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

We think of the act of ‘seeing’ as the simple detection of colour, movement and shape. But we see with our pasts.

Start, every time, with this inviolable rule: the scene must be dramatic. It must start because the hero has a problem, and it must culminate with the hero finding him or herself either thwarted or educated that another way exists.’

Every scene in a compelling story is a cause that triggers our childlike curiosity about its potential effects.

Cause and effect is a fundamental of how we understand the world. The brain can’t help but make cause and effect connections. It’s automatic.

The brain sorts through an abundance of information and decides what salient information to include in its stream of consciousness.

The world we experience as ‘out there’ is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It’s an act of creation by the storytelling brain.

Even sleep is no barrier to the brain’s story-making processes. Dreams feel real because they’re made of the same hallucinated neural models we live inside when awake.

Turning the confusing and random into a comprehensible story is an essential function of the storytelling brain. We’re surrounded by a tumult of often chaotic information. In order to help us feel in control, brains radically simplify the world with narrative.

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 ideolog

Humans have an extraordinary thirst for knowledge. Storytellers excite these instincts by creating worlds but stopping short of telling readers everything about them.