The Science of Story

 

Excerpted from my 2024 book, Every Day Is a Story All Its Own

https://joeymadiastoryteller.blogspot.com/2025/02/every-day-is-story-all-its-own.html

Stories Need Structure to Have an Effect

As I was chest deep in cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology research, I learned two things that resonate with the importance of applying solid structure to our stories. The first was that the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays, used his uncle’s theories to “invent” public relations and marketing. He linked consumerism with feeling better,[1] which is evident in many of the storylines for the award-winning series Mad Men.

There is an episode of another show, Perception, which aired in July 2014, on this subject. In the “teaser” or “cold open” (the scene preceding the main title and first commercial break), Professor Daniel Pierce (Eric McCormack) educates his neuroscience class on the effect that puppies and babies in commercials has on our brains.

Pursuing solid science on the matter, I found an experiment by scientist Paul Zak and colleagues wherein research participants watched a “short, sad story about a father and son.” Watching it produced two neurochemicals: cortisol (felt as distress, prompting us to keep watching) and oxytocin (which promotes connection, care, and empathy). The levels of neurochemicals released directly correlated with the amount of money participants gave to strangers or charity organizations for the care of sick children after watching their stories. To produce these two neurochemicals, the story needs both a climax and denouement (I discuss both in later chapters).

Accompanying Zak et al.’s article is an embedded video entitled “Empathy, Neurochemistry, and the Dramatic Arc” I encourage you to watch. Through their experiments, Zak et al. theorized a “Universal Story Structure,” citing the work of Gustav Freytag and the principle of the Dramatic Arc.[2]

The Universal Story Structure has its strongest expression in the Three-Act Model and Hero’s Journey, the monomyth popularized by Joseph Campbell,[3] which led to significant enhancements in the way writers write and people tell their personal stories. A wide range of teachers and practitioners referenced in this book, including Robert McKee, David Mamet, Michael Chase Walker, Christopher Vogler, and Steven Pressfield, structure their storytelling with the Hero’s Journey and Three-Act Model.

My podcast episode on the science of story, which goes much more in depth into how the science of story is used in politics, economics, culture, and in other aspects of daily life, is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxAADkTmoTg&t=108s

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[1] Russell Brand, Revolution, 21.

[2]“Eternity,” Perception, Season 3, Episode 5, TNT Network, July 15, 2014; Dr. Jeremy Dean, “The Psychology of Storytelling and Empathy Animated,” www.spring.org.uk/2014/01/the-psychology-of-storytelling-and-empathy-animated.php (accessed December 31, 2023; there is a link to the Zak et al. article in this article). Structure is a central focus throughout François Truffaut, Hitchcock (Rev. ed.) (Simon & Schuster, 1983 [1967]).    

[3]Although discussed most fully in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which I reference directly later, Campbell mentions the “Adventure of the Hero”—Call to Adventure, Magical Aid, Difficult Task, Return, etc.—in the context of the myths of Ancient Egypt in The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology (Viking Press, 1962), 77. The Hero’s Journey is ubiquitous in popular culture. See, for example, Russell Brand, Revolution (Ballantine Books, 2014) and Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), 143.