No Spoilers, Please! Why Curiosity Makes Us Patient
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,
Will Storr • The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better
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’.
Will Storr • The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better
We do not seek pleasure, we seek plot. Desire that obeys is boring. Desire that evades, withholds, arrives late but devastating? That’s the stuff of myth. That’s what keeps poets employed and therapists overbooked. We don’t want closure, we want cliffhangers. The ones that leave us pacing, rewinding, editing our own dialogue long after the credits... See more