Only Stories Matter: The Psychology and Neurobiology of Story

Never accept things as they are presented. Only stories matter.

—Anthony Shadid, The New York Times, February 18, 2012

Preface

Not that long ago I was in Los Angeles. Having a little free time, I decided to go to the Griffiths Observatory at the top of a small hill in Griffith Park. There is a planetarium in the Observatory and in order to escape the hoards of school groups that seemed to be swarming everywhere, I went to the planetarium—the first time I had done so since I myself was part of a school-swarm many years ago in New York at the Hayden Planetarium. I bought a ticket. I went inside.

The buzz of early adolescence continued until the lights dimmed, and suddenly the place grew quiet. All eyes turned to the "heavens." A young astronomer began to explain that the images we were staring at represented "the dawn of creation" not as understood by modern astronomers, but from the perspectives of different peoples across different times. She related the Biblical tale of the creation of heaven and earth in seven rather eventful days. Another saw creation as the issue of a divine sexual union. She told another of how the Earth passed into being through the Universal "navel." As she spoke I realized that each of the tales seemed nearly as persuasive and compelling as any "big bang." I wondered why that would be.

It was then that I began to realize that each theory of creation that she described was a story. It also dawned on me just how much of what we know—organize, imagine, understand—is conceptualized through story. I realized that it was not just story that has a beginning, middle, and end, but rather that we think about so many things in terms of beginning, middle, and end—our thinking itself has the temporal, causal structure of a story. The more I thought about this, the more I realized how very much of our basic thought is in the form of a narrative. And further that the less one is certain about something the more one resorts to narrative. It occurred to me that if one is certain about something—the sum of two plus two—then one is less likely to resort to narrative. But the greater the uncertainty—How were the heavens and earth created? When will I die? Why am I the way I am? What will I do tomorrow?—the more likely it is that one will resort to narrative. Often we tell stories, aloud or in our minds, when we are not entirely sure of the origin, meaning, cause or effect of an action we may take. Often we tell stories when we are relating to something uncertain—in the past, the future or straight ahead.

Not all of this occurred to me while I was watching the planetarium show. But a great deal of it did. And so when the astronomer ended her talk and I stepped out into the glare of the Southern California sun, a thought continued to play in my head, a thought that had begun while gazing at the "heavens" on the dome of the Griffiths Planetarium. A thought that was best expressed by the journalist Anthony Shadid when he wrote:

Only Stories Matter

The earliest known petroglyphs were done by our Cro-Magnon forebears some 38,000-40,000 years ago. The drawings relate to the cycles of life and death, to the spirits of beginning and end. The Cro-Magnon left evidence—in addition to works on cave walls—of a preoccupation with death and with its dark soul. In a burial site in Sungir, Russia, a skeletal remains was laid out wearing "bracelets, necklaces, pendants, and a tunic onto which hundreds of mammoth-ivory beads are sewn" (Vyshedskiy, 2008, p. 85). This elaborate preparation for the dead suggests ceremony, a belief in the afterlife, a journey, a story. It was as if some 40,000 years ago Cro-Magnon stared into the sky and wondered, "What will become of me when I die?" But...