Day Three

Days 3 and 4 were about stories. I've been interested in storytelling and story structure for many years and have developed quite a few theories about them, so this seemed a good opportunity to discuss them with a captive audience!

One question I've often wondered about is what stories are for? After all, every culture in the world tells stories - fictional, allegorical, biographical and mythical. They must have some value, but what?

It's certainly true that we find it easier to remember things when they're told in the form of a story - it's long been a standard trick of memorization to take lists of objects and turn them into a narrative, which even if it's crazy seems to stick in the mind better than the list on its own. We explored this at the start of Day 3, by playing a memory game ('As I was walking along the river yesterday, I saw...'). But I suspect that this is not the reason we tell stories - more likely, we remember stories because they're useful, not the other way round.

Another, more interesting possibility is that stories are useful because they are an extension of personal experience. Before we had language, we could only learn from our own experiences. A cat might remember that going into a particular garden is dangerous because a big dog lives there. But it can't tell another cat not to go into the garden. So the very first 'stories' would have been just that - 'I went down into the valley yesterday and I nearly got eaten by a sabre-tooth'. It's worth noticing that most stories today are still of this form - think how many stories start 'I had a nightmare time the other day...'

Consider what a huge advantage it is to be able to benefit from other people's experiences. At a stroke, the number of things you can learn about is multipled by all the other people you know. You don't even have to experience the danger yourself. And it's a short step to the 'warning' story about experiences that weren't survived!

And so we come to fiction. Because if we tell stories about dangerous situations that no one has experienced, then no one has to get into actual danger. With the power of imagination, empathy and analogy, we can take the experience of imagined people and translate it into our own situation. It's like a scientific thought experiment, taking some imagined people and placing them into a situation to see how they will react.

No wonder we remember and seek out stories. They are a major part of how we have been so successful as a species.