The Neuroscience of Story, Part 1: All About Survival
Long story shortest. Our brains evolved to recognize stories as necessary for survival—that’s why we always feel hooked by a compelling story.
Have you ever sat through a lecture that was boring you to tears? You are zoning out, scrolling on your phone, chatting with the person next to you, or just daydreaming of being on a boat outside Naples with a bottle of Tuscan Sangiovese (just me?). Then suddenly, the speaker says something like, “I actually saw this happen once. Two years ago, I was alone in Chicago in the middle of winter…” And without making a conscious decision, you find yourself immediately looking up at the speaker, leaning in, no longer thinking about that boat in the Tyrrhenian Sea. You never once say to yourself, “Oh, he’s going to tell a story. I think I’ll listen now.” You just do it.
There is something about a story—well-told ones at least—that gets hold of us. And that’s because our brains are literally wired for story.
I used to think of stories as those things we turn to when we want to escape reality (hello my good friend, The Office). But evolutionarily speaking, that’s actually the opposite purpose stories have served for us humans. In fact, one of the key differences between humans and every other living thing on Earth is our ability to tell stories. And it is a pivotal piece of what has allowed us to organize so effectively and “advance” so quickly.
We humans have been telling each other stories for a very, very long time. Some of the oldest cave drawings we’ve discovered feature story moments from our ancient ancestors. And it turns out, our ancestors didn’t start telling stories because they were bored on a Friday night and wanted some ghost stories around the campfire. The first stories humans would have told each other 10,000 years ago would have actually gone something like…
These berries are probably delicious and totally fine, though.
Hey y’all, I strongly suggest you don’t eat those yellow berries in the field by the east cave. I was with Gatherer Rebecca two days ago when we grabbed some of those berries. She popped a few in her mouth, then vomitted, and died. Right there on the spot. So…word to the wise.
Well, I’m paraphrasing a bit. But the point is that stories served as the most efficient form of communication we had for telling each other about our experiences so that others could either avoid the same mistakes or happen upon similar harvests. Storytelling became an essential tool for survival.
Over the millennia, story became our brains’ foundational operating system—its first language, so to speak. As story expert Lisa Cron says in her amazing book Story or Die (p. 25):
We’re wired to come to every story we encounter … asking one unconcious question: What am I going to learn here that will help me make it through the night? What will I learn that will help me survive in the physical world, and more importantly … the social world?
We’re almost never aware this is what’s going on. We just think the story is interesting. But the evolutionary reason why we pay attention to stories in the first place is that they might contain information that will help us navigate life more successfully. Remember the quote from Pádraig Ó Tuama in my previous post?
…the history of the word [story] holds meanings of ‘wise-man’ and the verb ‘to see.’ To tell a story well is to see wisely, I say to myself.
In human evolution, this is exactly why storytelling developed.
