What is story, and why tell stories?
In this article I will explore what story is and how we understand it. I will focus here on the origins of story with some exploration of the reasons why it seems so important to the human experience. Understanding the theory behind storytelling can be used to inform design and increase the impact of technologies utilizing language and culture, increasing the likelihood of bringing about change.
Some definitions
Let’s start with some definitions of story and storytelling before looking at the subject more closely.
Story and Narrative
Story and narrative, do these mean the same thing? And why is it important to distinguish between them?
…story is a sequence of events involving entities… A story is bound by the laws of time; it goes in one direction, starting at the beginning, moving through the middle, and arriving at the end.
Abbott, H. (2008)
Here Haven describes story in a way which encompasses narrative;
Story is not the information, the content. Story is a way of structuring information, a system of informational elements that most effectively create the essential context and relevance that engage receivers and enhance memory and the creation of meaning.
Haven 2007 – Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story
This is important framing for those telling a story, as with changes to narrative the same story can be told with greater impact, more social meaning and be more relevant to a specific audience.
Storytelling
Storytelling can be thought of as the art of how we communicate stories through narrative. Each culture shares narratives, each religion, even family units have certain stories passed down in ways culturally relevant to them. This is part of our human experience which makes us who we are, influencing how we see the world we live in. We pass information and experience through time over generations in the form of story.
Storytelling is part of how humans translate their individual private experience of understanding into a public culturally negotiated form.
Robin Mello – The Power of Storytelling: How Oral Narrative Influences Children’s Relationships in Classrooms
Story is relevant today for the same reasons it has been for thousands of years.
The importance of story, and its origins
Storytelling is one of the oldest, if not the oldest method of communicating ideas and images.
Mello (2001)
The earliest fossil evidence of Homo sapiens dates from around 300,000 years ago (Scerri et al. August 2018), with the earliest anatomically modern human skeleton dating to around 196,000 years ago Hammond, Ashley S.; Royer, Danielle F.; Fleagle, John G. (Jul 2017).
It’s fascinating to think of the first stories told and the form they may have taken. When did we start creating and sharing stories? What are the essential ingredients needed to create a simple story and which elements are essential for the art of narrative? Technological developments have given us new tools for storytelling which humanity has embraced wholeheartedly.
Consciousness
The ability of humans to understand and share stories wouldn’t be possible without consciousness for which it is less clear when and how it evolved and indeed how and why it exists. Various theories of mind have emerged from philosophy and science. It is thought that human consciousness is enabled by the unique properties of the mammalian neocortex enabling “global experiences of a surrounding world for guiding behaviour” (Eccles, 1992). Some of these theories are compatible with Darwin’s widely accepted theory of evolution, suggesting that consciousness may have evolved to where it is today as a result of natural selection, indicating it has been a significant survival factor. (Lindahl, 1997).
Imagination
Imagination helps make knowledge applicable in solving problems and is fundamental to integrating experience and the learning process (Wikipedia). Further, imagination can be expressed and exercised through narrative, with children often using narratives and pretend play for this. (Goldman, 1998).
Prefrontal synthesis is the most advanced component of active imagination, this involves mentally combining two or more objects together. It is thought to have emerged in humans around 70,000 years ago. Whereas prefrontal analysis allows for the mental breaking down of an object into its parts, this is thought to have emerged much earlier at around 3.3-2.5 million years ago. (Vyshedsky, Andrey, 2019).
The following image shows a history of the development of various components of imagination along with the age it is thought children acquire each.
It is thought that spoken language is around 60,000 to 100,000 years old (Anderson, 2012), which matches quite closely with the estimate of prefrontal synthesis.
Story creation likely became possible with prefrontal synthesis, and may also date within the last 70,000 years. If we use an estimate of 30 generations per thousand years, this equates to approximately 2100 generations of storytellers. This is a lot of opportunities for the development of storytelling and effective narrative.
Pattern processing
Superior pattern processing is the essence of the evolved human brain
Mattson (2014)
Mattson’s article lists some major superior pattern processing (SPP) abilities as language, invention, imagination, reasoning, and planning for the future and goes on to suggest that these have been key to human survival, leading to humans becoming the dominant species. Most of these abilities are part of the storytelling process, further validating the importance of storytelling for humans.
Memory
Framing experience is typically done in narrative form and there is evidence to suggest narrative is key to storing experience in memory. It is also suggested that framing is how we share memory within a culture (Bruner, 1990).
So, narrative has been used to impart important information over multiple generations.
Conclusion
The abilities listed in this article have allowed humans to create, share and experience stories. Stories give greater context to the wider world, expanding one’s worldview and experience of it. This has allowed the passing of information from one to another through generations which has likely increased survival chances as well as leading to beneficial sociocultural evolution.
The relationship between storyteller and audience has traditionally been an exchange with interactions, for the benefit of the individuals as well as the collective (eg family, tribe, nation etc).
The evolution of story is in fact, it seems to me, the story of human evolution.
It appears to me that story is the mechanism by which we exercise our minds and mental abilities, as well as the mechanism which we have evolved for sharing essential information. This validates the usefulness of both fictional and factual stories, but it also indicates the importance of story in a world where narrative is key, where understanding one another can both influence and encourage shared experience. I hope to use this understanding to inform the design and creation of new story experiences.
Further references
Fitch, W. Tecumseh. The Evolution of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Approaches to the Evolution of Language. Web.
Anderson, Stephen (2012). Languages: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-959059-9
Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
A useful glossary of terms is available in the following book
Abbott, H. (2008). Glossary and topical index. In The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature, pp. 228-243). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511816932.019
Credit: Featured Photo by Nourdine Diouane on Unsplash