Anne Muehlethaler

The place of maximum curiosity – the zone in which storytellers play – is when people think they have some idea but aren’t quite sure. Brain scans reveal that curiosity begins as a little kick in the brain’s reward system: we crave to know the answer, or what happens next in the story,

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

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.

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.’

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

I believe the focus on plot should be shifted onto character. It’s people, not events, that we’re naturally interested in. It’s the plight of specific, flawed and fascinating individuals that makes us cheer, weep and ram our heads into the sofa cushion. The surface events of the plot are critical, of course, and its structure ought to be present,

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’.

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

Being a domesticated species, we’re most interested of all in the cause and effect of other people. We’re endlessly curious about them. What are they thinking? What are they plotting? Who do they love? Who do they hate? What are their secrets? What matters to them? Why does it matter? Are they an ally? Are they a threat? Why did they do that