By Katherine Dolan

Story, a spoken or written account of connected events, is one of the main ways we communicate with other people. Whether it’s reading a picture book with a child, watching a movie, listening to a podcast, gossiping over a cup of coffee, or daydreaming about a vacation, we participate in storytelling in some way every day.

Although stories have frequently been dismissed as “leisure” or “escapism,” they serve a basic human need. After all, every society has its stories that are passed down from one generation to the next. But what exactly is happening to us when we dive into a story?

Research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that stories are far more than entertainment. They are one of the primary ways human beings learn, connect, and make sense of themselves and one another. Stories allow us to simulate experiences, understand other minds, regulate emotions, and strengthen the social bonds on which societies depend. A recurring finding is that stories exercise our social brain. They strengthen parts of the brain we use to relate to and connect with others, especially the cognitive systems responsible for empathy, theory of mind, and emotional regulation. As neuroscience PhD and science writer Aditi Subramaniam observes, fiction in particular “is a kind of cognitive simulation that allows us to practice social and emotional skills in a low-risk environment.” Essayist Susan Cushman argues that this might also be true of literary or narrative nonfiction, which is often told as a vivid story.

By contrast, expository nonfiction, whose goal is to inform without forming a narrative or eliciting an emotional response, offers a chance to exercise a wide range of skills that help build social connection more indirectly by enhancing general knowledge, improving analytical thinking, and building self-esteem.

How Stories Organize and Share Meaning

The human brain has evolved to sift, sort, and integrate a massive amount of information to prioritize survival. It registers sensory input, evaluates the relative importance of that input, and integrates it into an existing archive of memory and consciousness. Of key importance in this process is Superior Pattern Processing, which allows us to detect small changes in the environment and to ascribe meaning to those changes. Neuroscientist Mark Mattson argues that this is the basis of most of what makes the human brain unique (“intelligence, language, imagination, invention, and the belief in imaginary entities such as ghosts and gods”).

The brain is also overwhelmingly motivated by a need for social connection; our species is sometimes termed “ultrasocial” for the way large groups of unrelated individuals cooperate—a tendency also seen in some insects but in very few mammals. One of the ways we connect is through language and, by extension, story, which not only organizes our thoughts but also sends them to other brains. Story is like a delivery service that packs and transports a world of facts, emotions, ideas, sensations, and beliefs from one brain to another.

The Default Mode Network and the Social Brain

To understand why stories are such effective vehicles for transmitting ideas and experiences, it helps to look at one of the brain’s core networks for constructing meaning and imagining other perspectives: the Default Mode Network.

Since neurologist Marcus E. Raichle coined the term “default mode” in 2001, research on how our brains respond to story has incorporated a growing understanding of the default mode network (DMN). This is a system of connected brain regions that is inactive when we are focused on external stimuli but gets very busy when we are inwardly focused, for example, when daydreaming, thinking about the past, planning, or getting lost in a work of fiction.

In the words of Vinod Menon, director of the Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory, the DMN “integrates and broadcasts memory, language, and semantic representations to create a coherent ‘internal narrative’ reflecting our individual experiences.” This internal narrative, he says, is central to our sense of self; it shapes how we perceive ourselves and how we interact with others.

In fact, one of the regions most active in the DMN is the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in making predictions and in thinking about the thoughts and feelings of others.

Social neuroscientist Taylor Guthrie, of the “Sense of Mind” podcast, describes the utility of making predictions and imagining scenarios about social interaction:

In these social environments, there’s a lot of cost from damaging relationships. If a relationship is really providing us sustenance, is providing us a means of eating, of feeling safe and all of these things, then we need to make sure we’re not just reactive in the moment, that maybe we’re angry and we just say a bunch of things that we shouldn’t have said. Instead, it’s a lot more beneficial for us to be able to play out these scenarios. ‘If I said this, what would they maybe say?’ And ‘How could they maybe be thinking about this?’ and ‘What is their perspective? I know they have a mind of their own, they have emotions of their own.’

Narrative Transportation

The DMN is active in many forms of internally focused thought, but one of its most remarkable roles is helping us enter and make sense of imagined worlds. This ability is especially evident when we become deeply immersed in a compelling story—a phenomenon psychologists call narrative transportation.

An example of how the DMN helps us absorb new information is the quasi-magical experience of narrative transportation. A story can be so gripping that it pushes you into an experiential state of immersion in which all your mental processes are concentrated on the narrative events and scenes. In this trance-like state, your brain receives and processes the fictional narrative as if it were lived experience.

While you are in this state, the DMN is connecting story events to personal memories, simulating environments, and constructing meaning. For the duration of this process, the brain merges the narrative self with the material self.

Although there is no reliable rule for determining whether any particular story will spark narrative transportation in any one person, vivid writing doesn’t hurt. Strong visual and mental images stimulate motor-sensory regions of the brain that support a convincing sense of reality. When you read or hear the word “kick,” for example, your brain activates in the same way it would if you were kicking. The same goes for specific sensory details. Consider this sentence from Raymond Chandler’s story “Red Wind”:

“It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.”

Even if you have never experienced a Santa Ana wind, your body registers the sensations “hot,” “dry,” “curl,” “jump,” and “itch” and, to one degree or another, feels the discomfort. This kind of vivid writing makes it easier for you to get carried away because you have clear reference points in your memory.

Interestingly, especially for advertisers and politicians, messages couched in story-form are more likely to persuade people than direct appeals or the presentation of facts. When readers or viewers experience a story as if they themselves are living it, they become less likely to examine embedded messages in a critical light and more open to changing their behavior as a result of the message.

Mentalizing: Understanding the Internal States of Ourselves and Others

Narrative transportation does more than immerse us in fictional worlds. It also helps explain why stories are so effective in strengthening our ability to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings.

One way in which fiction, and literary fiction in particular, enhances social cognition is through exercising the default subnetwork. This network is involved in theory of mind, which is our ability to recognize that other people have thoughts, feelings, and perspectives that may differ from our own. This skill is also known as mentalizing.

The mentalizing subnetwork allows us to infer the mental states of others. It performs discrete tasks, one of which is perspective-taking, the act of practicing cognitive empathy by accepting another person’s point of view without necessarily agreeing with it. It also refers to experience and to general knowledge, and it anticipates the future.

Reading is an effective way to flex our mentalizing abilities and improve emotional literacy. In a 2005 study, mothers read picture books to their children and asked questions about characters’ emotional states. The children of mothers who frequently practiced storybook reading at home and trained them to identify mental-state terms tended to perform well in tasks testing their theory of mind. Other studies with adult participants have drawn similar conclusions: reading fiction supports readers’ understanding of emotional concepts by exposing them to these emotions in context.

Exposure to literary fiction in particular (as opposed to popular or genre fiction) is associated positively with emotion recognition in others. It improves a reader’s ability to mentalize, both for short periods and over a lifetime.

Inter-Brain Synchronicity

Stories influence not only our internal understanding of other minds but also the way our brains respond to one another during communication.

When a group of people listens to someone telling a story, something remarkable happens: specialized brain cells called mirror neurons fire in the same areas and with the same patterns in the listeners’ brains as in the speaker’s brain, only with a slight delay. This synchronicity, called neural coupling, occurs when successful communication is happening, such as when a teacher is giving a lesson, or a couple is conversing, or a baby’s caregiver is responding to the infant’s babbling. When there is a failure to communicate, for example, when a story is told in a language the listener doesn’t know, there is no significant neural coupling.

Synchronicity also occurs when individuals share the same narrative experience, for example, when they watch the same movie, hear the same story, or co-create it. A 2010 study found “that the greater the anticipatory speaker–listener coupling, the greater the understanding.” In other words, when neural coupling occurs, it fosters imitation, empathy, and learning. Similarly, the closer people are to one another in terms of friendship, the more similar their DMN patterns are.

A University of Chicago study measured the reactions of people watching the same movie while having MRI brain scans. It found that synchronicity was most pronounced during highly engaging moments, suggesting that different people experience a similar degree and pattern of engagement and attentional fluctuations while processing the same narratives.

The mirror neuron system is separate from the DMN, but the two systems do interact: the former provides “embodied simulation” of other people’s actions and emotions; the latter handles internal, self-relevant thought and social cognition. So, as in the case of narrative transportation, the DMN works to bridge extrinsic information with our intrinsic world, negotiating differences between others and ourselves.

Emotional Engagement

Shared neural activity is only part of the story. Strong narratives also engage the brain’s emotional systems, helping explain why certain stories remain memorable—and persuasive—long after they end.

At the beginning of the collection of folktales A Thousand and One Nights, Sultan Shahryar is so enraged by the infidelity of his former wife that he resolves to take a new wife every day and have her executed the next morning. When he has depleted the region’s supply of nubile virgins, the Vizier’s clever daughter Scheherazade offers herself to him in marriage. On their wedding night, she tells him a story that ends on a cliffhanger, with a promise to tell him the rest the following night. The sultan is so captivated by the tale that he readily agrees. The next night, the same thing happens, and the next. After 1001 nights of engrossing stories, the Sultan’s unreasonable rage has calmed. He no longer feels the urge to murder all the women in his kingdom, and his ideas of responsible leadership have (presumably) been influenced by the stories that modeled good kingship or warned against bad.

As A Thousand and One Nights shows, reading or hearing highly engaging fiction increases a reader’s empathy (the ability to feel, share, and mirror another person’s emotions). Fiction does this by accessing the emotional sharing network, which overlaps with the mentalizing network but also includes the mirror neuron system, which leads us to internalize observed actions and emotions; the amygdala, which processes emotional arousal; and hubs of affective empathy (the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex), which activate when we see others’ pain or disgust.

Narrative transport, or high engagement, can be a prerequisite for the release of hormones like dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. Will Storr, author of The Science of Storytelling, argues that well-crafted stories create tension through conflict and mystery, which keep readers and listeners engaged and trigger a dopamine-driven “reward” response in the brain.

Like a gambler in the throes of addiction, Sultan Shahryar was experiencing the “do-it-more” effect of dopamine, driven by the tension and mystery Scheherazade created by presenting him with intriguing plots and withholding the endings of her stories.

He was also, very likely, experiencing increased empathy thanks to a surge of oxytocin, a chemical that increases a feeling of closeness to and empathy for others. In a series of experiments, neuroeconomist Paul Zak and his team asked volunteers to watch one of two versions of a video about a dying boy. The first version was presented as a story, with a classic dramatic arc, while the second had a “flat” narrative arc. The team also took blood samples from the volunteers before and after viewing the videos. They found that people who watched the film in story form experienced increased oxytocin levels.

This emotional power of story was dramatically demonstrated by a 2020 study in which a single storytelling session with hospitalized children led to an increase in oxytocin, a reduction in cortisol and pain, and positive emotional shifts.

Calming the Nervous System

Stories influence us not only emotionally but physiologically, affecting the body’s stress response and overall sense of well-being.

Reading or listening to a story, or indeed to nonfiction texts, can have significant calming effects on your nervous system. Training your attention on a book can signal your brain to activate the parasympathetic nervous system(“rest and digest” mode), lowering your heart rate and easing muscular tension in much the same way as meditation. Making a habit of reading books can even lengthen your life.

Mentalizing also plays a role in emotional regulation. Those who regularly practice taking another person’s perspective (as fiction readers naturally do) develop strong connections between their prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate, a pairing linked to better emotional regulation and stress recovery.

Emotional regulation is not only healthy for us as individuals, but it is also an essential aspect of social communication. Recognizing emotions, calming down, and adapting behaviors to social contexts are all skills that decrease conflict and increase independence and resilience.

Stories are far more than entertainment or a pleasant escape from everyday life. They are one of the primary ways human beings make sense of themselves, understand one another, and build shared communities. Research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that stories organize information, exercise the social brain, strengthen empathy, regulate emotion, and help us imagine lives beyond our own experience. Whether we encounter them in novels, films, conversations, podcasts, or family traditions, stories do more than reflect what it means to be human—they help make us who we are.

Katherine Dolan is a writer, editor, and researcher at the Independent Media Institute, based in Dunedin, New Zealand. Dolan is a former senior writer at Fairfax Media Custom Publishing in New Zealand and at Lifestyle Magazine in Moscow, and a copy editor for the US news site NSFWCORP. She is a contributor to the Observatory.

This article was produced for the Observatory by the Independent Media Institute.