Stories shape our world. A cognitive scientist explains how to understand our narrative brain and regain some agency
The Narrative Brain: The Stories Our Neurons Tell (Yale University Press) by Fritz Breithaupt
Our world is made of stories. From idle gossip with work colleagues to stories of political tribes and nation states, our brains weave threads of narrative that form the tapestry of experienced reality. We are so attuned to this narrative thinking that the stories we tell have huge power over us, allowing the weakest individual to stand up against impossible odds, or leading whole nations into darkness.
Yet these stories are so ubiquitous, so fundamental to what makes us human, that they can become invisible, leaving us vulnerable to their seductive power. It is only through analysing the stories that shape our world that we can control them and retain agency, which is exactly what Fritz Breithaupt sets out to do in his fascinating new book.
Breithaupt is professor of Germanic studies and cognitive sciences at the University of Indiana, and he takes an interdisciplinary approach to the investigation. The book explores political history, literary analysis, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Breithaupt uses these complementary strands of enquiry to build a methodical and coherent picture of the psychological mechanisms and evolutionary roots behind our narrative thinking.
The keystone of his argument is a storytelling experiment conducted in his lab that was based on a children’s parlour game. The “telephone” game (aka “Chinese whispers”) involves the retelling of a story within a group. As it changes considerably from person to person, there are often hilarious results. Breithaupt saw the unique value of games like this to investigate the dynamic process of story propagation, which in turn sheds light on what is truly important to us when we engage in narrative thinking. Participants were asked to read a short story and then retell it in their own words, which was then passed to someone else to repeat the process. The study involved 12,000 participants and around 19,000 retellings. His team then analysed the input and output for all stages, measuring the length of the story, as well as the degree of information retention and emotional valence.
In some ways, the results were unsurprising. There was a tendency to shorten stories, with a drop in length of around 30 per cent for each retelling. There was also a very poor level of information retention, with events, characters and perspectives changing dramatically. But what was striking was that there was an incredibly strong retention in emotional valence, in the intensity and type of emotion expressed, whether joy or fear or frustration. If characters, events and settings can change, but the emotions remain consistent, Breithaupt concludes that the thing most important to us when we engage in narrative thinking is the communication of emotions. The reason we tell stories, he suggests, is to utilise our “mobility of consciousness”. We project our minds into the place of others to share experiences and emotions. This allows us to simulate how we might feel and react in similar circumstances, leaving us better equipped to deal with our unpredictable environment.
Breithaupt saves some of the most fascinating material for the epilogue, where he discusses some of the cultural and political narratives that have shaped our world over the last few years. He questions the different ways we might respond to the video of George Floyd’s murder, depending on whether we identify with a bystander or with Floyd himself. He discusses how the narratives surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have changed over the course of the war. These are some of the strongest parts of the book, so their brevity seemed like a missed opportunity. However, his focus on the mechanisms that underpin our narrative brains might help equip the reader to interrogate our world of stories for themself.
The book closes with a discussion of whether we need to reject narrative thinking in light of the power these stories have to manipulate us. Breithaupt’s conclusion is that we need more, not less, narrative thinking. We need to reject the allure of simple narratives that close down our thinking and lock us into a limited worldview. Instead, we should embrace a plurality of narratives that enrich and broaden our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
