The Science of Storytelling. Уилл Сторр
‘huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.’
Researchers recently tested this idea that clichéd metaphors become ‘worn-out’ by overuse. They scanned people reading sentences that included action-based metaphors (‘they grasped the idea’), some of which were well-worn and others fresh. ‘The more familiar the expression, the less it activated the motor system,’ writes the neuroscientist Professor Benjamin Bergen. ‘In other words, over their careers, metaphorical expressions come to be less and less vivid, less vibrant, at least as measured by how much they drive metaphorical simulations.’
In a classic 1932 experiment, the psychologist Frederic Bartlett read a traditional Native American story to participants and asked them to retell it, by memory, at various intervals. The War of the Ghosts was a brief, 330-word tale about a boy who was reluctantly compelled to join a war party. During the battle, a warrior warned the boy that he had been shot. But, looking down, the boy couldn’t see any wounds on his body. The boy concluded that all the warriors were actually just ghosts. The next morning the boy’s face contorted, something black came out of his mouth, and he dropped down dead.
The War of the Ghosts had various characteristics that were unusual, at least for the study’s English participants. When they recalled the tale over time, Bartlett found their brains did something interesting. They simplified and formalised the story, making it more familiar by altering much of its ‘surprising, jerky and inconsequential’ qualities. They removed bits, added other bits and reordered still more. ‘Whenever anything appeared incomprehensible, it was either omitted or explained,’ in much the same way that an editor might fix a confusing story.
Turning the confusing and random into a comprehensible story is an essential function of the storytelling brain. We’re surrounded by a tumult of often chaotic information. In order to help us feel in control, brains radically simplify the world with narrative. Estimates vary, but it’s believed the brain processes around 11 million bits of information at any given moment, but makes us consciously aware of no more than forty. The brain sorts through an abundance of information and decides what salient information to include in its stream of consciousness.
There’s a chance you’ve been made aware of these processes when, in a crowded room, you’ve suddenly heard someone in a distant corner speaking your name. This experience suggests the brain’s been monitoring myriad conversations and has decided to alert you to the one that might prove salient to your wellbeing. It’s constructing your story for you: sifting through the confusion of information that surrounds you, and showing you only what counts. This use of narrative to simplify the complex is also true of memory. Human memory is ‘episodic’ (we tend to experience our messy pasts as a highly simplified sequences of causes and effects) and ‘autobiographical’ (those connected episodes are imbued with personal and moral meaning).
There’s no single part of the brain that’s responsible for such story making. While most areas have specialisms, brain activity is far more dispersed than scientists once thought. That said, we wouldn’t be the storytellers we are if it wasn’t for its most recently evolved region, the neocortex. It’s a thin layer, about the depth of a shirt collar, folded in such a way that fully three feet of it is packed into a layer beneath your forehead. One of its critical jobs is keeping track of our social worlds. It helps interpret physical gestures, facial expressions and supports theory of mind.
But the neocortex is more than just a people-processor. It’s also responsible for complex thought, including planning, reasoning and making lateral connections. When the psychologist Professor Timothy Wilson writes that one of the main differences between us and other animals is that we have a brain that’s expert at constructing ‘elaborate theories and explanations about what is happening in the world and why,’ he’s talking principally about the neocortex.
These theories and explanations often take the form of stories. One of the earliest we know of tells of a bear being chased by three hunters. The bear is hit. It bleeds over the leaves on the forest floor, leaving behind it all the colours of autumn, then manages to escape by climbing up a mountain and leaping into the sky, where it becomes the constellation Ursa Major. Versions of the ‘Cosmic Hunt’ myth have been found in Ancient Greece, northern Europe, Siberia, and in the Americas, where this particular one was told by the Iroquois Indians. Because of this pattern of spread, it’s believed it was being told when there was a land bridge between what’s now Alaska and Russia. That dates it between 13,000 and 28,000 BC.
The Cosmic Hunt myth reads like a classic piece of human bullshit. Perhaps it originated in a dream or shamanistic vision. But, just as likely, it started when someone, at some point, asked someone else, ‘Hey, why do those stars look like a bear?’ And that person gave a sage-like sigh, leaned on a branch and said, ‘Well, it’s funny you should ask …’ And here we are, 20,000 years later, still telling it.
When posed with even the deepest questions about reality, human brains tend towards story. What is a modern religion if not an elaborate neocortical ‘theory and explanation about what’s happening in the world and why’? Religion doesn’t merely seek to explain the origins of life, it’s our answer to the most profound questions of all: What is good? What is evil? What do I do about all my love, guilt, hate, lust, envy, fear, mourning and rage? Does anybody love me? What happens when I die? The answers don’t naturally emerge as data or an equation. Rather, they typically have a beginning, a middle and an end and feature characters with wills, some of them heroic, some villainous, all co-starring in a dramatic, changeful plot built from unexpected events that have meaning.
To understand the basis of how the brain turns the superabundance of information that surrounds it into a simplified story is to understand a critical rule of storytelling. Brain stories have a basic structure of cause and effect. Whether it’s memory, religion, or the War of the Ghosts, it rebuilds the confusion of reality into simplified theories of how one thing causes another. Cause and effect is a fundamental of how we understand the world. The brain can’t help but make cause and effect connections. It’s automatic. We can test it now. BANANAS. VOMIT. Here’s the psychologist Professor Daniel Kahneman describing what just happened in your brain: ‘There was no particular reason to do so, but your mind automatically assumed a temporal sequence and a causal connection between the words bananas and vomit, forming a sketchy scenario in which bananas caused the sickness.’
As Kahneman’s test shows, the brain makes cause and effect connections even where there are none. The power of this cause and effect story-making was explored in the early twentieth century by the Soviet filmmakers Vsevolod Pudovkin and Lev Kuleshov, who juxtaposed film of a famous actor’s expressionless face with stock footage of a bowl of soup, a dead woman in a coffin and a girl playing with a toy bear. They then showed each juxtaposition to an audience. ‘The result was terrific,’ recalled Pudovkin. ‘The public raved about the acting of the artist. They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same.’
Subsequent experiments confirmed the filmmakers’ findings. When shown cartoons of simple moving shapes, viewers helplessly inferred animism and built cause-and-effect narratives about what was happening: this ball is bullying that one; this triangle is attacking this line, and so on. When presented with discs moving randomly on a screen, viewers imputed chase sequences where there were none.
Cause and effect is the natural language of