Researchers Investigate the Power of Storytelling on Storytellers
We often focus on how hearing a good story influences us, but now experts are curious about the other side - the effects of being a good storyteller.
Hiya!
As far as we know, stories are a uniquely human invention. A tool our species has long utilized to pass information through generations, make sense of the world we live in, and organize societies. However, on a more personal level, we use stories to learn and make sense of our lives and better understand other people. A single impactful story can stick with us and influence us in ways that can change the course of our lives.
It’s therefore unsurprising that researchers seek to understand why stories have such a profound impact on us, and have extensively investigated the various ways a good story influences our minds and bodies.
Yet, while we’ve learned a lot over the years, a team of researchers noticed a gap in story-related research and sought to fill it. While most studies have focused on the effects of hearing a good story, these experts wanted to investigate the impact of telling a good story.
Physical Effects of Hearing a Good Story
Before I get to the new research, let’s discuss a bit about what scientists already know about our relationship with stories. Stories are often considered someone else’s creation that we experience separately, through language or imagery on a screen.
But every one of us creates stories. We do it all day, every day, and about everything — our experiences, schedules, moods, beliefs, hopes, and fears. Even this article is a sort of story I’m telling you about storytelling research.
In a broad sense, stories are considered fabrications created by our minds, which are conveyed to our consciousness through our imaginations, fantasies, and dreams. We then reiterate them using images or words to share with other minds.
However, research shows that stories are also experienced in the body. We feel them, not just metaphorically, but literally, because a good story has the power to influence our neurochemical processes.
Raises Cortisol
Similar to how stories are a uniquely human invention, our ability to experience stress, even when there is no direct physical threat, is also a uniquely human trait — one that has a direct link to storytelling. After all, it’s through stories that we communicate potential threats or dangers to others.
A good story will stress us out, which triggers the release of adrenaline and cortisol, a hormone with many important roles, but is most known for managing our body’s stress response. When we don’t feel the stress or anxiety behind a story’s warning, then it loses us, and we turn our attention elsewhere.
However, cortisol alone isn’t enough to keep us engaged with a story. Sure, a conflict will grab our attention, and a quality setting can inspire wonder, but a good story isn’t complete without characters we care about.
Oxytocin Boost
As fictional characters interact, our bodies often release the peptide hormone and neuropeptide oxytocin. Commonly known as the “love” or “cuddle hormone,” oxytocin plays a significant role in love, reproduction, childbirth, and social bonding.
Experts found that oxytocin is released anytime we feel close to another person, even if it’s imagined, which is why stories (and our imagined closeness to the characters) trigger the release of oxytocin.
Yet, a good story, and our relationship with its characters, do more than release cortisol and oxytocin.
Activates Mirror Neurons
Research shows that a compelling story can activate our mirror neurons, aligning our brain activity of both listeners and storytellers.
Mirror neurons are brain cells that activate when we perform an action and when we observe someone else perform the action. These neurons enable us to learn through imitation, which affects everything from learning languages to emotional development. They also help us understand other people’s emotions and actions, while playing a key role in empathy & social connections.
So, when a good story captivates us, mirror neurons make the events that transpire seem real in our bodies, causing us to care about what happens to the characters.
As a plot thickens, a good storyteller pushes the characters into conflicts or inserts an obstacle to keep them from getting what they want, which can make our palms sweat or our bodies tense. We might even reach out to a person next to us who is likely experiencing something similar.
Broader Influence
The release of cortisol and oxytocin, and the activation of mirror neurons when we become involved in a story, is impressive. However, the real magic happens when all these elements come together.
Narrative Transportation
When our anxieties and attention combine with our empathy, and all our mental processes are concentrated on the events within a story, we experience a phenomenon called narrative transportation, or simply, “transportation.”
In other words, when we become so utterly absorbed in a story, it’s as if we’re transported into it.
Once transportation occurs, we’re hooked, and our sense of self becomes entwined with the characters for the rest of the story. Our limbic system, the brain’s reward center, releases dopamine, our “feel good” hormone that keeps us engaged and is the reason we want to stay up to “read one more chapter” or watch “one more episode.”
And when we especially identify with a fictional character, we’ll incorporate aspects of them into our own self-concept. The empathic skills we cultivate through narrative transportation transfer to our real lives by improving our emotional intelligence, providing us with insight into other people’s perspectives, including their thoughts and feelings.
In 2021, scientists from Ohio State University discovered that when we identify with a fictional character, our left prefrontal cortex becomes activated, a region associated with self-reflection and thinking about people close to us. The researchers write in their study that their findings,
“suggest that identification with fictional characters leads people to incorporate these characters into their self-concept: the greater the immersion into experiences of 'becoming' characters, the more accessing knowledge about characters resembles accessing knowledge about the self.”
However, there is another way stories influence our sense of identity.
Narrative Identity
Narratives aren’t always fiction; in fact, we often make sense of who we are, our purpose, and our sense of identity by shaping our life experiences into stories. Doing so provides us with a sense of meaning about our lives.
The idea of narrative identity is that by connecting our experiences, like dots on a page, we can recognize the larger picture or guiding force that has shaped our journey, which in turn provides us with a sense of purpose.
Dan P. McAdams, a psychologist and the Henry Wade Rogers Professor in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University, who wrote a book about narrative identity, explains:
“The story is a selective reconstruction of the autobiographical past and a narrative anticipation of the imagined future that serves to explain, for the self and others, how the person came to be and where his or her life may be going.”
For example, one of my narrative identities is that of a writer, or, I suppose, a storyteller. Reflecting on my life experiences, I can identify many moments that could be interpreted as signs that have led me to this point in my life.
For one thing, I’ve been told by countless people that I am a storyteller based on the amount of context and details I share when retelling my experiences.
I also used to ask my parents to assign me essays over summer breaks just because (now I assign myself weekly essays, which I publish here for you). In college, my gut told me to major in writing, but I resisted and chose something else instead.
Yet, somehow, I always circle back to writing, and when I hit my 30s, I finally embraced it by starting this newsletter and drafting my first fictional novel (the fourth draft of which is nearly finished).
Is being a writer my purpose? Who knows, but regardless, we all do some version of this. We create narrative identities that are uniquely our own.
All of this is to say that stories are a vital aspect of our species and for us as individuals. It’s challenging to imagine how we might otherwise live our lives or even form a society without stories. So, it’s no wonder scientists have investigated our relationships with them and their influence over us.
Yet, there’s one aspect of stories that has largely gone unnoticed until recently, when Professors Mario Mikulincer and Ron Shachar of Reichman University, in Israel, along with doctoral student Haran Einam, decided to flip the research perspective. Rather than studying the effects of listening to stories, the team wanted to investigate the impact of telling them.
Flipping the Perspective
Shachar explained in an article he penned for Scientific American about his and his colleagues’ recent research that they wanted to,
shift the focus from stories, particularly life stories, to storytelling.
After all, while everyone benefits from stories, a story is only as good as its delivery, and it takes a skillful person to become a great storyteller. More specifically, Shachar and his team figure that there are two skills a person must possess to tell a story successfully, both of which stem from the nature of stories themselves.
The researchers hypothesized that mastering these two skills results in storytellers having a stronger sense of meaning in their lives compared to people who are less adept with the skillset.