You may think you can tell fact from fiction, but your brain doesn’t know the difference
WE ARE all captivated by a good story. In One Thousand and One Nights, the storyteller Scheherazade escapes execution dawn after dawn by telling her misogynist husband a nightly series of cliffhangers – each one prompting him to delay her death by one more day so he can find out how the tale unfolds. Today, we find ourselves cueing up yet another DVD episode of Mad Men at 2 am on a weeknight, knowing we are due at work within a few short hours, or avidly turning the pages of a trashy paperback when there are more productive things to be done. Why do we find stories so compelling?
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.
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Now 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: to generate more compelling movies and more effective institutions, and possibly even to keep us safe from attack.
Nobody has done more to highlight the central role of storytelling in human psychology than neuroscientist of the University of California, Santa Barbara. In studies of people in whom the connection between the two sides of the brain has been severed, he has shown that the left hemisphere is specialised for interpreting our feelings, actions and experiences in the form of narrative. In fact, Gazzaniga believes this is what creates our sense of a unified self. 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 (żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, 7 October 2006, p 32).
You are the star
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, as Daniel Morrow discovered more than two decades ago when he studied how people handle information when they read a story. Morrow, now at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, found that readers could more quickly answer questions about objects in the room where a fictional character was currently located than in other rooms in the story – and that the speed of answering was proportional to the physical distance of the room from the current setting. Likewise, research by Rolf Zwaan from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, has shown that readers responded more quickly to questions about events in a fictional character’s recent past than to questions about the character’s more distant experiences (). 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 published in 2009 seems to confirm this. When a team led by Jeffrey Zacks of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, ran functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) 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’s 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. “What I find really strange is the degree to which that neural activity is conserved,” Zacks says. 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 Claremont Graduate University, California, thinks the key is oxytocin, a hormone produced during feel-good encounters such as breastfeeding and sex. As a pioneer in oxytocin research, Zak has developed various ways to stimulate its release, including orchestrating situations where the subject of his experiment is trusted by a stranger. But the most potent so far is an emotionally charged story. “Of all the stimuli we’ve developed that release oxytocin, this one was the best,” says Zak. Getting volunteers to watch a 5-minute video telling the story of a 4-year-old boy with terminal brain cancer increased oxytocin levels by an average of 47 per cent compared with others who saw an emotionally neutral film about the same boy going to the zoo (). “People were very engaged in the movie,’ he says. “The change in oxytocin correlated with their degree of empathy.”
Zak reckons this explains why we can be lured into watching back-to-back episodes of series such as The Wire. “We are empathetically engaged. We are treating this as if it is our real family. We can’t help but care for these people.” What’s more, it feels good to do so, he says. That’s because oxytocin facilitates the release of the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin, which are associated with reward, pleasure and feelings of well-being.
Taking this idea a step further, Read Montague of Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg and William Casebeer of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Virginia, have started using fMRI to see what happens in the brain’s reward centres when people listen to a story. These are the areas that normally respond to pleasurable experiences such as sex, food and drugs. They are also associated with addiction. “I would be shocked if narrative didn’t engage the same kind of circuitry,” says Montague. That would certainly help explain why stories can be so compelling. “If I were a betting man or woman, I would say that certain types of stories might be addictive and, neurobiologically speaking, not that different from taking a tiny hit of cocaine,” says Casebeer.
Survival benefits
The research is on hold for now, but 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?
“It’s a useful way of transmitting information for survival: how you ought to react in a certain situation, who you ought to praise and blame, what kind of attitude you ought to have about individuals,” Casebeer reasons. Zwaan adds 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 or emotions prompted by the narrative. Supporting this idea, Uri Hasson of Princeton University has found the same patterns of neural activity in different people watching the same movie. Similarly, the brain activity of a person listening to a story becomes aligned with that of the person telling the story ().
“The brain activity of a person listening to a story becomes aligned with that of the person telling the story”
Stories are also good for pure escapism, of course. Rafi Malach of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, has shown from fMRI scans that some movies suppress activity in regions of the brain usually engaged when we think about ourselves – including our past experiences and future plans. Malach says the same neurological deactivation occurs when people “lose themselves” in other engrossing activities. Self-reflection can be distressing, he points out. “There is a lot of anxiety and fear. I think that is why engaging fiction is so appealing to us. It is doing a good job in absorbing you but not harming you.”
Understanding the mechanisms by which stories affect us can be put to practical use. Hasson has coined the term neurocinematics to describe its application to movie-making. His work reveals how some directors’ styles are particularly effective at synchronising the neural activity among members of the audience. “Hitchcock is the best example I have so far,” he says. “He was considered an expert of really manipulating the audience and turning them on and off as he pleased,” Hasson notes, and this shows up in the scans of people watching his films. Perhaps future directors could use these insights to control an audience’s experience. Hasson’s team has investigated how the order in which different scenes appear affects neural responses to a movie – which could help editors create either more enigmatic or more instantly comprehensible storylines, as required. Other researchers are using brain scans to analyse the impact of different versions of trailers to see which creates the strongest mental buzz (żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, 11 September 2010, p 8).
Human history is full of examples of the motivating power of a shared narrative – be it national, religious or focused on some other ideal – and Casebeer wants to investigate the possible military and political applications of a deeper understanding of this kind of storytelling. “One of my interests is in understanding how we can design institutions that more effectively promote moral judgement and development,” he says. He believes, for example, that the right stories could help military academies produce officers who are more willing to exercise moral courage.
Casebeer notes that a compelling narrative can seal the resolve of a suicide bomber, and suggests that developing “” could help deter such attackers. “It might be that understanding the neurobiology of a story can give us new insights into how we prevent radicalisation and how we prevent people from becoming entrenched in the grip of a narrative that makes it more likely that they would want to intentionally cause harm to others,” he says. Surely nothing would more forcefully illustrate the power of storytelling.
