How Story Changed Our Minds

Narrative Became Both Humanity's Superpower and Kryptonite

Once upon a time, we humans were an animal without story.

That is to say, there was a point, deep in the murk of prehistory, before which our ancestors were unquestionably human (if not yet Homo sapiens then a member of the human tree not far removed) but lacking what is arguably the single most distinguishing trait of our species today.

These ancestors of ours were clever, feeling beings. They communicated, socialized, cooperated, made and used tools. They were even more similar to us than our current closest living relative, the chimpanzee.

What they didn't do is tell stories. More fundamentally, they didn't think or see the world in terms of story. Their minds were different from ours in ways we'll probably never be able to fully comprehend.

Somewhere along the line, though, something changed. Something big happened, and it forever altered the trajectory of human evolution. The trajectory of planetary evolution, for that matter.

It's unlikely we'll never know when or exactly how that change occurred. These are topics of hotly debated by experts—which, let me hasten to note, I am most assuredly am not. No anthropologist or philologist or any kind of ologist am I.

And the truth is: I may have already misrepresented the reality of the situation by making it sound like this change was one big pivotal moment in human evolution. In fact, there almost certainly wasn’t some cosmic lightning bolt came out of the blue and set our ancestors’ brains on fire, rearranging their neurons in some brilliant, divine flash. There was no 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith moment.

Chances are the path that led us to becoming a storytelling species was an incomprehensibly long, twisting trail of tiny, incremental changes. Or, even more likely, many, many different trails, running parallel, crisscrossing, branching, doubling back, merging. Exactly the kind of messy, sprawling, hard-to-hold-in-your-head situation that humans like to condense into a neat little story.

Even so, whatever liberties I've taken so far, I think it's fair to say the general gist here is truth enough.

If you went far enough in time, at least 100,000 years, if not considerably further, you could find humans that had not yet developed storytelling. For all their cleverness and sophistication, the concept of inventing and sharing stories would still be beyond them.

Jump forward in time to, say, 30,000 years ago and things would be different. You’d find humans painting representational images on cave walls and carving figures out of rock and ivory (and almost certainly bone, horn, and wood, too, although examples of this are probably lost to time.) If the paintings of Lascaux cave in France and the “Lion-man” figurine of Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in Germany don’t qualify as forms of visual storytelling, then I’m not sure what does.

The lion man of Hohlenstein-Stadel cave. Credit: Dagnar Hollmann / Wikipedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0)

And if humans were creating images and objects that told stories, and sometimes going to great efforts to do so, it's not a stretch to imagine they must have already been in the habit of telling tales around the fire. It was likely a tradition that had been passed down over many generations for tens of thousands of years.

Long before the beginning of recorded history, story was already well on the way of changing who we were.

Defining Story

Before we go further, let me clarify what I mean by "story".

What I'm talking about is both broader and more fundamental than just those tales told around the fire, more than just fiction, although those types of story are certainly an essential part of the larger whole.

Story, on its most basic level, is a way of thinking, a mental framework for organizing, interpreting, and communicating information. It's concerned with cause-and-effect, connecting the dots, finding links between pieces information to create longer sequential chains of meaning.

The central questions of narrative are always “Why?” and “What’s next?” 

Humans evolved to seek explanations, and it's unclear that we'd be able to do that without story as a means of imposing order on the chaos.

We are under constant bombardment by an onslaught of information. Narrative provides a filing system for information that lightens the cognitive load for the brain. We prioritize the information that fits into larger patterns of meaning, creating structures that we are easier to understand, recall, and express.

I'm proposing that story existed—in a nascent form anyway—by the time the very first words came into circulation. Again, this is a very non-academic take, but it seems impossible to me to meaningfully disentangle language from narrative.

A word comes narrative imprinted in its DNA. Like a brick, a word is of limited utility by itself, but the potential to construct larger, more elaborate structures is intrinsic in its nature. You don't need to know how to make an arch, dome, or flying buttress to recognize the usefulness of a bunch of bricks

Animals had been using syntax, varying arrangements of sound to communicate for hundreds of millions of years. There was no first human word that came before the principles of syntax and compositionality. Language and story started together and then co-evolved.

The truly mind-boggling feat of human language and story is representational thought, to be able to create and use a gesture, a symbol, a sound, a word, all things with no inherent meaning, as a mental stand-in for something else. It seems like such a monumental “and then a miracle happened” step in the evolution of consciousness that for a long time it was thought that it must have occurred as some kind of "great leap forward", a sudden radical change, a cognitive revolution, that cosmic lightning bolt.

Increasingly, though, that appears not to be the case. Archeological evidence is pushing back the beginnings of symbol use to back before humans emerged from Africa, suggesting that the emergence of complex symbolic thinking was a far more lengthy, gradual drip-drip-drip process than previously believed.

Story Helped Us Survive and Prosper

We don’t tend to think of story as a survival tool, but that’s exactly what it was for our ancestors. And an immensely powerful tool, at that.

Early humans were at a major physical disadvantage when it came to combatting predators, hunting prey, and just surviving day to day in a hostile, ever-changing environment. What competitive advantages they did have, apart from opposable thumbs and impressive manual dexterity, were primarily mental and social: creative problem-solving, cooperative behavior, tool-making.

When story came along, it drew from and elaborated on all those talents, giving them a huge upgrade in the process.

Narrative is a sort of cognitive Swiss Army knife, a combination tool for sense-making, planning, communication, teaching, information storage, collaboration, socialization, and creativity. Not only did story give us a framework for understanding and talking about the world around us, it enabled us to conceive of and share things that were wholly conceptual and imaginary. It provided us with the means to imagine and discuss the future, the past, and alternatives to the present: what happened, what could happen, what might have happened, what we should do next.

Story appealed to both the logical and emotional aspects of human nature. We like to explain things and to have things explained. In addition to being maybe the greatest survival hack of all time, explanations are satisfying. So satisfying that we started inventing stories for the pleasure of explaining imaginary circumstances. Stories gave us a low-risk surrogate for real-world experience.

Story also opened a communal mental space between people, giving us the ability to collectively create and transmit culture from one generation to the next. We gained the ability to build and pass down knowledge, beliefs, traditions, practices, and values. If civilization is a fabric, then narrative is the weave.

The emergence of cumulative human culture changed everything. Not just for us, but for the entire planet. It has given us written language, art, agriculture, urbanization, technology, literature, mathematics, law, medicine, science—everything. If biological evolution is a slow, blind crawl, then human cultural evolution is a snowball rolling downhill and constantly gaining momentum.

Narrative Fallacy

Humanity is an animal that evolved to seek meaning, and story is the process we use to make meaning.

And therein lies the problem.

Meaning is a slippery, amorphous, and subjective thing. The meaning we find is to a large extent a projection of our own identity, emotions, biases, and expectations. If we accept that there is such a thing as "truth", story can get us closer to it, but it can just as easily serve as an obstruction.

Our reliance on narrative can make it difficult to evaluate information objectively. The writer and mathematician Nassim Taleb coined the term "narrative fallacy" to describe human habit of forcing stories onto circumstances where they don't fit.

When we indulge in narrative fallacy, we try to condense complexity and randomness into familiar forms. We find what we're primed to find. We look for the information that validates our biases and aligns with our existing narratives, particularly the narratives we have about ourselves, and dismiss the rest.

It's a habit that worsens in times of anxiety and uncertainty. We despise uncertainty, chaos, and the unknown. Human nature abhors a vacuum, so we manufacture meaning and plot to fill the void, populating the shadows with angels and demons.

Girl with Balloon, Banksy (Credit: Zorro4, Pixabay.)

Narrative fallacy gives us superstition, magical thinking, conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, zealotry, bigotry, and all manner of political and social narratives that reject evidentiary reality. Our internal monologues can be rife with baseless stories that cast us as the hero, the victim, the failure, the joke. We rationalize, catastrophize, valorize, vilify, absolve, embellish, and self-anesthetize.

Contrary to popular belief, story doesn't really need a beginning, middle, or end to work. At least, not in the way we use it to navigate our day-to-day lives.

Despite our love of order, we don't really seek closure or completeness nearly as much as may think we do. Life, after all, is an open-ended work in progress, the meaning of it constantly being rewritten and revised.

Most of the narratives flitting through our heads at any given moment are fragmentary and half-formed. Scraps of story that may morph or combine or be discarded as needed. The details are often fuzzy. Sometimes there's just a persistent idea, theme, belief, or feeling that suggests possible beginnings, middles, or ends without ever fully committing.

Even a fragment of a story can exert a powerful hold over us, lodging in our minds, encouraging us to look for pieces that fit and to ignore what doesn't.

Once upon a time...

...story helped us survive. Then, it turned us into one of the most successful species on Earth. Now, story has the power to lay us low, if we aren't careful.

Our world grows increasingly complex and interconnected, the pace of change accelerating. In a time when it can feel like chaos is rapidly encroaching, it is the human impulse to try to regain a sense of control and stability with the stories we tell.

With story, we can make better sense of the world—at least, up to a point—or we can force the sense we want onto it, reality be damned. Any tool can be turned into a weapon. A story can even be turned into a weapon of mass destruction.

Life on Earth is more tightly intermeshed and interdependent than ever. In the face of multiple global crises, we can't afford to let our stories disengage us from reality.

Story doesn't represent the absolute limit of human thought. We can develop an awareness of narrative in our lives, both our self-narratives and those surrounding us every day, taking a step back to assess and challenge our own assumptions. Again, not all stories are unhelpful or toxic or even wrong, but they are all, well, stories and should be treated with caution. The more we can learn to tolerate uncertainty, to take the world as it is and not simply as we want or expect it to be, the less likely we'll be to weaponize story against ourselves. Given the state of humanity today, that might come across as meager solace, but here we are and the future hasn't been written yet.

Photo at Top of Page: Native American petroglyphs - Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada. (Credit: Tim Madison.)