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You are a Narrative Being

For better or worse.

By Simon Sticker, Documentary Storyteller

The Suction of Story

You do not wake up in the morning calculating your life in spreadsheets.
You tune in to the private film that has been running since childhood: a sweeping epic in which you are hero, narrator, and attentive audience all at once.
The pull of that interior cinema is so strong that, as Jonathan Gottschall describes it in his book ‘The Storytelling Animal’, “Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story.”
We are narrative beings long before we are rational ones, and that fact reveals everything from our earliest evolutionary victories to our twenty-first-century skirmishes with misinformation.

Our Cooperative Superpower

Evolution chose story as its cooperative superpower.

Anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and storytellers alike now argue that language itself probably emerged to let us swap tales about what mattered for survival: threats, alliances, and opportunities.
Will Storr describes the consensus in his book ‘A Story is a deal”: “It’s believed that language evolved to allow us to tell stories, and that these stories granted us the ability to behave with extremely high levels of cooperation.”
The moment early humans could turn isolated observations into a shared narrative, they ceased to be lone apes and began functioning as what biologists call a “superorganism.”
Shared stories aligned attention, intentions, and emotions, turning scattered foragers into small bands capable of coordinated hunts, mutual defense, and eventually the construction of whole cultures.
It laid the groundwork for the success of our species.

Wired for Narrative

Modern neuroscience shows that our brains still treat story as the default operating system.
When we listen to or read a compelling narrative, cascades of cortisol, oxytocin, and dopamine flood the bloodstream, enhancing focus, empathy, and memory.
In experimental settings this “neural coupling” means that the storyteller’s brain activity syncs with that of listeners, letting separate minds simulate a single experience.
“Hormones such as cortisol, oxytocin, and dopamine are released… causing the same parts of our brains to be used as the speaker is using.”
Stories literally wire us together.

That wiring is visible even in early childhood.
By about four years old, children master a theory of mind and become, as Storr notes in his book ‘The science of storytelling’, “story-ready; equipped to understand the logic of narrative.”
From that point on, the brain insists on arranging reality into chains of cause and effect with identifiable protagonists and obstacles. Emotion is the compass. Storytelling is then feelings translated into sequence.

Where the Wiring Goes Wrong

Because our neurons privilege narrative, memory itself behaves like an editor obsessed with coherence.
We are drawn to finished tales and intolerant of dangling threads.
Researchers at the University of Western Australia found that once a vivid story lodges, even when listeners learn that it is false, “it’s hard for our memories to let it go.”
The brain prefers a tidy but inaccurate chronicle to an untidy truth. For the storyteller fighting for nuance, this is the engine to fight against. It is the cognitive wiring that makes a simplistic, misleading headline more "sticky" than a carefully reported, complex story.
Add to this the discovery that we “re-script” our autobiographical past to make ourselves moral and competent protagonists - and you begin to see why evidence alone seldom rearranges convictions.

This appetite for coherence also explains why uncertainty stings like physical pain.
“Evolutionarily, the brain dislikes uncertainty,” notes Andrea Small in her book ‘Navigating Ambiguity’, and so it “creates story upon story to explain it away.”
In the ancestral savanna, premature certainty was safer than endless doubt; today the same bias generates quick takes, conspiracy theories, and premature judgments. Brian Klaas labels the tendency “narrative bias”—a hard-wired preference for “stories with neat and tidy cause and effect” that renders conspiracy tales curiously seductive.

Once a preferred plotline sets in, the brain looks for more evidence to confirm it - confirmation bias - retrieving confirmatory detail and deleting dissonance.
Basically, if you got a belief, your brain will search for evidence to back it up.
Add social media’s infinite scroll and algorithmic amplification, the tendency for drama and extreme view, that sparks our negativity bias, and you have an ecosystem where our storytelling craft is actively devalued.
The system doesn't reward integrity or nuance; it rewards the most emotionally charged narratives, true or false, turning the storytellers's thoughtful work into a strategic disadvantage.

These cognitive mechanics make misinformation a feature of our design, not an aberration.
Hugo Mercier provocatively argues that people are often “far more skeptical than they are given credit for,” yet they still cluster around partisan myths because those myths meet psychological and tribal needs.
Dismissing believers as gullible misses the point; narrative allegiance is more about loyalty and identity than about data quality. In fact, much “fake news” merely accessorizes a worldview its audience already holds—80 to 90 percent of false content is consumed by those “who have already made up their minds.”

Why Facts Alone Are Not Enough

So for better or worse, we are narrative beings, capable of incredible things, yet also vulnerable, because of it.
If story is the brain’s mother tongue, rational analysis is a foreign language learned late, yet we came to the believe that this is, what drives our worlds.
But facts that ignore narrative context bounce off. Neuroscience writer Alex Edmans warns that locating a single accurate statistic in an argument is insufficient because the stat can be “true yet misleading without context or causation understanding.”

Without a story scaffold, facts stay inert.

Photo & collage: Simon Sticker

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