something for people.”
Silvia breaks the purpose of curiosity (a curious concept in and of itself) down into three functions.
Curiosity motivates us to learn - most animals are born with the skills they need to face the world already programmed. Humans are born almost entirely ignorant, but with a massive capacity, and thirst, for learning. “Curiosity is what gives us our hungry minds”, says Silvia, and it’s the reason we seek freshness.
Curiosity counterbalances anxiety - healthy fear has kept humankind safe since our species first started wandering upright around savannahs. But unhealthy fear can cripple us. Curiosity acts as a salve for this anxiety. It pushes us to overcome natural wariness and try new things.
Curiosity counterbalances enjoyment - just as fear holds us back from experimentation and innovation, over-attachment to the familiar can also be a barrier to engaging with novelty. Curiosity “motivates people to go out on a limb, to try something new”. Which is exactly what progression demands.
When Silvia talks about the benefits of curiosity for humankind, he’s not really talking about stories or narratives and the curiosity around those things. He’s talking about exploration and innovation and all the new-thing-trying that put humankind on the path to modernity. Less the first guy to come up with the concept of a happily-ever-after, more the first guy curious enough to try putting meat on a fire and giving it a lick.
But the curiosity that drives deep species-level innovation is the same mechanism that compels us to consume stories. When we encounter a gap in a narrative, or spot an unresolved conflict, our brains crave closure. There’s a psychological term that goes along with this: the Zeigarnik effect. It postulates that our closure-craving is so powerful that we remember unfinished stories (or tasks) way better than we remember completed ones.
So we predict the story’s end. Remember the twists and turns, because they frustrated us. Analyse the character motivations for clues. Use everything that we’ve already learned from our own lives to try connecting dots and filling gaps.
Just as they’re a source of entertainment and joy, stories affect the brain in that they’re intellectual puzzles. They engage our cognitive faculties and help us to foster critical thinking skills. Which is particularly obvious when we look at folk or fairy tales.
Once upon a time? Think bigger.
“Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history”, says Jeremy Hsu in his Scientific American Mind paper The Secrets of Storytelling.
Every ancient culture shows evidence of folk tales. Literally every single one. Every people weaves narratives, and the same story characteristics pop up all over the globe in these ancient, unconnected stories.
Fairy tales are a particularly rich example of our oral storytelling tradition. They’re filled with moral conundrums and sharpen the critical thinking skills of their listeners. And they teach children how to start stretching their cognitive muscles.
I was recently gifted a copy of Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales. As well as being a lovely read, it’s a genuinely fascinating book. It’s a collection of 100-ish woman-centric fairy tales from around the world, all lovingly transcribed by Carter. Some of the stories she’s telling are ancient beyond measure, and have been passed down from elder to child over countless generations.
In her intro, Carter acknowledges that by writing down these traditionally spoken stories, she’s fundamentally changing their nature.
“For most of human history, ‘literature’, both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written – heard not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world.”
She’s collected these tales and copied them almost verbatim, with only enough editing to make them cohesive and clear - resisting that writerly urge to always ‘improve’****. The old English fairy tales she chose were familiar to me, obviously, as were many of the European stories and some of those from cultures further afield.
But even the ones that were entirely unfamiliar in content still tickled at the bit of my brain where familiarity lives. Because their shapes are (for the most part) entirely recognisable.
The presence of these strikingly similar folk and fairy tales, seen across vastly different cultures, evidences how storytelling is a universal human trait. And shows that it’s always been a primary vehicle to convey messages we deem crucial for life.
Although they’re all unique unto themselves, most of Carter’s fairy tales broadly follow one of three narrative patterns. Because all stories (at least according to people like literary Darwinism sympathiser Patrick Colm Hogan) follow one of three narrative patterns:
Romantic - where the story follows “the trials and travails of love”
Heroic - where the story deal with classic “power struggles” and the victory of a hero
Sacrificial - either focussing on “agrarian plenty versus famine” or “societal redemption”
Which basically covers off the three most basic needs of humankind: food, sex and society. The ubiquity of these fundamental story forms hints at intrinsic templates in the human mind for making sense of our most primal drivers. From the European woods of the Grimm Brothers to the myths of Indigenous Americans and ancient Mesopotamians we can find restless youths testing the same romantic bonds. We see underdogs rising up to become the same heroic champion. We see communities threatened and then restored by the same sacrifice.
Whether metaphorically or literally, these fairy tale archetypes act as a kind of narrative instruction manual as they pass down. Showing us how to structure meaning around the core experiences perpetuating our species. Their cross-cultural consistency implies, even if we didn’t have the brain scans to back it up until now, that storytelling taps into our neural programming.
So we’re compelled by our own neurology, curiosity and history to tell stories. I can’t help but wonder…
Did we make storytelling into a pillar of human society by prizing the act of spinning a narrative? Or has storytelling shaped society using its own intrinsic power?
The relationship between storytelling, the human brain, and the fabric of society is a chicken-and-egg paradox. On one level, our reverence for masterful storytellers, eagerness to consume narratives, and the impact of storytelling-induced neurological pairing on relationships, has elevated the art to an exalted status that’s woven inextricably into the foundations of civilisation.
Skilled skalds and oral historians were a community’s backbone, serving as the esteemed keepers of cultural lore. The great myth cycles and heroic epics we still rehash and Hollywoodise today are only there because of the painstaking preservation and commitment of many generations of storytellers.
But there’s also a case that storytelling’s role was more primordial. That the ability to imagine, construct and convey symbolic narratives was integral to humans coalescing into complex social groups in the first place. That the hunter-gatherer bands who first told one another stories around their newfangled campfires, and then painted them onto the walls of their caves, were already bought into the power of the practice. And their storytelling prowess made them so successful as a species.
Because it’s stories that allowed us to cooperate as societies expanded. Myths, religions and rituals bound together the belief systems of our ancestors. They still rule our society now. (Consider, for example, the massive storified myth of money - which has no value beyond the narrative we’ve constructed around it.)
So perhaps stories didn’t turn into something venerated and celebrated once societies were established. Maybe they were actually one of the core innovations that made societal organisation possible from the start. And that’s why they have such a massive, measurable impact on our neurological processes.
Or maybe I’m talking out of my hoop
I’m guessing that neither storytelling nor society superseded the other. I’m no anthropologist, I just feel big feelings about stories, so maybe this is all utter claptrap. But I reckon that storytelling does play a massive role in the roots of early man.
The most successful groups of early humans were the ones who worked together most successfully. And the most culturally successful civilisations lauded and reinforced the skills of master storytellers as indispensable vessels of wisdom and culture. Which is a self-feeding cycle. The better you are at telling, and hearing, stories, the more primed your brains are to pair. The more paired your brains are, the more closely you can work together.
Ergo, the humans who were best at storytelling were best at cooperation. Which gave them a massive societal boost. We’re not born knowing how to make fire. We don't instinctively use complex tools. We can't weave cloth without learning how. We can't do anything, really, without listening to the advice of the stories the generations have passed down.
A product and architect of society in equal measure, storytelling is both the descriptive mirror and prescriptive blueprint for how our species makes sense of itself and the world we inhabit.
So the storytelling lessons of neuroscience, psychology and anthropology are clear. We must traverse the path another has trodden. Allow them to walk us through it, whispered word by whispered word. Allow ourselves to be borne along by the waves of their brain, and take their story into our own. Pair our brains, over and over again, with all the people we can.
It’s what we’re made to do, after all.
*gossip is such a massive part of being a person that it actually makes up 65% of our speaking time. So, if you’re part of a digital-first team, consider booking in some Teams time to chew the fat, separate from your brass tacks chatter.
**this is called “narrative transportation”. It’s what’s happening if you’ve ever been so enraptured by a story that you feel as though you’re part of the story. It’s one of my absolute favourite things. Partly because I love the peculiar paradox that you can’t control when it happens, and trying to force yourself into a state of narrative transportation is a surefire way of never getting there. U just gotta let it be yo. I’m writing a follow up post on narrative transportation, because it’s too big to go into here, but here’s some info if you must read about it right NOW.
***this phrase has nothing to do with brainwaves, it stems from early radio broadcasting. If two radio stations were literally on the same wavelength, you’d hear them both at the same time on your radio. Which would be extremely confusing, unless the two stations cooperated extremely effectively.
****in quotes because we all know how often that ‘improvement’ actually takes something deliciously pure from a story.
