The Science of Storytelling. Will Storr

predominantly that of people. Our hyper-social brains are designed to control an environment of other selves.

      Humans have an extraordinary gift for reading and understanding the minds of other people. In order to control our environment of humans, we have to be able to predict how they’re going to behave. The importance and complexity of human behaviour means we have an insatiable curiosity about it. Storytellers exploit both these mechanisms and this curiosity; the stories they tell are a deep investigation into the ever-fascinating whys of what people do.

      We’ve been a social species, whose survival has depended upon human cooperation, for hundreds of thousands of years. But over the last 1,000 generations it’s been argued that these social instincts have been rapidly honed and strengthened. This ‘sharp acceleration’ of selection for social traits, writes developmental psychologist Professor Bruce Hood, has left us with brains that are ‘exquisitely engineered to interact with other brains’.

      For earlier humans that roamed hostile environments, aggression and physicality had been critical. But the more cooperative we became, the less useful these traits proved. When we started living in settled communities, they grew especially troublesome. There, it would’ve been the people who were better at getting along with others, rather than the physically dominant, who’d have been more successful.

      This success in the community would’ve meant greater reproductive success, which would’ve gradually led to the emergence of a new strain of human. These humans had thinner and weaker bones than their ancestors and greatly reduced muscle mass, their physical strength as much as halving. They also had the kind of brain chemistry and hormones that predisposed them to behaviour specialised for settled communal living. They’d have been less interpersonally aggressive, but more adept at the kind of psychological manipulation necessary for negotiating, trading and diplomacy. They’d become expert at controlling their environment of other human minds.

      You might compare it to the difference between a wolf and a dog. A wolf survives by cooperating as well as fighting for dominance and killing prey. A dog does so by manipulating its human owner such that they’d do anything for them. The power my beloved labradoodle Parker has over my own brain is frankly embarrassing. (I’ve dedicated this bloody book to her.) In fact, this might be more than a mere analogy. Researchers such as Hood argue that modern humans have gone through a process of ‘self-domestication’. Support for the idea comes partly from the fact that, over the last 20,000 years, our brains have shrunk by between ten and fifteen per cent, the same reduction that’s been observed in all the thirty or so other animals that humans have domesticated. Just as with those creatures, our domestication means we’re tamer than our ancestors, better at reading social signals and more dependent on others. But, writes Hood, ‘no other animal has taken domestication to the extent that we have.’ Our brains may have initially evolved to ‘cope with a potentially threatening world of predators, limited food and adverse weather, but we now rely on it to navigate an equally unpredictable social landscape.’

      Unpredictable humans. This is the stuff of story.

      For modern humans, controlling the world means controlling other people, and that means understanding them. We’re wired to be fascinated by others and get valuable information from their faces. This fascination begins almost immediately. Whereas ape and monkey parents spend almost no time looking at their babies’ faces, we’re helplessly drawn to them. Newborns are attracted to human faces more than to any other object and, One hour from birth, begin imitating them. By two, they’ve learned to control their social worlds by smiling. By the time they’re adults, they’ve become so adept at reading people that they’re making calculations about status and character automatically, in one tenth of a second. The evolution of our strange, extremely other-obsessed brains has brought with it weird side-effects. Human obsession with faces is so fierce we see them almost anywhere: in fire; in clouds; down spooky corridors; in toast.

      We sense minds everywhere too. Just as the brain models the outside world it also builds models of minds. This skill, which is an essential weapon in our social armoury, is known as ‘theory of mind’. It enables us to imagine what others are thinking, feeling and plotting, even when they’re not present. We can experience the world from another’s perspective. For the psychologist Professor Nicholas Epley this capacity, which is obviously essential for storytelling, gave us incredible power. ‘Our species has conquered the Earth because of our ability to understand the minds of others,’ he writes, ‘not because of our opposable thumbs or handiness with tools.’ We develop this skill at around the age of four. It’s then that we become story-ready; equipped to understand the logic of narrative.

      Human religion begins with the ability to populate our minds with imagined other minds. Shamans in hunter-gatherer tribes would enter trance states and interact with spirits, and use these interactions as attempts to control the world. Early religions were also typically animistic: our storytelling brains would project human-like minds into trees, rocks, mountains and animals, imagining they were possessed by gods who were responsible for changeful events, and required controlling with ritual and sacrifice.

      Childhood stories reflect our natural tendency for such hyperactive mind-detecting. In fairytales, human-like minds are everywhere: mirrors talk, pigs eat breakfast, frogs turn into princes. Youngsters naturally treat their dolls and teddies as if they’re inhabited by selves. I remember feeling terrible guilt for preferring my pink bear, handmade by my Grandmother, to my shop-bought brown bear. I knew they both knew how I felt, and that left me distracted and sad.

      We never really grow out of our inherent animism. Which one of us hasn’t kicked a door that’s slammed on our fingers believing, in that disorientating flash of pain, that it attacked us out of spite? Who among us hasn’t told a self-assembly wardrobe to fuck off? Whose storytelling brain doesn’t commit its own literary-style pathetic fallacy, allowing the sun to make them optimistic about the coming day or the brooding clouds pessimistic? Studies indicate that those who anthropomorphise a human personality onto their cars show less interest in trading them. Bankers project human moods onto the movements of the markets and place their trades accordingly.

      When we’re reading, hearing or watching a story we deploy our theory-of-mind skills by automatically making hallucinatory models of the minds of its characters. Some authors model the minds of their own characters with such force that they hear them talk. Charles Dickens, William Blake and Joseph Conrad all spoke of such extraordinary experiences. the novelist and psychologist Professor Charles Fernyhough has led research in which 19 per cent of readers reported hearing the voices of fictional characters even after they’d put their books down. Some reported a kind of literary possession, with the character influencing the tone and nature of their thoughts. I can’t be the only writer to find myself immersed in a book only to find myself writing in the style of its narrator the next day.

      But much as humans excel at such feats of theory of mind, we also tend to dramatically overestimate our abilities. Although there’s an admitted absurdity in claiming to be able to quantify human behaviour with such absolute numerical precision, some research suggests strangers read another’s thoughts and feelings with an accuracy of just 20 per cent. Friends and lovers? A mere 35 per cent. Our errors about what others are thinking are a major cause of human drama. As we move through life, wrongly predicting what people are thinking and how they’ll react when we try to control them, we haplessly trigger feuds and fights and misunderstandings that fire devastating spirals of unexpected change into our social worlds.

      Comedy, whether by William Shakespeare or John Cleese and Connie Booth, is often built on such mistakes. But whatever the mode of storytelling, well-imagined characters always have theories about the minds of other characters and – because this is drama – those theories will often be wrong.This wrongness will lead to unexpected consequences and yet more drama. The influential post-war director Alexander Mackendrick writes, ‘I start by asking: What does A think B is thinking about A? It sounds complicated (and it is) but this is the very essence of giving some density to a character and, in turn, a scene.’

      The author Richard Yates uses a theory-of-mind mistake to create a pivotal moment of drama in his classic Revolutionary Road. The novel charts the dissolving marriage of Frank and April Wheeler.