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

At the start of a story, we’ll often meet a protagonist who is flawed in some closely defined way. The mistakes they’re making about the world will help us empathise with them. As the story gives us hints and clues about the causes of their errors, we’ll warm to their vulnerability and become emotionally engaged in their struggle.

‘The more familiar the expression, the less it activated the motor system,’ writes the neuroscientist Professor Benjamin Bergen. ‘In other words, over their careers, metaphorical expressions come to be less and less vivid, less vibrant, at least as measured by how much they drive metaphorical simulations.’

We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode.

Curiosity is shaped like a lowercase n. It’s at its weakest when people have no idea about the answer to a question and also when entirely convinced they do. The place of maximum curiosity – the zone in which storytellers play – is when people think they have some idea but aren’t quite sure.

For the Greeks, the primary agent of control was the individual. For the Chinese, it was the group. For the Greeks, reality was made up of individual pieces and parts. For the Chinese, it was a field of interconnected forces. Out of these differences in the experience of reality come different story forms. Greek myths usually have three acts, Arist

Estimates vary, but it’s believed the brain processes around 11 million bits of information at any given moment, but makes us consciously aware of no more than forty.

Causes and effects should be shown rather than told; suggested rather than explained. If they’re not, curiosity will be extinguished and readers and viewers will become bored. Just as bad, they’ll become alienated from the story. People should be free to anticipate what’s coming next and able to insert their own feelings and interpretations into wh

In Star Wars, when Han Solo boasts that his ship the Millennium Falcon ‘made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs’ we have the strange experience of knowing it’s an actor doing gibberish whilst simultaneously somehow feeling as if it’s real. The line works because of its absolute specificity and its adherence to what sounds like truth (the ‘K

culture is actually built deeply and directly into our model of the world. It forms part of the neural machinery that constructs our hallucination of reality. Culture distorts and narrows the lens through which we experience life, exerting a potent influence on us,