#10: The Power of Stories
and their place in learning
We all love stories, don’t we?
When I was a child I wanted to be a writer, and that desire has never left me. I suppose it eventually led to the life I now have, a handful of books and articles. But the writing I do isn’t really the kind of writing I envisaged when I was seven or eight years old, because I always wanted to write stories.
Somewhere along the way these intentions diminished, but never really left me, spawning, instead, pieces about stories and imagination and how the human mind can conjure up events that have never happened and people who have never existed. I even wrote a 100,000 word manuscript on the subject that I doubt will ever see the light of day, although I’ve adapted a few chapters and published them here:
The Curious Psychology of Fictional Characters
Imagining Ourselves into Existence
In the February issue of The Psychologist, there’s an interesting interview with writer Will Storr, where he discusses the powerful nature of stories (I’d also highly recommend his book The Science of Storytelling). I rarely read books about writing, which might be why I have so many problems getting anything accepted for publication. I do, however, write all the time (including two novels and countless short stories) even though I know most of what I write will never be published. I also read pretty much continuously, after all, writers must also be readers.
So why do I write?
I suppose, in one way, I use writing as an outlet. I have always been a daydreamer, a rather solitary person more comfortable with his own thoughts than amongst lots or people. Writing, I think, acts as a type of cognitive offloading, a means of downloading the stories that clutter my mind. I can take the chaos, make sense of it by writing it down and then file it away. This can be a journaling type exercise, but can also take the form of fiction, perhaps as a way of creating some distance between my experiences and the emotional consequences of them. I have written about these things, such as the death of my partner and my experiences of raising our son, but I never manage to fully express these experiences in the way I want to. Perhaps I can accomplish this my creating a world that isn’t so close to my own?
Storytelling (and, I think, story making) can comfort us, as this fascinating piece from The Atlantic implies.
Storytelling and learning
Stories also help us learn, as The Atlantic piece explains here:
The theory is that if I tell you a story about how to survive, you’ll be more likely to actually survive than if I just give you facts. For instance, if I were to say, “There’s an animal near that tree, so don’t go over there,” it would not be as effective as if I were to tell you, “My cousin was eaten by a malicious, scary creature that lurks around that tree, so don’t go over there.” A narrative works off of both data and emotions, which is significantly more effective in engaging a listener than data alone. In fact, Jennifer Aaker, a professor of marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, says that people remember information when it is weaved into narratives “up to 22 times more than facts alone.”
In this blog post from 2013, cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham also recognises stories as powerful learning aids. Yes, we learn a great deal about science, for example, by reading about the life stories of scientists but, as Willingham points out:
You don't have to think of narrative just as the story of an individual or group of people; you can think more abstractly conflict, complications, and the eventual resolution of conflict as the core of narrative structure.
Tom Sherrington describes and expands on Willingham’s ideas here, with some excellent practical examples.
Dynamic narratives
How we recall stories is, of course, influenced by the reconstructive nature of episodic memory. We generally retain the gist of a story rather than the verbatim narrative (see my piece here). Back in the 1930s Frederic Bartlett also found that people make sense of ambiguity in stories by shortening them, simplifying, or replacing parts with material that fits better with the readers experiences. This is more so with stories that have arisen within specific cultures and are then read by individuals raised in a different culture - the most famous example in psychology being Bartlett’s War of the Ghosts study, whereby British participants were asked to read and reproduce a Native American folk tale.
And… schemas
Of course, I can’t conclude without adding something about schemas, as we can hypothesise that this is how narratives are stored (with the caveat that we may not actually store anything - a topic for another time, perhaps). Nevertheless, the idea of schemas can provide one explanation as to why stories can be such a powerful learning tool.
But storytelling is also part of our evolutionary journey, from our prehistoric ancestors to the first early written tales. Indeed, some groups still rely on these oral histories, such as the Yazidi people of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The Yazidi faith is complex and seemingly secretive, partly because they have never relied on holy books, preferring to pass on their beliefs and stories of their religion orally. It’s likely the stories told to young Yazidis today are subtly different to those told in the past, but similarities remain and devotees are able to ascertain the gist of what it is to be Yazidi, sometimes without fully understanding the faith they follow (Nadia Murad’s book The Last Girl explains this better than I will ever be able to, as well as the attempted genocide of the Yazidi people by Islamic State).
Learning is, therefore, also about stories, coherent narratives that help to make sense of countless facts and seemingly useless information. We may forget facts and figures, but we rarely forget a good story.
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