The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

by Gottschall, Jonathan

  THE HERO DIES IN OUR STEAD

  Navy fighter pilots have many difficult jobs. But perhaps the greatest challenge they face is landing a fifty-thousand-pound airplane—laden with jet fuel and high explosives—on a five-hundred-foot runway that is skimming across the ocean at up to thirty knots. The aircraft carrier is immense and powerful, but the ocean is more so, and the whole runway moves with the swell. The carrier deck is speckled with people and planes. The belly of the huge ship holds thousands of souls, a terrible array of missiles and bombs, and a nuclear reactor. Navy pilots have to land on this thread of concrete in all kinds of weather and in the black of night. They have to do so without wrecking their planes, killing their shipmates, or causing a nuclear disaster. So before letting young aviators attempt actual landings, instructors strap them into flight simulators that provide much of the benefit of practicing landings, without the potential carnage and hellfire of the real thing.

  Landing a jet on an aircraft carrier is complicated. But navigating the intricacies of human social life is more so, and the consequences of failure can be almost as dramatic. Whenever people come together in groups, they will potentially mate with one another, befriend one another, or fight one another.

  A Helldiver aircraft circling for landing on the USS Yorktown during the Second World War.

  Practice is important. People practice playing basketball or violin in low-stakes environments so that they will perform well—in the stadium or concert hall—when the stakes are high. According to evolutionary thinkers such as Brian Boyd, Steven Pinker, and Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, story is where people go to practice the key skills of human social life.

  This argument is not new to evolutionary psychology. It is a variation on one of the traditional justifications for fiction. For example, Janet Burroway argues that low-cost vicarious experience—especially emotional experience—is the primary benefit of fiction. As she puts it, “Literature offers feelings for which we don’t have to pay. It allows us to love, condemn, condone, hope, dread, and hate without any of the risks those feelings ordinarily involve.”

  The HBO sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm offers a master’s course in the dangerous involutions of social existence. In most episodes, the Aspergerish main character, Larry David (shown here), commits a truly hideous faux pas by failing to understand and negotiate the weird ballet of human interactions.

  The psychologist and novelist Keith Oatley calls stories the flight simulators of human social life. Just as flight simulators allow pilots to train safely, stories safely train us for the big challenges of the social world. Like a flight simulator, fiction projects us into intense simulations of problems that run parallel to those we face in reality. And like a flight simulator, the main virtue of fiction is that we have a rich experience and don’t die at the end. We get to simulate what it would be like to confront a dangerous man or seduce someone’s spouse, for instance, and the hero of the story dies in our stead.

  So, this line of reasoning goes, we seek story because we enjoy it. But nature designed us to enjoy stories so we would get the benefit of practice. Fiction is an ancient virtual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems. Interesting theory. Is there any evidence for it beyond problem structure?

  TO SIMULATE IS TO DO

  The television show I’m watching cuts to a commercial for the National Football League. The ad absorbs my attention before I can think of surfing away. A dark-skinned boy is racing in slow motion over green grass straight into my living room. The boy is beaming, tossing glances—semi-scared, semi-delighted—at someone or something to his right. Suddenly a huge, handsome young man (a defensive lineman for the Houston Texans) sweeps in from outside the frame. He scoops the giggling boy up like a football and runs at the camera, still in slow motion. The man and the boy are both smiling to crack their faces. Sitting alone in my living room, I cannot help but smile so broadly it stings.

  In the 1990s, quite by accident, Italian neuroscientists discovered mirror neurons. They implanted electrodes into a monkey’s brain to discover which neural regions were responsible for, say, commanding the hand to reach out and grab a nut. In short, the scientists discovered that specific areas of a monkey’s brain light up not only when they grab a nut, but whenever they see another monkey or person grab a nut.

  There has since been a flood of mirror neuron research in monkeys and humans. Many scientists now believe we have neural networks that activate when we perform an action or experience an emotion, and also when we observe someone else performing an action or experiencing an emotion. This might explain why mental states are contagious. It might reveal, at a basic brain level, what happened to me when I saw that NFL ad. Just seeing the goofy smiles on the faces of the football player and the boy triggered an automatic mirror response in my own brain. I literally caught their joy.

  Newborn infants imitating facial expressions. Andrew Meltzoff (pictured here) and his colleagues argue that mirror neurons may help explain how newborns as young as forty minutes old can imitate facial expressions and manual gestures.

  Mirror neurons may also be the basis of our ability to run powerful fictional simulations in our heads. A pioneer of mirror neuron research, Marco Iacoboni, writes that movies feel so authentic to us

  because mirror neurons in our brains re-create for us the distress we see on the screen. We have empathy for the fictional characters—we know how they’re feeling—because we literally experience the same feelings ourselves. And when we watch the movie stars kiss on screen? Some of the cells firing in our brain are the same ones that fire when we kiss our lovers. “Vicarious” is not a strong enough word to describe the effect of these mirror neurons.

  As with any area of emerging science, controversies rage. Some neuroscientists are confident that we understand what is going on in another person’s mind by simulating it at a neuronal level—by mirroring that person’s brain state with our own. Other scientists are more wary. But whether mirror neurons turn out to be the ultimate explanation or not, we know from laboratory studies that stories affect us physically, not just mentally. When the protagonist is in a tight corner, our hearts race, we breathe faster, and we sweat more. When watching a scary movie, we cringe defensively when the victim is attacked. When the hero brawls with the villain, we may do a little dance in our seats, as though slipping punches. We writhe and weep at Sophie’s Choice. We laugh until it hurts at Candide or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. We gulp and sweat during the shower scene in Psycho, watching through the cracks between our fingers—and the trauma we endure is so real that we may stick to baths for months to come.

  In their book The Media Equation, the computer scientists Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass show that people respond to the stuff of fiction and computer games much as they respond to real events. For Reeves and Nass, “media equals real life.” Knowing that fiction is fiction doesn’t stop the emotional brain from processing it as real. That is why we have such a powerfully stupid urge to scream at the heroine of the slasher film, “Drop the phone and run! Run for God’s sake! Run!” We respond so naturally to fictional stimuli that when psychologists want to study an emotion such as sadness, they often subject people to clips from tearjerkers like Old Yeller or Love Story.

  Our responses to fiction are now being studied at a neuronal level. When we see something scary or sexy or dangerous in a film, our brains light up as though that thing were happening to us, not just to a cinematic figment. For example, in a Dartmouth brain lab, people watched scenes from the Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly while their brains were scanned by a functional MRI (fMRI) machine. The scientists, led by Anne Krendl, discovered that viewers’ brains “caught” whatever emotions were being enacted on the screen. When Eastwood was angry, the viewers’ brains looked angry, too. When the scene was sad, the viewers’ brains also looked sad.

  In a similar study, a team of neuroscientists led by Mbemba Jabbi placed research subjects in an fMRI scanner w
hile they screened a short clip of an actor drinking from a cup and then grimacing in disgust. They also scanned subjects while the researchers read a short scenario aloud, asking the subjects to imagine walking down the street, accidentally bumping into a retching drunk, and catching some of the vomit in their own mouths. Finally, the scientists scanned the subjects’ brains while they actually tasted disgusting solutions. In all three cases, the same brain region lit up (the anterior insula—the seat of disgust). As one of the neuroscientists put it, “What this means is that whether we see a movie or read a story, the same thing happens: we activate our bodily representations of what it feels like to be disgusted—and that is why reading a book and viewing a movie can both make us feel as if we literally feel what the protagonist is going through.”

  Scientists have begun experimenting on virtual humans in the lab. Here researchers at University College London replicate Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments with electric shock—except that they are torturing a semirealistic cartoon instead of a real person. Despite the fact that all of the participants know that the setup is fake, they tend to respond—behaviorally and physiologically—as though the torture is real.

  These studies of “brains on fiction” are consistent with the problem simulation theory of storytelling. They suggest that when we experience fiction, our neurons are firing much as they would if we were actually faced with Sophie’s choice or if we were taking a relaxing shower and a killer suddenly tore down the curtain.

  It seems plausible that our continuous immersion in fictional problem solving would improve our ability to deal with real problems. If this is so, fiction would do so by literally rewiring our brains. It is an axiom of neuroscience that “cells that fire together wire together.” When we practice a skill, we improve because repetition of the task establishes denser and more efficient neural connections. This is why we practice: to lay down grooves in our brains, making our actions crisper, faster, surer.

  At this point, I should make a distinction between the problem simulator model I’m describing and a related model championed by Steven Pinker. In his groundbreaking book How the Mind Works, Pinker argues that stories equip us with a mental file of dilemmas we might one day face, along with workable solutions. In the way that serious chess players memorize optimal responses to a wide variety of attacks and defenses, we equip ourselves for real life by absorbing fictional game plans.

  But this model has flaws. As some critics have pointed out, fiction can make a terrible guide for real life. What if you actually tried to apply fictional solutions to your problems? You might end up running around like the comically insane Don Quixote or the tragically deluded Emma Bovary—both of whom go astray because they confuse literary fantasy with reality.

  But there’s another problem with Pinker’s idea. It seems to depend on explicit memory—the type of memory we can consciously access. Yet think back over the past several years. Which novel or film affected you most deeply? Now what do you actually remember about it? If you are like me, you’ll recall a few key characters and the basic gist; sadly, almost all of the granular detail will be lost in an amnesiac fog. And that’s for the story that moved you the most. Now think of the thousands of more pedestrian sitcoms, films, and prose fictions you enjoyed over the same period. Almost none of the details will be left in your memory bank.

  “A world of disorderly Notions, pick’d out of his books, crouded into his Imagination” (Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605–1615).

  But the simulator model I’m describing doesn’t depend on our ability to store fictional scenarios in an accurate and accessible way. The simulator model depends on implicit memory—what our brains know but “we” don’t. Implicit memory is inaccessible to the conscious mind. It is behind all the unconscious processing that goes into driving a car, or swinging a golf club, or even navigating the rocky shoals of a cocktail party. The simulator theory is based on research showing that “realistic rehearsal of any skill . . . leads to enhanced performance regardless of whether the training episodes are explicitly remembered.” When we experience fiction, our minds are firing and wiring, honing the neural pathways that regulate our responses to real-life experiences.

  Researchers have been circling this idea for years, but they’ve made little progress in testing it. This is not because the idea is untestable. It is because researchers are simply not in the habit of pursuing scientific responses to literary questions. Navy administrators test whether flight simulators work by seeing whether pilots who train on them are more likely to be proficient, not to mention alive, at the end of their training than pilots who flew before the advent of simulators. The evidence is unequivocal: flight simulators work. In the same way, if the evolutionary function of fiction is—at least in part—to simulate the big dilemmas of life, people who consume a lot of fiction should be more capable social operators than people who don’t.

  The only way to find out is to do the science, and the psychologists Keith Oatley, Raymond Mar, and their colleagues have made a start. In one study, they found that heavy fiction readers had better social skills—as measured by tests of social and empathic ability—than those who mainly read nonfiction. This was not, they discovered, because people who already had good social abilities naturally gravitated to fiction. In a second test that accounted for differences in personality traits—as well as factors such as gender, age, and IQ—the psychologists still found that people who consumed a lot of fiction outperformed heavy nonfiction readers on tests of social ability. In other words, as Oatley puts it, differences in social abilities “were best explained by the kind of reading people mostly did.”

  Note that these findings are not self-evident. If anything, stereotypes of nerdy bookworms and introverted couch potatoes might lead us to expect that fiction degrades social abilities rather than improving them.

  ***

  So here is the central idea as we’ve developed it to this point. Fiction is a powerful and ancient virtual reality technology that simulates the big dilemmas of human life. When we pick up a book or turn on the TV—whoosh!—we are teleported into a parallel universe. We identify so closely with the struggles of the protagonists that we don’t just sympathize with them; we strongly empathize with them. We feel their happiness and desire and fear; our brains rev up as though what is happening to them is actually happening to us.

  The constant firing of our neurons in response to fictional stimuli strengthens and refines the neural pathways that lead to skillful navigation of life’s problems. From this point of view, we are attracted to fiction not because of an evolutionary glitch, but because fiction is, on the whole, good for us. This is because human life, especially social life, is intensely complicated and the stakes are high. Fiction allows our brains to practice reacting to the kinds of challenges that are, and always were, most crucial to our success as a species. And as we’ll see, we don’t stop simulating when the sun goes down.

  4. Night Story

  The pig dreams of acorns, the goose of maize.

  —HUNGARIAN PROVERB, quoted in Sigmund

  Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

  I AM IN MY BED—sweating, panting, paralyzed except for my eyeballs rolling beneath their lids.

  I am in the desert in the last of the dusk. I am walking hand in hand with my daughter, who is three. The horizon is far away. The hardpan beneath us is brittle with thirst.

  I am sitting high on the rim of a desert canyon, with my feet dangling down, watching some sporting event way down in the valley. It is deep night. The athletes are lit with fire that washes along the canyon walls like waves. I smile down on the performance, enjoying myself, swinging my legs over the edge like a boy.

  My daughter is in her own world, dancing along the cliff’s edge, twirling and making her skirt and her ponytail fly out. I watch her singing quietly to herself, twinkling on her toes, with no need of her heels. I smile at her, noticing and admiring everything, and I turn back to the game.

  And t
hen she is falling, and I know I should dive after her, but I can’t move.

  Despair vaster than I have ever known. Pain beyond enduring or explaining. Death—remorseless, immovable—has her and will never give her back.

  But when the dream released me, death released her. For a time, I lay fearfully in the darkness doubting the miracle. Had my most ardent and impossible wish really come true? I lay in bed sending atheist prayers of thanksgiving into the void.

  Every night of our sleeping lives, we wander through an alternate dimension of reality. In our dreams, we feel intense fear, sorrow, joy, rage, and lust. We commit atrocities; we suffer tragedies; sometimes we orgasm; sometimes we fly; sometimes we die. While the body lies dormant, the restless brain improvises original drama in the theaters of our minds.

  The novelist John Gardner compares fictional stories to “vivid and continuous dream[s],” but it’s just as accurate to call dreams “vivid and continuous stories.” Researchers conventionally define dreams as intense “sensorimotor hallucinations with a narrative structure.” Dreams are, in effect, night stories: they focus on a protagonist—usually the dreamer—who struggles to achieve desires. Researchers can’t even talk about dreams without dragging in the basic vocabulary of English 101: plot, theme, character, scene, setting, point of view, perspective.

  Night story is a mystery. Who hasn’t marveled at the psychotic creativity of their own dreaming mind? What does it mean when our dreaming selves appear naked in church, or murder some innocent, or soar through the sky? What does it mean when a dream finds you in a bathroom, staring in stark terror as an evil elf masturbates above the clothes hamper, and your mother is pounding on the door, and you look in the mirror and there is no elf crouching over the clothes hamper, only you? Who has not wondered, as I did in the sweaty aftermath of my desert dream, why his brain decided to stay up all night just to torture itself? Why do we dream?