Storytelling
We are wired for story, but what does that actually mean? Storytelling is an evolutionary act - it keeps us safe, passes on knowledge and is key to our survival and empathy.
Storytelling
Studies have shown that stories offer a unique opportunity to engage in “theory of mind” – our ability to understand and empathize with another’s mental state.
Sally Mallam • The Science of Storytelling
For most of our human history, storytelling was oral. Myths were spoken or sung by diverse storytellers who could select and modulate their narrative to best suit a given audience, emphasizing some aspects and ignoring others.
The Oral Tale
A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind — an effect that was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television.
Annie Murphy Paul • Opinion | Your Brain on Fiction (Published 2012)
On the biological level, two cerebral hemispheres of the cortex are specialized for different modes of information processing. The left hemisphere operates primarily in the verbal, sequential mode; the right hemisphere primarily in a spatial and simultaneous mode. This right hemisphere mode is often devalued by the dominant, verbal intellect.
Idries Shah • A Unique Form of Literature
the linear, cumulative mode of gathering knowledge is again contrasted with a holistic and tacit mode which can appear only when consciousness is organized differently.
Idries Shah • A Unique Form of Literature
storytelling is a powerful means of fostering social cooperation and teaching social norms, and it pays valuable dividends to the storytellers themselves, improving their chances of being chosen as social partners, receiving community support and even having healthy offspring.
Jeffrey Kluger • How Telling Stories Makes Us Human
“The gift of story is wisdom”
― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling
― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling
Meta Storytelling
One study compared subjects’ brain activity while reading two types of written material: technical passages and folk tales. There was no change in the level of activity in the left hemisphere, but the right hemisphere was more activated while the subject was reading the stories than while reading the technical material.
Sally Mallam • The Science of Storytelling
Technical material is almost exclusively logical. In stories, on the other hand, many things happen at once; the sense of a story emerges through a combination of style, plot, and evoked images and feelings.
Transcendence of ordinary consciousness is not this kind of belief but a discovery and a development inside our minds of a different kind of knowledge. It is not intellectual or emotional, either, but the development of a conscious insight.