Why Sharing Stories Brings People Together

A new neuroscience study may explain why telling stories builds empathy and also why, when you tell a good one, people act as if they're watching it unfold before them.

A team of scientists at Princeton, led by Uri Hasson, had a woman tell a story while in an MRI scanner. Functional MRI scans detect brain activity by monitoring blood flow; when a brain region is active it needs more blood to provide oxygen and nutrients. The active regions light up on a computer screen. They recorded her story on a computer and monitored her brain activity as she spoke. She did this twice, once in English and once in Russian; she was fluent in both languages. They then had a group of volunteers listen to the stories through headphones while they had their brains scanned. All of the volunteers spoke English, but none understood Russian. After the volunteers heard the story, Hasson asked them some questions to see how much of each story they understood.

When the woman spoke English, the volunteers understood her story, and their brains synchronized. When she had activity in her insula, an emotional brain region, the listeners did too. When her frontal cortex lit up, so did theirs. By simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listeners' brains.

Hasson also looked at listening comprehension. He found that the more the listeners understood the story, the more their brain activity dovetailed with the speaker's. When you listen to stories and understand them, you experience the exact same brain pattern as the person telling the story.

When the woman spoke Russian, the speaker-listener brain coupling disappeared. The woman tried to communicate something that had happened to her, but the listeners could not understand. Her voice had inflection and emotion, but without comprehensible words to clue them into the action, the listeners could not make sense of her story. Except in the early auditory regions involved in processing sounds, their brains did not have corresponding activity.

When you tell a story to a friend, you can transfer experiences directly to their brain. They feel what you feel. They empathize. What's more, when communicating most effectively, you can get a group of people's brains to synchronize their activity. As you relate someone's desires through a story, they become the desires of the audience. When trouble develops, they gasp in unison, and when desires are fulfilled they smile together.

Extract from Psychology Today by Joshua Gowin