Storytelling

The reward for great honor and virtue is fame (kleos), which is what guarantees meaning and value to one’s life. Dying without fame (akleos) is generally considered a disaster, and the warriors of the Homeric epics commit the most outrageous deeds to avoid dying in obscurity or infamy

A study published in February 2012 at Emory University found that a region of the brain important for sensing texture through touch, called the parietal operculum, is also activated when someone listens to a sentence with a description of texture, but only if a metaphor is used

Unlike factual text or legal documents, which benefit from being inscribed, a story once written down — even one rich in analogy and metaphor that holds within it multiple levels of meaning — can, over time, become believed to be literally true, offer “right” or “wrong” answers, and stipulate ways of thinking or belief as well as modes of behavior,... See more

Catharsis : Stories allow us to experience a wide range of emotions in a safe environment. This emotional release, or catharsis, can be therapeutic.

The ancient world gave no importance to authorship or ownership of stories and had no conception of copyright.

we next explored whether storytelling does in fact promote cooperation. Nearly 300 Agta, from 18 separate camps, were asked to name the best storytellers. To assess cooperation, individuals were also asked to play a simple resource allocation game where players were given a number of tokens (representing rice) and asked to distribute these between ... See more

The intersection of oral and written storytelling happened first in Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, about 2,500 years before Homer was first written down. Originally, scribes used this new technology only for bookkeeping, recording inventory, or for the equivalent of today’s text messages. But once the first scribes in Ur realized that writing ... See more

in esoteric tradition is to receive unfamiliar information. Teaching stories purposely contain certain specially chosen patterns of events. The repeated reading of the story allows these patterns to become strengthened in the mind of the person reading them. Since many of the events are improbable and unusual, the reading of the stories begins to c... See more

One story, “The sun and the moon”, clearly communicated norms of sex equality and cooperation. “There is a dispute between the sun (male) and the moon (female) to illuminate the sky. After a fight, where the moon proves to be as strong as the sun, they agree in sharing the duty – one during the day and the other during the night.”