Stories and Storytelling
“Stories are powerful because they transport us into other people’s worlds but in doing that they change the way our brains work, and potentially change our brain chemistry—and that’s what it means to be a social creature.” —Paul J. Zak, “The Moral Molecule: How Trust Works”
The Evolution of Storytelling
The Evolution of Storytelling
“What is it about stories—what are their particularities—that enables them to work as they do? More than mere curiosity is at stake in this question, because human life depends on the stories we tell: the sense of self that those stories impart, the relationships constructed around shared stories, and the sense of purpose that stories both propose and foreclose.” —Arthur Frank, Letting Stories Breathe
The First Stories
“The world we experience as ‘out there’ is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It’s an act of creation by the storytelling brain.” ―Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better
The Oral Tale
For most of our human history storytelling was oral. Myths were spoken or sung by diverse storytellers who could select and modulate their narrative to best suit a given audience, emphasizing some aspects and ignoring others.
The Written Word
Originally scribes used this new technology only for book-keeping, recording inventory, or for the equivalent of today’s text messages. But once the first scribes in Ur realized that writing could be used to record their most valued epic stories, their excitement likely matched our own when portable computers came on the scene.
The Science of Storytelling
“Stories are actually a form of technology. They are tools that were designed by our ancestors to alleviate depression, reduce anxiety, kindle creativity, spark courage and meet a variety of other psychological challenges of being human.”
Teaching Stories
A Unique Form of Literature
“It’s as if we had the unassembled parts of a bicycle, and knew, through analogy (the shapes perhaps) that there was a relationship between the handles and our hands, the pedals and our feet, and so on. We may even have an idea that these are a necessary part of what is known as ‘a bike’ and of ‘riding a bike’ But to actually assemble the bike correctly, and then to be able to ride it, when and where to ride it, that requires contextual thinking: seeing each disparate part as part of a whole. That ‘whole,’ of course, expands with experience and understanding. A comprehensive study of Teaching Stories provides what is for all intents and purposes a limitless whole.” —Robert Ornstein, Teaching-Stories and the Brain, Library of Congress lecture, 2002
The Teaching Story
The Sufis have been using carefully constructed stories for teaching purposes for thousands of years as a means of stimulating and stabilizing an expanded consciousness. Though on the surface these often appear to be little more than entertaining fairytales or folktales, they enshrine—in their characters, plots, and imagery—patterns and relationships that nurture a part of the mind not reachable in more conventional ways, thus increasing our understanding, flexibility, and breadth of vision.
In the series: Ideas that Shaped Our Modern World
- Paleolithic Beginnings
- Connecting with the Gods
- Axial Age Thought
- Jesus: Origins of Christianity
- Muhammad: Origins of Islam
- The Journey of Classical Greek Culture to the West
- A Contemporary Look at the Nature of Religious Experience
- Returning to the Spirit in “Sacred Nature”
- Religious Evolution and the Axial Age