Science Says Stories are Empathy
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This is Part 3 of a 4-article series about a new theory of storytelling that tries to explain why we love stories and why they have the structure they have. In Part 1, I explained how stories have a clear underlying structure. In Part 2, I show how it’s due to evolution. In this one, I’ll explain how the brain works when listening to stories.
In my last article, I claimed that we’ve evolved to love stories because they teach us how other people solve problems. Is it true? What does science have to say about stories?
Stories are memorable
If I ask you what happened to the Red Riding Hood, you’d be able to tell me her story in a heartbeat. But if I ask you about the list of US presidents, you might not be able to go very far. Yet the tale of the Red Riding Hood contains much more information than the list of ~45 US presidents. Do we remember better the story because it’s a story instead of a list of facts?
Indeed, one of the facts that internet loves touting about stories is that they are 22 times more memorable than facts alone. It’s so common to find that claim that you’d assume it would have plenty of backing. I looked for the source of that claim for days, but I haven’t been able to find it…
However, there is some research supporting the memorability of stories. One paper showed that if you construct a story around sets of words, you can remember 6 to 7 times more words. This is unbelievable! Recall increased from 10%-20% without narrative to 80%-90% with narrative. What kind of intervention have you ever seen that increases anything from a 10% performance to 90%?
Another paper looked at what people remembered from 400–500 word passages. When the passages had a narrative form, recall was about twice as high as without narrative.
Clearly, stories are memorable. It’s not just intuitively right, it’s well established scientifically. What else does science know about stories?
Stories are Virtual Reality
Imagine that you are sitting on a leather chair. Your fingers travel along the seams on the armrest, towards the table. They move towards a cup of hot coffee, touch the porcelain, slip the fingers around the handle, grab the cup and get it close to your face. The smell of hot coffee invades your nose. You tilt the cup just enough that your lips touch the porcelain, and a little stream of coffee oozes on your tongue.
What happened in your brain? Did you notice? Were you able to picture the scene like you were there? This is exactly what your brain experienced. It can’t tell the difference between living something and hearing about it.
An experiment discovered that if you hear somebody talk about the smell of something, your brain activates exactly the same areas as if you were smelling that thing yourself. Remember the coffee before? When you read about it, your brain couldn’t tell whether you were hearing about it or actually smelling it yourself.
The same thing happens with touch and with movement. If you hear about somebody moving, or touching a surface, your brain thinks you’re experiencing that yourself.
There’s probably more senses that trigger the same behavior and we just haven’t discovered it yet. But the pattern is clear: if you hear somebody experiencing something, your brain behaves as if you were experience it yourself.
Isn’t that crazy? It’s like stories evoking sensual information behaved like virtual reality! As you tell the story, your brain thinks you’re there.
Stories are Telepathy
It gets better. When an audience hears or watches a story, the brains of every member of the audience starts synchronizing.
Let’s pause for a second… Remember the last time you were in the cinema? All the people around you had the same brain activity as yours. If the audience is not able to understand what’s going on—like if a different language is spoken—or if what’s being told is not a story, then people’s brain activity will decouple and brain activity will be different for every person. But if they’re hearing a story—even a pretty mediocre one—suddenly the brains start activating and working in unison.
It gets even weirder. If it’s a person telling a story, the brains of the storyteller and of the audience synchronize. Remember the last time somebody was telling you a story about what they did this weekend? That’s right: you and the other person had the exact same brain activity.
How crazy is that? It’s like stories were telepathy: the storyteller is able to implant what he’s thinking into somebody else’s brain just by telling a story.
If you like neuroscience, you might start recognizing some patterns here. Before, I told you that your brain can’t tell the difference between living something and hearing about it. Now, I’m telling you that a storyteller and his audience share the same brain activity. This might remind you… mirror neurons.
Mirror neurons are types of neurons that fire both when an animal or person does something and when the same individual observes the same action performed by another. It is likely that mirror neurons are at the root of both our ability to live an experience we hear about, and get into somebody else’s brain through a story.
If you’re interested in this specific area, you should watch this TED Talk.
Stories are Empathy
Mirror neurons are traditionally linked to another concept: Theory of Mind. It’s the ability to realize that somebody else might think something different than you, and to empathize to understand what that other person is thinking.
Some research has discovered that stories—whether through books or movies—improve the ability of kids to put themselves into somebody else’s shoes. Put in another way, Stories are a way to teach what somebody else is thinking.
Another paper has shown how people who consume narrative are better able to understand what other people think and how they solve their social problems.
Putting everything together
We have shown that stories are more memorable than facts alone; that vivid descriptions in stories make people think they’re experiencing the story themselves; that when listening to a story, the storyteller and the audience’s brains synchronize; and that stories enable us to get into somebody else’s brain and understand what they think.
Science supports that, when we hear a story, we get so engaged that we believe we’re there, we think the same thing as the storyteller, we understand what they’re thinking and how they navigate the world, and we remember that.
Put in another way: according to science, stories are a way to get into somebody else’s brain to see how they’ve solved their problems, and they’re so powerful that we believe we’re there ourselves and remember them much longer.
This is exactly what we predicted when we suggested that we’ve evolved to love stories because they teach us how others solve problems.
But if this is the case, then stories must have the structure of problem-solving. Is this the case? Find out in the 4th and last article of this series.
If you’re interested in this topic, you should watch my TEDx Talk about it. If you want to read the last article in this 4-part series, or if you like storytelling structure in general, follow me. I have written about different storytelling topics, such as the storytelling structure of Star Wars — which became an Amazon best-selling book — , the future of Game of Thrones characters, or why The Hateful Eight is non-linear.
