His 2009 book On the Origin of Stories argues that telling stories is not just something we humans like to do, but something we need to do – in fact, something that evolution has hardwired us to do. We asked him why…
Telling stories – whether about real things or imagined things – is obviously something that humans everywhere compulsively do. Why?
We tell and listen to real stories and flighty gossip or her serious sister, history because we are compulsively social, because we need to know who is or was doing what to whom.
But to answer why we tell and listen to imagined stories, I think we need to understand why we engage in any of the arts, and since fiction almost certainly emerged after music, dance, and visual art. I see all the arts as derived from play, and play is compulsive across the animal kingdom.
You describe storytelling as “cognitive play”. What does this mean and why is it important?
In art, including the art of fiction, we play with patterns. We can understand information easily when our minds can extract patterns. For that reason, we have a tremendous appetite for pattern and other kinds of clear information, crisp but perhaps complex outlines, bold colours, pure sounds: think of our fondness for looking at flowers or butterflies, paintings or photographs, or listening to birdsong or human music.
In the social world, we see patterns of identity (who are these people?), personality (what are they like?), society (who are they related to? who do they team up with? where do they stand in the pecking order?). In the world of events, we see patterns of cause and effect. In the world of social events, we see patterns of intention, action and outcome.
When we participate in fiction, from pretend play to adult classics, we play with high doses of these kinds of information pattern. And just as with any kind of play that we engage in repeatedly and fully focused, we improve those skills.
And because in fiction we can choose to play with high stakes and striking characters, our attention is hooked, our emotions are aroused, and our memories are responsive.
Why is it important to know whether storytelling is truly an innate behaviour or not?
We all want to know how things really happened: as you will surely agree, it’s a key way to understanding the world.
If storymaking became part of human nature not only because it can impart true information but, as I argue, because even when it deals with false information it helps our minds grow in ways that matter to us, and especially in understanding human actions, then that is worth knowing. We might start to think more closely, how can we make the most impact, not in terms of the size of movie audiences or book sales, but in terms of the way we think and understand‚ out of the stories we devote time to.
In our company we are particularly interested in “true stories” rather than fiction. Why do you think that putting knowledge into a narrative framework helps us make sense of the world so much more effectively?
Cause and effect are crucial. If you want to achieve or to avoid certain effects, you have a much better chance of doing so if you really understand their causes. And in the social world, that means especially being able to understand or imagine what drives others in a complicated network of interests, often at least partly conflicting.
If you put cause and effect into narrative form, they immediately engage us. They follow and they even flood the flow of experience. And that flow, after all, is what minds first evolved to track.
How does our compulsive interest in fiction and the play of art impact on our compulsive interest in factual stories?
From what I understand of your work, you use all the arts, and especially the art of fiction, to make the true stories you tell as compelling as they can be. Personal engagement, character, incident, vivid detail, colour, movement, shape, music, drama, suspense, mystery, surprise, imagination, humour: we learn how to play with these through arts, and especially the art of story.
Documentary makers and museum designers once thought they could present facts and images or objects just square on. But information dumps, even with clear labels and authoritative voices, aren’t enough. Over the last few decades documentary makers and museum folk have learned enormously from all the resources, and the play, in fiction and the other arts. And so have you, I’m sure.
Your book is a heady mixture of evolutionary psychology and literary criticism. What kind of reaction to it have you got from people in different fields?
Excitement from people engaged in literature and other arts, or in studying them, who see this as a way forward. Resistance, but with begrudging praise, from those who like the academic status quo in my field, however unsatisfactory everyone recognizes it has become.
Excitement too from the science side, from biologists and psychologists, who have been impressed by how much of the science I have covered and by the fact that I seem to have it all right and up-to-date.
Tears of recognition from some. Invitations to speak, or write, or research, from others, in the humanities, the sciences, the arts, and business.
Your title is a tribute to Darwin’s world-changing book. Do you think that your idea, like his, has the potential to make a big change to our understanding of ourselves?
Darwin pervades every aspect of the life sciences. His explanation for evolution has been called the best single idea anyone ever had‚ and he kept adding new layers to it, and anticipating developments that actually took another century. My ideas build on his, and on other ideas that build on his. If I could have a fraction of the impact his ideas have had and will continue to have, I’d be very happy. One per cent would be plenty!
There are three kinds of impact I’d like my work in this area to have.
First, to make people aware of the huge added power we have to see ourselves and our world when we look through evolutionary lenses.
Second, to help the arts. People are naturally drawn to the arts, but they can also feel they’re perhaps frivolous or indulgent. That makes it hard, for instance, for people arguing for the arts to make the case for the funding they could put to good use. I’ve already had people in Europe and America using my work to build their arguments, and of course for all of us it’s useful to know that these pleasures have real benefits to us individually and collectively.
Third, to revitalize the study of art and especially literature. Academic literary studies have been in the doldrums for a couple of decades, cut off from life, from feeling and from excitement by a tide of obscurantist theory and self-congratulatory political posturing. I’d like students and other readers to develop, not deny, their passion for stories, and for the connections stories can make with our own lives and minds and with the rest of life and the life of the mind.
By James McLean, Director
