Our Brain is Addicted to Stories

Stories Make Us Human

In our quest to extract meaning from the information flowing from our senses, narrative is our brains' biggest and favorite weapon. (1) Stories is how we humans make sense of the world - it is also how memes spread and become persistent.

Our brain is addicted to stories. Even when our body goes to sleep, our mind stays active all night, telling itself stories.

Getting our Fiction Fix

Why are stories so central to the human experience? Simple: they're our brain's favorite narcotic, an escape from the drudgery and boredom of everyday life. Fiction is a mental vacation: from the comfort of our couch, we can experience thrilling adventures, steamy romances, and nail-biting dramas. It's like emotional bungee jumping, minus the risk of actual bodily harm.

Life Lessons You Won't Learn the Hard Way

Our addiction to stories is a good thing, as at a fundamental level story is how we learn how to navigate life's problems. Human social life is intensely complicated, and the stakes are high - for each individual as well as for groups. Stories is how our brain gets to practice life without the pesky consequences of real-world mistakes. It is no surprise that the stories that resonate are those dealing with thorny problems, and the struggle to overcome. Far from being a passive listener, our brains engage in the story as a protagonist, our imagination gets fired up, and we experience the struggles and emotions vividly. There are benefits to being a couch potato after all! (2) (3)

Stories are also key to convey accumulated wisdom about the world across generations. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damaso put it, "The problem of how to make all this wisdom understandable, transmittable, persuasive, enforceable—of making it stick—was solved by storytelling.”

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Our World, Imagined: Where the Wild Things Really Are

Our addiction to stories is such that we're all living in two worlds simultaneously. There's the physical world where we stub our toes and eat sandwiches, and then there's the imaginary world that exists purely in our minds. This imaginary realm is so ubiquitous, it's like air - essential for our existence, yet often unnoticed. This coexistence of the real and imagined is a defining aspect of the human experience.

One of earliest known deities: Ishtar, Mesopotamian goddess of love, sex, and war

What populates this imaginary world? Myths and religions to start with, which address the human quest for meaning with stories that seek to answer existential questions. The holy books of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are full of stories, from creation to judgment day and the afterlife. Most religions share dominant stories that explain why things are the way they are. And, as Jonathan Gottschall points out in "The Storytelling Animal", religion epitomizes the power of story: sacred religious stories influence what we eat, how we dress, when we have sex, when to forgive and when to wage war. Most importantly, they address our spiritual thirst to connect to something larger than ourselves.

Oldest known coin

Other parts of our imaginary world include abstract concepts such as states, corporations, and human rights. None of these things exist outside the stories we invented and tell one another. Yet they play a critical role by enabling large numbers of people who don't know each other to cooperate successfully on the basis of shared beliefs and goals. Money is the most successful fiction ever told, as it makes the world go round. Money creates an ingenious universal system of mutual trust, enabling complete strangers to trade goods and collaborate to get things done.

The Power of Collective Imagination

The real magic happens when millions of people start believing in the same stories. Suddenly, these figments of imagination become forces that can move mountains (or motivate people to move them). Over time, we've woven increasingly intricate tales, enabling us to cooperate on an ever-larger scale and manage a more complex world. Imaginary entities like TikTok, the United States, and Apple wield unmatched sway over our daily lives. Think about this paradox for a moment - the most powerful forces governing our lives are elaborate figments of our collective imagination.

Storytelling is the invisible fabric that holds our world together. It's how we make sense of existence, learn without getting bruised, and cooperate on a scale that would astound our ancestors. So, the next time someone tells you to "stop living in a fantasy world", you can politely inform them that's precisely where humanity does its best work.

Trust, But Verify

By engaging with stories, we observe how different actions, decisions, and events are linked in cause-and-effect relationships. We assess the plausibility of explanations and their fit within the story's context of the story and enhance our understanding of the world. But for this understanding to be useful and effective, we need to constantly test and refine our assumptions and reasoning. This leads us to the next rung of cognitive capabilities supported by language, which we turn to next.

Next: Theory, the Uber-Story

(1) Much of the information presented here is gathered from "The Storytelling Animal. Stories Make us Human." by Jonathan Gottschall.

(2) As noted by Jonathan Gottschall. Also see note above.

(3) For the skeptics among you, several studies from the psychologists Keith Oakley and Raymond Mar have shown that people who read fiction have better social skills than people who don't. So much for the stereotype of the nerdy bookworm being ill at ease in society!

See: Exploring the Link Between Reading and Empathy and The Function of Reading is The Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience