Gripping Yarns
We are all captivated by a good story. Like language, religion and music, stories are found in all cultures; they are part of what makes us human. Much of our conscious thought takes the form of an internal narrative in which we try to understand ourselves and our actions. We tell stories to make sense of the world, to communicate, and to influence and manipulate other people.
New researchers’ efforts are starting to reveal how stories affect us mentally and physically. As well as throwing new light on human psychology, their discoveries have practical potential.
The neuroscientist Michael Gazzangia has shown that the left hemisphere is specialised for interpreting our feelings, actions and experiences in the form of narrative. We also seem to use storytelling to reconcile our conscious and subconscious thoughts – as, for example, when we make choices based on subconscious reasoning and then invent fictions to justify and rationalise them.
Given the central role of internal narratives in human psychology, it is hardly surprising that stories told by other people also have a hold on us. In fact, the two modes of storytelling have a great deal in common. It would appear that we don’t just tell stories to make sense of ourselves; we actually adopt the stories of others as though we were the protagonist.
Brain-scanning research seems to confirm this. When a research team of Washington University, Missouri, ran functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on people reading a story or watching a movie, they found that the same brain regions that are active in real-life situations fire up when a fictitious character encounters an equivalent situation. What is more, the brain responds in the same way whether the story is in the form of words on a page or a realistic action video. The mental mechanisms evolved over millennia to interpret a spoken story seem to have no problem adapting to new media.
Stories can also manipulate how you feel, as anyone who has watched a horror movie or read a Charles Dickens novel will confirm. But what makes us empathise so strongly with fictional characters? Paul Zak from Clare-mont Graduate University, California, thinks the key is oxytocin, a hormone produced during feel-good encounters. As a pioneer in oxytocin research, Zak has developed various ways to stimulate its release. The most potent so far is an emotionally charged story. Getting volunteers to watch a 5-minute video telling the story of a 4-year-old boy with terminal brain cancer increased oxytocin levels an average 47 per cent compared with others, who saw an emotionally neutral film about the same boy going to the zoo. The change in oxytocin correlated with their degree of empathy.
Whether or not stories are processed in the reward centres, there is no doubt that we can become engrossed in them at the expense of other more pressing activities. From an evolutionary perspective, this suggests narrative must have some survival benefits. So what might these be?
One reason may be that stories allow us to try out ideas and imagine what might happen if we made different, perhaps more risky, choices. Another possibility is that stories act as social glue, binding people together in a common identity that is forged as they share the ideas and emotions prompted by narratives. Supporting this idea, Uri Hasson of Princeton University has found the same pattern of neural activity in different people watching the same movie.
Stories are also good for pure escapism, of course. Some movies suppress activity in regions of the brain usually engaged when we think about ourselves – including our past experiences and future plans. That is why engaging fiction is so appealing to us. It is doing a good job in absorbing us but not harming us.
Jessica Marshall, New Scientist