The Pleasures and Perils of Storytelling from BBC’s The Forum

This transcript was taken from The Pleasures and Perils of Storytelling, an episode of The Forum from the BBC. You can access The Forum on the BBC’s website here.

Bridget Kendall
Welcome to The Forum from the BBC, with me, Bridget Kendall.

Are you an avid consumer of novels? Love stories, maybe? Or mysteries, or historical fiction, which transports you into another age? And have you ever wondered what all these stories may be doing to your head? Today, we want to probe the pleasures and perils of storytelling — why reading fiction may enrich us, and why perhaps a love of stories may blind us too.

Joining me from Toronto is Raymond Mar, associate professor of psychology at York University in Canada, whose research explores whether the habit of reading fiction may help hone our social skills. Joining us from New York is business consultant Thaler Pekar, who seeks out persuasive stories and teaches people how best to share them. And with me in the forum studio here in London is science writer and broadcaster Philip Ball, who asks whether our human hunger for narratives may sometimes be a problem, especially in our ever-more complex world. So, welcome to all three of you, and I want to start by asking all of you, in turn, briefly — as a child, did you enjoy listening to and telling stories? And if so, what was your favorite story? Philip?

Philip Ball
Well, I absolutely did enjoy doing both. I think I wrote my first book at 10, very sort of intently. The stories that really stick in my mind, there are two groups of stories. They are the Moomin novels by Tove Jansson and the Earthsea stories by Ursula Le Guin. And I think what I take away from that memory, is the idea that when children are being given something in a story that goes beyond the completely commendable idea of telling you an exciting narrative, when it tells you something more, something profound about the world, I think they instinctively know that.

Bridget Kendall
That’s interesting because you’re talking about stories that have wizards and magic in and fantastical creatures. What about you, Thaler?

Thaler Pekar
My favorite book as a child was “Harriet The Spy,” which I realize now, is about listening to people, about sharing stories, and about being heard. I also played with dolls for a very long time, and by the end, I had constructed an entire city under the ping pong table in my parents basement, with municipal services and with complex relationships, and with my dolls having highly dramatic storylines.

Bridget Kendall
So that’s interesting. That’s fantasy, but perhaps more earthbound. What about you, Raymond?

Raymond Mar
I wasn’t much of a storyteller growing up that I can recall, but I was definitely an avid reader. I can recall getting in trouble at the dinner table often for trying to read with a book on my lap and barely touching my food. I read everything — comics, books, all types of genres. One that does stand out for me is these stories about a boy detective named Encyclopedia Brown that would solve mysteries with facts.

Bridget Kendall
Isn’t that interesting, two of you were would-be spies and detectives. Well, let’s do some more detective work ourselves on storytelling now, and start with you, Raymond Mar, and your research into what seems to be happening in our brains when we read or listen to stories. Because one of your main conclusions, as a researcher, is that people who read a lot of fiction seem to be better at empathizing with other people than those who don’t read fiction. In other words, reading literature isn’t just pleasurable. It may actually be rather useful teaching us in a fictional context how to navigate the social complexities of life. But one does wonder, why should reading lots of fiction that is, invented stories about made up people in imaginary situations, have that effect?

Raymond Mar
That’s a great question. I think that what’s important to keep in mind is these stories that we’re reading, that we’re interested in, are made by writers that are really interested in human psychology, in the human world, and have quite a lot of experience in what people are like, and are invested in portraying the social world as accurately as possible.

And so I think that when we read novels, when we watch television and when we watch movies, we’re really engaging in a very complex fictional representation of what real-world psychology and real-world relationships are like.

Bridget Kendall
So this is all about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes?

Raymond Mar
Absolutely. Taking the perspective of a main character or protagonist, or maybe multiple different characters, as they try and negotiate often very difficult relationships and very difficult circumstances.

Bridget Kendall
And you’ve done studies to test this, haven’t you?

Raymond Mar
Yes, that’s right. And so one of the things that we did, for example is, we looked at lifetime exposure to either narrative fiction, so stories, novels or expository nonfiction, which we employed as a sort of control or comparison condition. And I thought that these essays or these nonfiction texts were a good control, because it’s another form of complex reading, but it doesn’t really involve a portrayal of the social world.

Bridget Kendall
And what did you find?

Raymond Mar
What we found was that adults who had read more fiction in their life actually did better, or were more capable of inferring what other people are thinking and feeling — understanding other people’s motivations, their emotions and their thoughts and so forth.

Bridget Kendall
So it made them more empathetic, more sociable. The thing though, is one wonders, how are you able to extricate cause and effect here? Because couldn’t people who are naturally more empathetic and sociable be the sort of people who are more drawn to read about it? To enjoy fiction?

Raymond Mar
Absolutely. And that’s a great point. I really do want to emphasize that these are correlational studies, and so we can’t make strong causal inferences from these kinds of data. What we can do is try and measure those variables and control for them statistically. And so in these studies that I’m talking about, we controlled for the possibility that they might have outgoing personalities, for example, or that might value social relationships and social harmony a great deal. We also controlled for their tendency to even become highly engaged or immersed in stories. And controlling for all these things, we still see those relationships. There are also experimental studies by other researchers like David Kidd and Emanuele Castano that have found that short-term exposure to narrative fiction, literary stories, appears to create short-term boosts in empathy or social understanding.

Bridget Kendall
And you’ve also done studies involving children, haven’t you? Which is interesting because these are people, of course, who have less experience of life?

Raymond Mar
Right. We did a study on preschoolers between the ages of 4-6. And what’s interesting is that at this age, children develop an understanding that other people have minds, that they can have thoughts and preferences that might be different from their own. And what we found was that parents who were better at recognizing the names of children’s book authors and the titles of children’s story books had children that were more advanced in understanding other people’s mental states. And what was really interesting is that parental ability to recognize the names of adult authors showed no such prediction. So it was really unique to parents having a good understanding of storybooks that had predicted their child’s ability to understand mental states and understand other people.

Bridget Kendall
But how do you control for factors like the influence of general intelligence or family support for learning? Maybe it’s not just about the story books, right?

Raymond Mar
Absolutely. And so what we did was we measured these factors and then controlled for them statistically. So we controlled for parental socioeconomic status, how wealthy the parents were. We controlled for the verbal ability of the children as well as the children’s age. We controlled for as many other intervening variables as we could come up with, and we still happened to see the effect.

Bridget Kendall
It does sound difficult to identify controls which you can be absolutely sure about, but you have also looked about what’s been going on in the brain, haven’t you, when people are reading fiction — and what does your research suggest there?

Raymond Mar
Right, so what I did was a meta analysis that summarized the results of a lot of different neuroimaging studies that looked at people reading while their brains were being scanned. And what we found was that the network of brain areas that seemed to be implicated or involved while people are understanding stories shows a great deal of overlap with the network of brain regions that people use when trying to understand to understand other people in the real world.

Bridget Kendall
Phillip, what’s your reaction to this?

Philip Ball
What I’m burning to ask you, Raymond is, does all fiction work as well? That’s to say, does Dan Brown work as well as Dostoyevsky? And that sounds like it could be going into something.

Bridget Kendall
So Dan Brown is sort of simple —

Philip Ball
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, that’s right —

Bridget Kendall
Versus Dostoyevsky, very complex philosophical novels —

Philip Ball
Philosophical and psychological, yeah.

And I’m asking that particularly not to sort of say, “Well, of course it has to be high literature before it has this effect.” I mean, that may turn out to be the case. But I’m thinking more that, sometimes, it’s the simpler stories, the ones that are in some ways less literary, that find a real resonance in our cultures. And not necessarily Dan Brown, but things like Sherlock Holmes or Dracula, that just keep being reinvented. They seem to have some real power that resonates with people.

So did you look into that at all, Raymond, what type of books the people were reading?

Raymond Mar
Absolutely, this is a really interesting question, and I would say it’s the topic of live debate within the literature at this moment. And there is some evidence showing that literary stories that are a little more complex, that require readers to be a little more active and engaging and inferring what’s going on, might be really powerful in promoting empathy. But then there’s other research that seems to show that stories that we wouldn’t typically think of as being literary, such as romance novels, are again, really good predictors of our ability to understand others. And so I would say that the jury’s out a bit on this. It’s certainly a topic that we have an eye on, and lot of people are doing research on, but the results are a bit mixed at the moment, and we’re not sure what might be going on when it comes to different types of stories. My own sort of idea is that any story that deals a lot with social content, especially relationships and emotions, in a relatively accurate way, would be likely to promote empathy and understanding.

Bridget Kendall
Thaler, what do you think about this as someone who deals a lot with storytelling, but as a non-scientist? Because it occurs to me that in some ways, none of this is that surprising. I mean, we’ve been constantly told, haven’t we, that reading good literature isn’t just entertaining, it’s enriching. It’s good for you. It makes you a better person.

Thaler Pekar
I appreciated what Raymond said about fact and about emotion.

To me, stories are compelling because they unify emotion and fact. If you think about it, in the midst of having an emotional experience, you’re unable to simultaneously experience the meaning of the event. Assigning meaning to the event comes later, and stories are what help you process emotion and assign meaning. And so story then becomes this really efficient structure for delivering and understanding both complex and emotional information.

And because of that, I think story succeeds where no other communication vehicle can.

Bridget Kendall
You mean that you’re not just in the character, but there’s also a plot there, and possibly a narrator to help you along the way to sort of see the bigger significance of it.

Thaler Pekar
And what Philip said earlier — it’s those profound lessons that we’re able to take away. But it takes that little bit of distance and that little bit of time, and that great thing of story that enables us to combine both information and fact and emotion together and make it a unified structure.

Bridget Kendall
Raymond, does that fit with what you’ve been studying?

Raymond Mar
It certainly fits with my own belief regarding these things. I do think that what’s really unique about narrative is that we can control our emotional distance of it. So if we’re reading about something that’s terribly, terribly sad, we can actually sort of withdraw a bit from the story so we’re not completely overwhelmed and allow us to process these emotional events and actually again, attribute meaning to them and come to a greater understanding of them. Whereas, if something highly emotional were to happen to us in the real world, we can easily become overwhelmed and not be able to make sense of or make meaning of it. So stories, because we’re allowed to make this distance, and also that we’re allowed to revisit these stories, can really help us to process very complex emotions.

Bridget Kendall
But if stories have this distancing aspect to them, this sort of abstraction, a simplified version of reality, you don’t have every little detail, do you? You just have the ones that are needed for the plot or the characterization. Isn’t there a kind of paradox here, that this is inevitably a pale imitation of reality, and yet you’re saying that it makes your brain work as though you’re dealing with the real thing.

Raymond Mar
I think the key is that our brain is a lot of filling in. We can draw upon our past experiences, our memories, our knowledge of the world to flesh out these stories. And in doing so, we become interactive. We are engaged with the story, we’re actually becoming partially a storyteller as we understand these stories. And I think that’s what makes these stories so powerful.

Bridget Kendall
It does raise the question, doesn’t it — if you think about today’s world where everyone says, “Oh, kids aren’t reading nearly as much as they used to in my day,” — what about the effects of computer games? If you have your nose stuck in a computer game, if the game’s imaginative enough, can it do the same thing?

Raymond Mar
I think it’s certainly possible. I think there’s been an increasing focus on storytelling within video games and video game development — people are much more critical of video games that lack a good story. And so I think that there’s certainly potential here. It’s just another modality for storytelling: interactive story. And in ways that people feel like they’re a part of the story, similar in ways, I suppose, to choose your own adventure novels, where people could read a book and then they were given a choice. You know, “If you choose to do this, you go to this page. If you would like to do something else, you go to another page.” I think interactive stories have always been a part of storytelling.

Bridget Kendall
It is interesting, isn’t it, Thaler — as someone who cares a lot about storytelling — that maybe work like Raymond’s, which helps deconstruct what’s useful from books, could maybe give us some hints about what be good video games and computer games?

Thaler Pekar
Absolutely, I think a large part of what’s happening in the gaming industry is empowering the actual player to be a storyteller. And so there’s an understanding that just as we walk around inside of stories that we hear, we want to actively participate in the games and help co-create those stories.

We’re already doing that in our heads. When we hear a story, we think of a story.

When we’re in the midst of a story, our brains work as prediction machines, so we’re already imagining what could be happening next. I think that people who are designing games are understanding that there is that sort of Interactivity, and a connectivity, and let’s empower the gamer to have a say in how the story proceeds.

Bridget Kendall
Let’s talk a bit more about your world, Thaler Pekar, where you focus on coaching people, both in the business and nonprofit worlds, on how best to create and use stories. And let’s look first at the corporate sector — we’ve heard for years that every company needs its own story, but what you say is that business leaders should focus not so much on telling stories, but listening out for them. Why do you say that?

Thaler Pekar
I direct smart leaders and institutions in finding, developing and sharing true stories.

And as I said before, the reality is that story begets story — when you hear a story, you are actually neurologically prompted to remember a story. So a large part of my work is helping smart leaders learn to strategically share a story and then to sit back, to shush up, and to listen to the stories that they hear in return.

Another reason is the understanding that in today’s network world, it’s increasingly difficult for institutions to control communication. That old style of throwing lots of advertising dollars out and saying what you want to say and not having anybody dispute — it is gone. Business Communication has moved from controlling dissemination to a much more democratic and dialog-based communication. And so it’s important that leaders listen to the stories that customers and consumers are actually sharing about their businesses, or actually sharing about what they think about what’s going on.

Bridget Kendall
So this isn’t just about hooking people in with individual stories. This is also about the new world of personalized production then, when you try and listen out to the individual needs of your consumer, is that what you’re saying?

Thaler Pekar
Absolutely. And I also encourage people to ask for stories. Because businesses are starting to understand that in a really complex market, where there’s complex topics and there’s complex people, story elicitation and asking for stories results in great and deep insight.

When you ask for a story, you hear things that you wouldn’t normally hear. When you ask a direct question, you get a “yes” and “no” answer. My “yes” might be different then Raymond’s “yes.” Or if I say “no” to something, Philip might be saying “no” too, but for a very different reason. But when we ask for a story — when we ask for somebody to tell their experience or what they are basing their “yes” or “no” on — we hear lots of emotion. We hear lots of insight that we wouldn’t otherwise hear if we asked for a direct question.

Bridget Kendall
Raymond, listening to this, what are your thoughts on this as a psychologist?

Raymond Mar
I think it’s really interesting, this idea that elicited stories provide rich information that can be of benefit to companies. It really reminds me of different research approaches. You can ask what we consider to be closed-ended survey questions, where people answer between 1-7 their agreement with a statement, but you can also ask open-ended questions — just allow people to speak for themselves. And it’s true that you get a lot more information this way, and it’s really useful when you’re interested in a topic, but don’t know too much about it. So it’s a good way to get information from the bottom up, that can later on shape different ways of asking questions.

Bridget Kendall
But Thaler, isn’t there something of a problem with this sort of result-oriented story? Whether it’s a business who’s looking to engage people to like their product, or possibly it’s a charity who wants to convince a philanthropist to give them money — that you’re trying to come up with a story where you want a certain result. And actually the very best stories, if we go back to the world of fiction, are not the ones where the ending is geared towards what they think you want to hear. It’s out of your control. You just have to take it and accept it.

Thaler Pekar

I believe that all communication is a means to an end goal. I believe that there’s a reason why we’re speaking. Usually there’s a reason why you’re engaged in conversation with somebody — even if it’s to figure out where you want to go on vacation with your partner, or if it’s wanting to get, perhaps someone who works with you to work faster. If we’re talking to somebody without a goal in mind, even if that goal is to make them happy — when we go out for a beer or a cup of coffee with a friend, we’re out with them to make them feel good, usually — and so there’s always a goal. I don’t think that this idea of being clear about intent is necessarily manipulative.

I think that lying is wrong. I think that misrepresentation is wrong. But I think that being clear about what it is that you want, and inviting people to be a part of that, is okay. A company exists because it’s offering something to the world. It’s offering some sort of solution. Now you might not want to buy that solution, but some other people do, or else the company wouldn’t exist. And so I think asking people and inviting them to be a part of that solution is okay.

Bridget Kendall
How do you keep stories fresh and keep them meaningful? If you are trying to do something like, for example, as a charity, engage a philanthropist in what you’re doing?

Thaler Pekar
I think there’s a couple of points here — and I was thinking of this earlier in our discussion.

There’s a saying among storytellers that you need to tell a story 100 times to understand what it means. And I thought recently of a story I shared with a client that I had shared many times before, and for some reason, I broke down in tears sharing this story. It was probably the 50th time I had told that story. But for some reason, emotionally I lined up with it in a different way.

I do think that it’s a wonderful development that there is an understanding that people and the world are very complex, and I do think that we are moving away from the simplicity of stories that are often told in advertising, and often told to engage people, and to engage donors as well. Simplicity is great because it’s a pattern matching exercise. A story with a clear beginning, middle and end, and easily identifiable archetypes — it’s pattern matching, and it’s familiar and it’s very comfortable.

But the reality is that lives are highly complex, and that seldom is the path from bad to good or from suffering to redemption clear and easy.

So there is a skepticism, as you said. And because of this, I think there is a great movement away from that simplicity. And there’s an acknowledgement and a celebration, actually, of the plurality of stories and narratives that exist in people’s lives.

Humans may crave simplicity, but I think that we mostly crave empathy. And the stories that tend to resonate most deeply with us are the ones that reflect the realities of our messy lives.

Bridget Kendall
Raymond, would you agree with that from your research?

Raymond Mar
I would say that this is true. I think that, although there are broad themes that tend to run through narratives about love, about conflict, about competition — the way that these stories ultimately emerge is so multi-varied and so complex. And I agree that people see a resonance there — in the complexity of their own lives, the complexity of maybe their own thoughts and their own personalities, in how complexity is represented within these stories and story characters.

Bridget Kendall
I guess the question is, how complex can a narrative become? We’ll explore that in a couple of minutes, but now it’s time for a short break in this forum on storytelling. We’ll be back after a summary of the latest BBC News.

This is the forum from the BBC today. We’re talking about the pleasures and pitfalls of storytelling, but now it’s time for our 60-second idea to improve the world. And this week, it’s from Canadian psychology professor Raymond Marr. Raymond, you’ve got just 60 seconds to make your case to me, Bridget Kendall, and my other two guests, American business consultant Thaler Pekar and British science journalist Philip Ball. And of course, our global Forum audience. So Raymond, if you’ve collected your thoughts, off you go.

Raymond Mar
People all vary in their willingness to interact with complete strangers. Some of us would really enjoy it if someone sat down next to us on the bus and struck up a conversation, whereas others would find this idea terrifying and abhorrent. The real problem is that no one knows at a glance what anyone else’s preference is. And so, in a retail shop, all the staff were instructed to be very gregarious and friendly towards customers, but this might actually turn off some customers, but appeal to others. And so what I’m proposing is that everyone wear a colored badge that indicates to other people their willingness to interact with strangers. A yellow badge would mean normal expectations, so feel free to ask me for directions if you’re lost. A red badge would indicate more conservative expectations, so please don’t bother me if you’re a stranger, unless it’s a really important emergency. And a green badge would indicate more liberal expectations — in other words, I’m very open to be chatted up by a stranger.

Bridget Kendall
I thank you very much, Raymond, and I would guess that the forum definitely has to be a green badge event. I suppose what you’re acknowledging is that we don’t feel sociable, all of us, all the time. And that follows on from your interest in how we learn the skills of social engagement from reading fiction. And given we’re talking about storytelling, I was wondering if maybe you could have another badge, maybe a purple badge, for example, which would mean — I’m not feeling very sociable at the moment, but if you have a really good story to tell me, have a go, try and engage me. What do you think?

Raymond Mar
I think that’s a fascinating addition to the idea. And certainly, more badges, more color, means hopefully less awkward interactions between people, because there’ll be shared expectations.

Bridget Kendall
Philip Ball, do you like this idea?

Philip Ball
Well, I just, I’m clearly affected by our theme, because I was starting to tell myself stories about those scenarios. So everyone is on the tube, and on comes the guy who normally you know you must avoid making eye contact with, and he has a big green badge on — so what does everyone do? Or the guy who’s on the street and is trying to find directions and everyone around him has red badges and he can’t talk to anyone.

Bridget Kendall
What about you, Thaler Pekar?

Thaler Pekar
I think that I should title my autobiography, “The Purple Badge,” that’s a great idea. I always loved the television showSeinfeld. There was an episode where Elaine suggests to the New York City mayoral aide that all New Yorkers wear name tags so that the city will be friendlier. The idea is widely ridiculed, however, and it’s considered a fiasco — the mayor actually loses his reelection because of it.

While I liked Raymond’s idea, I think we have to remember that social isolation is a known cause of poor physical and mental health — so the people wearing the red tags may very well be the ones who are in need of engagement. So I could only hope that, were this to actually occur, that the people wearing the green tags would actually encourage the Reds towards increased engagement, and not the other way around.

Bridget Kendall
That’s interesting you should say that, Thaler, because when you were saying, “Well, you know, maybe people need to have name badges” in a way it’s true, Raymond, isn’t it, that any kind of information you put out there about yourself from a colored badge is an invitation to the people who are around you to understand better what your mood might be. And so in a way, it’s all an invitation to engagement.

Raymond Mar
Yeah, it’s all a form of communication with others. And what I would like to stress is these are simply about interactions with strangers. And so many people who are a bit introverted, for example, have very strong social ties to others, very deep bonds to maybe a close number of friends, but can become anxious when approached by those they do not know well or are just not comfortable around strangers. So I don’t think that wearing a red bed would necessarily mean social isolation, but it would help to sort of communicate preferences with respect to interactions with strangers.

Bridget Kendall
Oh, I don’t know about just interaction between strangers. I have another story now, and it’s about a family and the teenager comes down to breakfast in the morning, probably most days wearing a red badge, because they would like to eat their cereal without anybody talking to them. But if maybe one day they had a green badge, then, you know, the parents know they can jump in. Anyway, thank you, Raymond, love the idea. And if you’re listening and you have other 60 second ideas to offer us, or if you want to hear more 60-second ideas or whole Forum programs, you can download them for free from our website or from your favorite podcast app.

Now, let’s continue our exploration of storytelling with you, Philip Ball. You’re a highly regarded British science writer whose work appears in prestigious journals like Nature, and among the topics to which you regularly return, both in your articles and your books, is what seems to be an instinctive human desire to interpret the world in simple terms, often through a story or a narrative. And you argue that we try and look for these narratives and patterns in everything, including music, even works of abstract classical music, like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for example.

[Music Plays]

That was Carlos Kleiber conducting the Chicago Symphony. And Philip, people have constructed all sorts of narratives about the opening of that symphony — fate knocking on the door, the struggle against Beethoven’s own deafness, and the symbol of Allied Victory in World War II, people have said, too. What would you say about narrative and music?

Philip Ball
Gosh that would have been pretty prescient of Beethoven, wouldn’t it? They certainly argued about that little motif, that four note “duh duh duh duh,” where that came from. Some people have said it came from birdsong — who knows? I think the real question there is what Beethoven does with it.

People have wanted to construct a narrative about the broader trends that go through a long piece of music like that — what’s it about? What is this symphony trying to communicate to us? And they tell stories about it. They’re often stories that are very vague, kind of generic stories about triumph over adversity, but I think it’s very interesting that even in something as abstract as that — there are no words there, and there’s no semantic meaning that’s in the notes — we have this impulse to create a story around it.

Well, that’s the thing about music, although the notes themselves carry no meaning, it seems to simulate language and discourse in all sorts of ways.  Parts relate to other parts. You can sort of hear, perhaps, a difficulty being accounted in the music and then a solution is found. And so it mimics the kind of contours that narratives have. And that seems to be enough to trigger this story-making part of our brain, so we start to try to interpret it that way.

Bridget Kendall
Philip, though, your point is that in our predilection to look for patterns and narratives, that there can be a danger, especially in science or economics. Because if we try and make sense of data by organizing it in some sort of story or emotional journey, then we could end up distorting the meaning.

Philip Ball
Well, I think it can certainly give us an illusion of understanding. And we see this happening, certainly in economics, where you have these patterns, there’s crazy graphs of some economic index going all over the place and people are pointing to this peak here and saying, “Well, this is obviously when, you know, this transaction took place.” As if by telling a narrative, we can understand something that is clearly extremely complex.

That’s the worry — that there are some processes, in fact, probably lots of processes in the natural world and in the social world, that can’t easily be explained by narratives but nevertheless, we tend to.

It’s the old problem of the causes of the First World War. I think, I certainly hope, that school children are no longer taught that it was the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that caused the war. There are still discussions going on about whether — let alone what — we can attribute any particular cause to the first World War. It’s obviously a hugely complex set of circumstances. So in history, we’re ready to accept that, but in understanding more natural systems, sometimes that degree of complexity isn’t something that we have a language for talking about other than in a narrative language.

Bridget Kendall
So you’re saying that as we become more aware of complex systems — which might have feedback, knock on effects, and not be a single trajectory — then there’s this idea of a narrative is less useful, and may even be harmful?

Philip Ball
I think that’s true. If you take the case of genetics, for example, I feel that there was a degree of a narrative element to the way we used to talk about it, perhaps 20 or 30 years ago, certainly before the Human Genome Project, in the sense that it was a sort of bottom up causation, that there were genes that caused particular traits, particular behavior. That’s certainly not nonsense, there’s a foundation for that story. But the picture that seems to be emerging now is that it isn’t that simple, that even in cases where there’s a trait that has a clear inherited component, so it has to be genetically encoded somehow, we can’t identify the genes that we would presume are involved. We can only identify a tiny fraction of the inherited effect in particular genes. And it seems to me that probably what that’s telling us is that we’ve got the wrong picture, we’ve got the wrong bottom-up narrative of genes having particular causes.

Often the genes that are involved in something as complex as an intelligence, the ones that have sometimes been looked at as candidates for “intelligence genes,” they’re doing incredibly, seemingly mundane biochemical processes that are involved in a whole host of our body’s processes. So it’s not at all clear whether it’s meaningful to think of them as genes for intelligence. But we still have that tendency to look for stories like that. And I suspect that what we really need to be doing is thinking differently about the causative pathways — the whole nature of causation in a complex system like our body’s genomes.

Bridget Kendall
Well, what do you think about this, Raymond, as a scientist, that our instinct to look for narratives actually becomes not just less and less useful, but maybe can lead us down wrong paths, as we understand greater and greater complexity in, for example, the natural world or studying the brain or whatever it might be?

Raymond Mar
I think that might very well be true. I think that the world is an incredibly complex place and people search out for simple answers, especially when we’re talking about short-form media and journalism and their portrayal of scientific results. That said, there is an obligation for scientists to communicate with public in a way they understand. I think that it’s important to balance these two different expectations to represent the complexity of the work in its entirety and also communicate with people in a way that they will find engaging and be able to comprehend. It’s possible that some new approaches that involve data visualization or simulation or interaction demonstrations can help to communicate some of these complex results.

Bridget Kendall
Do you not think, Raymond, that it’s not just a problem communicating with us? But possibly also a problem for scientists themselves as they try and compile and make sense of data. Maybe they, too, are inclined to try and look for a narrative strand?

Raymond Mar
It’s certainly there. I mean, when you’re going to vote to write up some scientific paper, you have to look for a way to package it in a coherent, cogent, convincing way. And the simplest story that you can come up with is probably going to be the most compelling thing, not just to the public, but also to other scientists that might be peer-reviewing the work. So I think that there is perhaps this push to simplify, but I also think that within the scientific realm there’s a growing acknowledgement of this complexity.

So the work on genetics that Philip was mentioning, I think that this has become a much more accepted and prevalent story, that genes actually express themselves in very, very complicated ways in the presence or absence of lots of other genes. And so I think the scientists themselves are no longer really looking for “the gene that does this” simply because they found that you can’t find them and the genes don’t express themselves in this way.

Bridget Kendall
Thaler, you were saying earlier that maybe one way to get around hackneyed stories is not to tell simple stories but tell complex stories. What we’re hearing from Philip is, “Maybe we need to think about narratives that are so complex you can’t even really call them narratives anymore.”

Thaler Pekar
I think that there are a couple of things that are very encouraging toward an embrace of complexity — and one is the popularity of long-form storytelling. Long radio shows —

Bridget Kendall
Like this one —

Thaler Pekar
Yes, and longer magazines. In America, ProPublica did a wonderful, radio show that really got into talking about the cause of the market collapse and banking issues, and people are sticking around and listening. People are sitting and waiting for the ends of these stories — the popularity of Serial.

And the other thing is that the New York Times says that their most shared stories are awe-inspiring.

The stories that are shared most on their website are stories about science, and they’re the stories that are giant in scale, and that the readers actually feel they have to do a mental accommodation to view the world in a different way. And they have an emotional reaction of saying, “I’m awed by this,” and they want to share it with a friend to say, “I was awed by this and I want you to be awed by it as well.”

Bridget Kendall
Raymond, a final thought from you as a psychologist — Do you think that as we’re finding out the world is more and more complex, we’re just simply going to have to accept the fact that our inclination to try and join the dots together and make it a narrative isn’t going to work? And that isn’t going to be a way in which we can make intelligent sense the complexity of the world within the limits of our human brains?

Raymond Mar
I’m not sure if that’s the case. I do think that humans have an enormous capacity for complex narratives. If you think about how people think about their own lives and their own life trajectories, they’re very open to the fact that their lives could have turned out very differently if only one small thing had been different. I think that the complexity of the stories that are coming about in the natural world are a reflection of the complexity of our experience of our life in the natural world. I don’t think these are two entirely separate things.

Bridget Kendall
Do you think there’s an increasing conflict between an ever more complex world that we’re finding out about and our tendency to want to interpret it in simple terms, Philip?

Philip Ball
I think, in the end, we are what we are, and we understand the world through stories. And the challenge that we have is whether it’s going to be possible to explain the sort of complexity that we have in the world. Whether we can find narratives that will enable us to do that. But I rather fear that if we can’t, it’s going to be very hard for us to get some intuitive understanding of why the world is the way it is. We do need those stories somewhere.

Bridget Kendall
Thank you very much to all three of you — Consultant Thaler Pekar; Psychologist Raymond Marr; and science writer Philip Ball.