Once upon a time in 1944, two professors – Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel – invited a group of undergraduates into their lab to view a short film. It was not exactly a blockbuster: The actors and scenery were black geometric shapes moving soundlessly around on a white background for two minutes.
Yet the motions alone, their pace and direction, were enough for almost all the viewers to interpret it as a story, with strong emotions and exciting action, centring on the rivalry of two triangles (one large and bullying, one small but brave) for the love of a circle.
The Heider and Simmel experiment demonstrated what we already know from our own experience: Humans are compulsive tellers and consumers of stories; we animate our world by attributing emotion and intention to things.
As soon as they can speak, children are willing to pretend that their toys have characters and are, for example, “chasing” each other, or “making friends.” Nor do we lose this childlike quality with age and experience: You will hear expert engineers say, “The plane wants to go left,” or distinguished chemists remark, “Oxygen likes to bond with other elements.” No wonder we call the scientific method a discipline: Thinking purely like a scientist requires unusual self-control and resistance to our storytelling instinct.
Ask practitioners in different fields, and you will get different, if complementary, answers.
Neuroscientists will point out that our senses generate far more data than our brains could process (one human eye transmits the same bit-rate as an Ethernet connection), so that we must find a way to reduce experience to some kind of memorable algorithm for future action.
Primatologists will add that humans are part of a mammalian order where individuals live in groups with shared responsibility for survival and complex social relationships: Stories – that is, gossip – is a life-or-death matter for us and our fellow apes.
Ask the psychopharmacologists and you get an even more basic answer: Stories make us feel more alive. The economist Paul Zack summarizes this in his 2009 study in The Annals of the New York Academy of Science: A sad, worrying or frightening event, whether real or fictional, is marked by a rise in blood levels of cortisol, a stress hormone associated with an increase in awareness and potential for action.
The progression of a story, with its guesses and speculations about the logical connections of events, stimulates production of dopamine, which links with the pleasurable sensation of learning or making sense of things.
Finally, the growing knowledge of and empathy with characters in the story – even when they are just triangles – triggers the release of oxytocin, which encourages nurturing, sociable behavior.
And the result of hearing a compelling story is not just a pleasurable experience, but a spur to action; people with higher oxytocin responses also give more generously to charitable causes.
So don’t be surprised when you see a car advertisement that tells you nothing about the car except that, if you buy it, you will meet your ideal life partner and raise a beautiful family. That is the way our brains like to be told things. There will always be time later to look up the facts; in the meantime, enjoy the story.
By Michael Kaplan, Edinburgh, UK