Why we love stories

People love stories! Every single one of us. Our basic nature is that of the emotional "storyteller." And that's for a reason. This ground is nothing less than the basis of our civilization. The secret of homo sapiens' success on this planet.

At least that is an accepted theory in modern science. Why have Homo Sapiens been so much more successful than their physically superior cousins, the Neanderthals? Or any other hominid species that lived on Earth before or parallel to the Sapiens and obviously didn't win the fight for survival? What is our secret?

Survival through storytelling

It sounds quite simple: the ability to tell stories and to believe in them is why our species has been so successful so far. This has several evolutionary advantages:

On the one hand, stories create connections. When many individuals believe the same story, it connects us. It makes us a group, a unit.

Quality time around the campfire: Netflix didn't exist 70,000 years ago

Today we know that people in groups of up to 200 people can keep track of each other to some extent. Know each other and have some kind of relationship with each individual, you can classify people hierarchically and you know who is friends, relatives or enemies. From a group size of 200 members upwards it gets more complicated. Personal relationships between all individuals are no longer possible. This is where stories come into play. Legends of heroic deeds of a common ancestor told around the campfire in the evening, a religion through whose rituals one feels connected, or the belief in the value of a common currency - these stories create a sense of community and belonging.

The unifying power of stories made it possible for Homo sapiens to form large groups that vastly outnumbered the Neanderthal tribes.

On the other hand, important information can be conveyed through stories. In this way, the history of the clan can be passed down from generation to generation. Rules and warnings become - packed into stories - lessons for the offspring. Stories are instructive and trend-setting. Sometimes even essential for survival, for example when it comes to how your cousin escaped from a wild mammoth, or which herb saved the life of your neighbor's daughter.

To this day, stories still serve these important social functions, even if we're not always aware of them. Nation states, corporations, currencies, religions, human rights - they are all based on stories and our belief in them. These stories make possible the cooperation of thousands, even millions, of people who have never met each other.

People who have never met are welded together through stories.

The story of history

Our brains have probably been trained for stories for 70,000 years. The first stories were - logically - passed down orally. 40,000 years ago, our ancestors began capturing individual stories in paintings on cave walls. It was not until 35,000 years later that the Sumerians in Mesopotamia invented what was probably the first writing and numbering system. It served a very pragmatic purpose: it was used to record income, property, tax payments, and debt. Since at some point it became simply impossible to remember the amount of data of the steadily growing population, the step to writing was a logical consequence. However, prose texts were still a long time coming. This explains what has long been a proven fact:

Humans are far better at processing stories than numbers and facts. Our brains are biologically designed for it.

So storytelling is inherent in us. Every day we tell our partner, friends or family what has happened to us. It is said that 65% of our everyday communication takes the form of stories. If we want to get to know someone, we exchange experiences from the past. Or we report on personal experiences to warn other people about something or to give good advice. We do all of this without really thinking about it.

But what exactly is behind the way stories work? When and why do they work?

So far, we learned why storytelling is in our blood and the evolutionary benefits it had for our ancestors. In this part we would like to deal with the question of why stories work so well and what they trigger in our body.

The three E's

The secret super power of stories consists of three things:

Events Emotions Experiences

Events

Simply put, a story is made up of events. It doesn't matter whether many loud events take place in parallel or one after the other, or whether a quiet event develops over the entire length of the story. All that matters is that these events address the limbic system—the “old part” of our brain.

Scientists have found that words like "jump," "hit," or "sneak" stimulate our motor cortex, the area responsible for voluntary movement. On the other hand, when we read or hear terms like “coffee” or “perfume,” it stimulates the olfactory cortex, the area responsible for processing smells. This means that a good story activates the same areas of the brain that a real event would activate – including the corresponding emotions. So through stories we experience events in a similar way as if they were happening to us.

Emotions

We remember very emotional experiences particularly well. You can easily check that for yourself. What childhood experiences are still as present today as if they happened yesterday? Usually those that we associate with strong emotions, like fear or happiness. I can't remember what I ate for breakfast every day as a child. But I vividly remember the day I had a food fight with my sister in the kitchen, until breakfast was stuck to the walls and our mother scolded us.

Our experiences and the emotions associated with them are all stored in our so-called emotional experience memory, which is also located in the "old part" of our brain. Good storytelling speaks to that part of us and makes us emotionally empathize with a story.

Experiences

Precisely because good stories signal our brains as if we were experiencing them ourselves, they contain something very valuable: experiences. Stories offer us the opportunity to gain experiences, try things out, or experience emotions in a safe environment. Aristotle was already familiar with this phenomenon and called it »catharsis«. Of course, stories don't have exactly the same effect as when we experience an event first-hand. When an ax murderer invades your home, your fear of death may not compare to the shivers of joy you get when you see a horror movie at the cinema. But that is precisely the advantage of stories: they allow us to live through experiences and at the same time to analyze the situation on a rational level and from a safe distance.

Learn from stories

The meaning behind it? On the one hand, our brain hopes to learn something that prepares us for real situations. On the other hand is always looking for answers - both to the big questions of humanity, as well as to the small twists and turns of everyday life.

Stories tell us about change. Towards the end of the book, the protagonist is a different person, shaped by the events that happen to him in the course of the story. We can identify very well with that. That's another reason why we're such big story fans. Change is a big part of our lives and we spend a lot of time considering how to respond to it. It is therefore not surprising that the basic themes of stories remain the same across millennia and diverse cultures. They often come in different packaging, but themes such as growing up, the fear of death or the struggle between good and evil are universal and concern everyone. All over. Constant.

The biochemistry behind storytelling

The success of stories can be measured quite clearly in numbers. But you can also observe the influence of stories on a biochemical level. Different messengers play a role and the type of story determines which messenger is released and what it does.

A small selection:

Exciting stories

Release dopamine. The more exciting, the more dopamine is released - sounds logical. The well-known cliffhanger leaves us at the end of an exciting episode with fingernails chewed off, followed by tears - and in times of Netflix. It often leads to binge-watching of the entire season on a free Sunday afternoon, because that's how it is when one becomes emotionally invested in the story.

Dopamine enhances our attention, motivation and memory. By the way, all kinds of stories release dopamine – exciting stories tend to release higher amounts.

Touching stories

Oxytocin is often associated with pregnant women because they release a lot of it. It creates empathy, trust and bonding. Oxytocin is particularly stimulated by stories that are emotional and touching. In particular, NGOs working to help people in famine or to save the rainforest rely on oxytocin-inducing stories to increase our generosity in giving.

Funny stories

Trigger the release of endorphins. Everyone has probably heard the term before. Whether in connection with sex or sport, there is no doubt that it is always positive and is even known to many as a "happiness hormone". Endorphins cause you to be creative, relaxed, and focused.

Terrible and scary stories

Anyone who likes to watch horror films knows the pleasant shivers that we have already described in the "Experiences" section. Scary stories cause our bodies to release cortisol and adrenaline. On the one hand, this encourages attention (after all, you don't want to miss the woman who ran up the stairs against all reason being hacked to pieces by the ax murderer).

However, the two substances also bring less beautiful effects. Fear can limit our tolerance, creativity and memory. Our ability to make good decisions (see the woman running up the stairs).

In the cinema, the damage may be limited. But we all know from our everyday lives how fear and catastrophic scenarios try to influence our decisions. Not least in certain political camps, this type of storytelling is used to win over voters, to mobilize for a topic or to divide society (although propaganda can of course also use other types of storytelling).

So we're learning that well-told stories can affect the biochemistry of our brain, affecting how we feel and even how we behave.

The reason for this brings us full circle to the beginning of this article. Humans are deeply social beings and depend on getting along in larger groups. These biochemical processes in our body are the basis for large groups of people getting together and being enthusiastic about a common cause.