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It’s testament to the powers of the storytelling brain that many psychologists argue that human language evolved in the first place in order to tell tales about each other.
Will Storr • The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better
Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds.
Jonathan Gottschall • The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
Story, in other words, continues to fulfill its ancient function of binding society by reinforcing a set of common values and strengthening the ties of common culture.
Jonathan Gottschall • The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
In a groundbreaking 2010 study,
Yuval Noah Harari • Homo Deus
The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.
Jonathan Gottschall • The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
Story is what brain does. It is a ‘story processor’, writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, ‘not a logic processor’
Will Storr • The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better
'you could say stories are an especially useful storage format, a type of compression, and consciousness is the program that unpacks it.'
Greg Jackson • The Dimensions of a Cave
Harari posits that our ancestors’ capacity to imagine nonexistent things was the key to everything, for it allowed them to communicate better.