The Science of Storytelling

by Will Storr

  2.3

  As powerful a force as personality is, we’re more than just introverts, extraverts and the rest. Our traits work with our cultural, social and economic environments, as well as the experiences we go through, to construct a neural world for us to live in that is unique.

  There’s little more thrilling, in a story, than suddenly encountering a mind that is utterly different to ours while being revealing of character and the story to come. The protagonist’s point of view orients us in the story. It’s a map of clues, full of hints about its owner’s flaws and the plot they’re going to create. For me, it’s the single most underrated quality of fiction writing. Too many books and films begin with characters that seem to be mere outlines: perfect, innocent human-shaped nothings, perhaps with a bolt-on quirk or two, waiting to be coloured in by the events of the plot. Far better to find ourselves waking up, on page one, startled and exhilarated to find ourselves inside a mind and a life that feels flawed, fascinating, specific and real.

  Charles Bukowski manages this brilliantly in the opening paragraph of his novel Post Office:

  It began as a mistake.

  It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up on the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody, and so I went and the next thing I knew I had this leather sack on my back and was hiking around at my leisure. What a job, I thought. Soft! They only gave you a block or two and if you managed to finish, the regular carrier would give you another block to carry, or maybe you’d go back in and the soup would give you another, but you just took your time and shoved those Xmas cards in the slots.

  A world away from blue-collar Los Angeles, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth opens in Cricklewood Broadway at the scene of the attempted suicide of 47-year-old Archie Jones, ‘dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate … scrunched up in each fist he held his army service medals (left) and his marriage licence (right), for he had decided to take his mistakes with him … He wasn’t the type to make elaborate plans – suicide notes and funeral instructions – he wasn’t the type for anything fancy. All he asked for was a bit of silence, a bit of shush so he could concentrate … He wanted to do it before the shops opened.’

  In most of the best contemporary fiction, objects and events aren’t usually described from a God-like view, but from the unique perspective of the character. As in life, everything we encounter is a component not of objective external reality, but of that character’s inner neural realm – the controlled hallucination that, no matter how real it seems, exists only in their head and is, in its own way, wrong. In fiction, it might not be going too far to say all description works as a description of character.

  In an electrifying passage from his novel Another Country, James Baldwin shows Rufus Scott – a doomed African-American trying to survive in 1950s America – walking into a Harlem jazz club. Baldwin’s description of the saxophonist playing on the stage crackles with as much information about Scott, his world and his frustrated attempts at controlling it, as it does about the musician, who he perceives,

  wide-legged, humping the air, filling his barrel chest, shivering in the rags of his twenty-odd years, and screaming through the horn Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? And again Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? This, anyway, was the question Rufus heard, the same phrase, unbearably endlessly, and variously repeated with all the boy had … the question was terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he had received the blow from which he never would recover and this no one wanted to believe. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?

  2.4

  Culture is another route by which characters in life and fiction become the flawed and peculiar people they are. We often think of ‘culture’ as surface phenomena, such as opera and literature and modes of dress, but culture is actually built deeply and directly into our model of the world. It forms part of the neural machinery that constructs our hallucination of reality. Culture distorts and narrows the lens through which we experience life, exerting a potent influence us, whether by dictating the moral rules we’ll fight and die to defend or defining the kinds of foods we’ll perceive as delicious. The Japanese eat hachinoko, a delicacy made from baby bees. The Korowai of Papua New Guinea eat people. Americans consume ten billion kilograms of beef a year, while in India, where cows are sacred, a vigilante might kill you for eating a steak sandwich. Orthodox Jewish wives shave their heads and wear wigs, lest any alluring trace of hair be glimpsed by dirty mortals. The Waorani of Ecuador wear almost nothing at all.

  Such cultural norms are incorporated into our models in childhood, a period in which the brain is rapidly working out who it needs to be in order to best control its particular environment. Between the ages of zero and two, it generates around 1.8 million neural connections every second. It remains in this state of increased malleability – or ‘plasticity’ – until late adolescence or early adulthood. It learns, in part, through playing. Lots of animals enjoy these pleasurable, rule-based, exploratory interactions, including dolphins, kangaroos and rats. But our domestication, and the highly complex social realm we must learn to control, has elevated the importance of play in humans. It’s the main reason we have such greatly extended childhoods.

  We’ve evolved different forms of play, from games to education to storytelling. Play, including storytelling, is typically overseen by adults who tell children what’s fair and not fair, what’s of value and not, and how we should behave, punishing and rewarding when we act in accordance, or not, to the models of our culture. Caregivers don’t merely read morally charged stories to their children, they often add their own narration, underlining the narrative’s message. Play is critical for the making of social minds. One study into the backgrounds of sociopathic murderers found no connection between them apart from an extreme lack of play, or a history of abnormal play such as sadism and bullying, in the childhoods of 90 per cent of them.

  It’s in our first seven years that culture mostly gets built into our models, honing and particularising our neural realm. Western children are raised in a culture of individualism which was birthed around 2,500 years ago in Ancient Greece. Individualists tend to fetishise personal freedom and perceive the world as being made up of individual pieces and parts. This gives us a set of particular values that strongly influence the stories we tell. According to some psychologists, it’s a mode of thinking that arose from the physical landscape of Ancient Greece. It was a rocky, hilly, coastal place, and therefore poor for large group endeavours like farming. This meant you had to be something of a hustler to get by – a small business person tanning hides, perhaps, or foraging or making olive oil or fishing. The best way of controlling that world, in Ancient Greece, was by being self-reliant.

  Because individual self-reliance was the key to success, the all-powerful individual became a cultural ideal. The Greeks sought personal glory and perfection and fame. They created that legendary competition of self versus self, the Olympics, practised democracy for fifty years and became so self-focused they felt compelled to warn of the dangers of runaway self-love in the story of Narcissus. This conception of the individual as the locus of their own power, free to choose the life they wanted, rather than being slave to the whims of tyrants, fates and gods, was revolutionary. It ‘changed the way people thought about cause and effect,’ writes the psychologist Professor Victor Stretcher, ‘heralding in Western civilisation’.

  Compare this pushy, freedom-loving self to the one that emerged in the East. The undulating and fertile landscape in Ancient China was perfect for large groupish endeavours. Getting by would have probably meant being a part of a sizeable wheat- or rice-growing community or working on a huge irrigation project. The best way of controll
ing the world, in that place, was ensuring the group, rather than the individual, was successful. That meant keeping your head down and being a team player. This collective theory of control led to a collective ideal of self. In the Analects, Confucius is recorded as describing ‘the superior man’ as one who ‘does not boast of himself’, preferring instead the ‘concealment of his virtue’. He ‘cultivates a friendly harmony’ and ‘lets the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection’. He could hardly be more different than the pushy Westerner emerging seven thousand kilometres away.

  For the Greeks, the primary agent of control was the individual. For the Chinese, it was the group. For the Greeks, reality was made up of individual pieces and parts. For the Chinese, it was a field of interconnected forces. Out of these differences in the experience of reality come different story forms. Greek myths usually have three acts, Aristotle’s ‘beginning, middle and end’, perhaps more usefully described as crisis, struggle, resolution. They often starred singular heroes battling terrible monsters and returning home with treasures.

  This was individualist propaganda, transmitting the notion that one courageous person really could change everything. These story outlines begin influencing a Western child’s emerging self surprisingly early. On being asked by researchers to spontaneously tell a story, one three-year-old girl in the US produced a perfect sequence of crisis-struggle-resolution: ‘Batman went away from his mommy. Mommy said, “Come back, come back.” He lost and his mommy can’t find him. He ran like this to come home. He eat muffins and he sat on his mommy’s lap. And then him have a rest.’

  Stories weren’t like this in Ancient China. This was a realm so other-focused there was practically no real autobiography for two thousand years. When it did finally emerge, life stories were typically told stripped of the subject’s voice and opinions and they were positioned not at the centre of their own lives but as a bystander looking in. Rather than following a straightforward pattern of cause and effect, Eastern fiction often took the form of Ryu–nosuke Akutagawa’s ‘In A Bamboo Grove’, in which the events surrounding a murder are recounted from the perspectives of several witnesses – a woodcutter, a priest, a policeman, an elderly woman, the accused murderer, the victim’s wife, and finally from a spirit medium channelling the victim himself. All these accounts somehow contradict each other, with the reader left to puzzle out their meaning for themselves.

  In such stories, according to the psychologist Professor Uichol Kim, ‘you’re never given the answer. There’s no closure. There’s no happily ever after. You’re left with a question that you have to decide for yourself. That’s the story’s pleasure.’ In Eastern tales that did focus on an individual, the hero’s status tended to be earned in a suitably group-first way. ‘In the West you fight against evil and the truth prevails and love conquers all,’ he said. ‘In Asia it’s a person who sacrifices who becomes the hero, and takes care of the family and the community and the country.’

  The Japanese form known as Kishõtenketsu comes with four acts: in act one (‘ki’) we’re introduced to the characters, in act two (‘sho’) the actions follow on, in act three (‘ten’) a twist that’s surprising or even apparently unconnected takes place and in the final act (‘ketsu’) we’re invited, in some open-ended way, to search for the harmony between it all. ‘One of the confusing things about stories in the East is there’s no ending,’ said Professor Kim. ‘In life there are not simple, clear answers. You have to find these answers.’

  Whereas Westerners enjoy having accounts of individual struggle and victory beamed into their neural realms, Easterners take pleasure from the narrative pursuit of harmony.

  What these forms reflect is the different ways our cultures understand change. For Westerners, reality is made up of individual pieces and parts. When threatening unexpected change strikes, we tend to reimpose control by going to war with those pieces and parts and trying to tame them. For Easterners, reality is a field of interconnected forces. When threatening unexpected change strikes, they’re more likely to reimpose control by attempting to understand how to bring those turbulent forces back into harmony so that they can all exist together. What they have in common is story’s deepest purpose. They teach lessons in control.

  2.5

  It takes time for a self, with all its flaws and peculiarities, to bend itself out of the universe. It begins with us recognising our image in the mirror. Our caregivers tell us stories about the past and the present, what’s happening around us and what we had to do with it. We begin to contribute to these little stories about ourselves. We realise we’re goal-directed – we want things and we try to get them. We grasp that we’re surrounded by other minds that are also goal-directed. We understand ourselves to be a certain category of human – a girl, a boy, working-class – of whom others have specific expectations. We have power and have done things. These pockets of story memory slowly begin to connect and cohere. They form plots that become imbued with character and theme. Finally, in adolescence, writes the psychologist Professor Dan McAdams, we endeavour to understand our life as a ‘grand narrative, reconstructing the past and imagining the future in such a way as to provide it with some semblance of purpose, unity and meaning’.

  Having undergone its adolescent narrative-making process, the brain has essentially worked out who we are, what matters, and how we should behave in order to get what we want. Since birth, it’s been in a state of heightened plasticity that has enabled it to build its models. But now it becomes less plastic and harder to change. Most of the peculiarities and mistakes that make us who we are have become incorporated into its models. Our flaws and peculiarities have become who we are. Our minds have been made up.

  Then the brain enters a state that’s valuable to understand for anyone interested in human conflict and drama. From being model-builders we become model defenders. Now that the flawed self with its flawed model of the world has been constructed, the brain starts to protect it. When we encounter evidence that it might be wrong, because other people aren’t perceiving the world as we do, we can find it deeply disturbing. Rather than changing its models by acknowledging the perspectives of these people, our brains seek to deny them.

  This is how the neurobiologist Professor Bruce Wexler describes it: ‘Once [the brain’s] internal structures are established they turn the relationship between the internal and external around. Instead of the internal structures being shaped by the environment, the individual now acts to preserve established structures in the face of environmental challenges, and finds changes in structure difficult and painful.’ We respond to such challenges with distorted thinking, argument and aggression. As Wexler writes, ‘we ignore, forget or attempt to actively discredit information that is inconsistent with these structures’.

  The brain defends our flawed model of the world with an armoury of crafty biases. When we come across any new fact or opinion, we immediately judge it. If it’s consistent with our model of reality our brain gives a subconscious feeling of yes. If it’s not, it gives a subconscious feeling of no. These emotional responses happen before we go through any process of conscious reasoning. They exert a powerful influence over us. When deciding whether to believe something or not, we don’t usually make an even-handed search for evidence. Instead, we hunt for any reason to confirm what our models have instantaneously decided for us. As soon as we find any half-decent evidence to back up our ‘hunch’ we think, ‘Yep, that makes sense.’ And then we stop thinking. This is sometimes known as the ‘makes sense stopping rule’.

  Not only do our neural-reward systems spike pleasurably when we deceive ourselves like this, we kid ourselves that this one-sided hunt for confirmatory information was noble and thorough. This process is extremely cunning. It’s not simply that we ignore or forget evidence that goes against what our models tell us (although we do that too). We find dubious ways of rejecting the authority of opposing experts, give arbitrary weight to some parts of their testimony and not others, lock onto th
e tiniest genuine flaws in their argument and use them to dismiss them entirely. Intelligence isn’t effective at dissolving these cognitive mirages of rightness. Smart people are mostly better at finding ways to ‘prove’ they’re right and tend to be no better at detecting their wrongness.

  It might seem odd that humans have evolved to be so irrational. One compelling theory has it that, because we evolved in groups, we’re designed to argue things out lawyer-style until the optimal way forward emerges. Truth, then, is a group activity and free speech an essential component. This would validate the screenwriter Russell T. Davies’s observation that good dialogue is ‘two monologues clashing. It’s true in life, never mind drama. Everyone is always, always thinking about themselves.’

  Because our models make up our actual experience of reality, it’s little wonder that any evidence which suggests they are wrong is profoundly unsettling. ‘Things are experienced as pleasurable because they are familiar,’ writes Wexler, ‘while the loss of the familiar produces stress, unhappiness and dysfunction.’ We’re so used to our aggressive model-defending responses – they’re such an ordinary part of being alive – we become inured to their strangeness. Why do we dislike people we disagree with? Why do we feel emotionally repulsed by them?

  The rational response, when encountering someone with alien ideas, would be to either attempt to understand them or shrug. And yet we become distressed. Our threatened neural models generate waves of sometimes overwhelming negative feelings. Incredibly, the brain treats threats to our neural models in the much same way as it defends our bodies from a physical attack, putting us into a tense and stressful fight-or-flight state. The person with merely differing views becomes a dangerous antagonist, a force that’s actively attempting to harm us. The neuroscientist Professor Sarah Gimbel watched what happened when people in brain scanners were presented with evidence their strongly held political beliefs were wrong. ‘The response in the brain that we see is very similar to what would happen if, say, you were walking through the forest and came across a bear,’ she has said.