The Neuronal Hard-Wiring Behind Storytelling

The human species is really a rather remarkable case of what can happen by pure chance, when some free-floating nucleic acid and lipids just happen to be in the same primordial lake at the same time. And from that lake emerged all of life. Granted, it took rather a long time for us to evolve from those earliest life forms – we’ve only been around for roughly 300,000 years. And perhaps 300,000 seems like a large number (I suppose it even is), but there was about 4.5 billion years leading up to that, and so we’ve only roamed the Earth for about 0.007% of its history. And look how far we’ve come in that time. We started from humble beginnings as fledgling groups of hunter-gatherers communicating through grunts and hand signals. Now here we are – skyscrapers, computers, satellites orbiting the planet, cars for when we don’t feel like walking, stairmasters for when we do, air conditioning for when it’s too warm, and heaters for when it’s too cool. 

It’s really something of a miracle that humans have advanced this far. Think of all the species that we had to compete with in the early days as cavemen. Wooly mammoths, saber-tooth cats, rhinoceros, cave bears, and dire wolves. They’re all dead now. But if I lined up all these ferocious beasts next to an average human being and told you only one of these creatures would survive, would you bet on us being the ones that make it? I’m not sure I would. 

So just how did we do it? We did not have the immense strength of mammoths or the wings of birds or the acute senses of foxes or the dagger-like teeth of saber-tooth cats. All we had was a mass of cartilage in our throats the size of a plum – the larynx. And this is the secret to our survival. Our ability to speak. To tell stories to each other.

Almost everything about human life has changed at some point from the beginning of our existence as a species. And yet when everything else was in flux, there was one thing that remained through thousands and thousands of years of the history of our survival: storytelling.

Now, you, like me, might wonder how storytelling could confer such an evolutionary advantage over the environmental odds stacked against us. You, like me, might wonder what even drew us to this rather unique strategy for survival. 

To figure out why exactly humans are so drawn to stories and literature, we must look to the human brain. More specifically, we must look to modern imaging studies. With functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which uses blood flow/oxygenation as a proxy for levels of neural activation, we’ve finally begun to identify the once-elusive neural networks that explain our proclivity for storytelling, and thus explain our unlikely survival as a species. 

The first area involved in storytelling is hardly a surprise: the frontal lobe. If you compare the human brain to that of any other species, one of the most astounding differences you’ll notice is how large the frontal lobe is in proportion to everything else. Thus, it only makes sense that this outsized region of the brain would be so important in an intellectual capability so unique to humans. The frontal lobe manages a truly impressive array of functions, including decision-making, motivation, social interaction, planning, reasoning, and self-reflection. However, when you consider these functions, it is rather curious that the frontal lobe would be involved in storytelling. Indeed, you might ask yourself why a lobe involved in self-reflection and personal decision-making would be activated when we hear stories about other people. Well, this is essentially concrete proof of our ability as human beings to empathize with each other. When we listen to the hardships and turmoil and adventures of others, our brain computes that like it would our own life experiences. We are evolutionarily and physiologically hard-wired, to the level of our neurons, to put ourselves in the place of others. Empathy, it turns out, is a survival mechanism. By being able to imagine ourselves in the place of others, we are able to simulate real-world dangers in our head. Most other creatures must encounter actual danger to prepare for it in the future – they just have to rely on their own experiences and the protection of their parents to evade death. Other animals only know what they’ve experienced firsthand. However, humans, we have multiple lifetimes of experiences in our heads without necessarily having to encounter those situations in real life ourselves. 

Beyond that, the human frontal lobe is equipped with a ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) – the social interaction hub of our brains. Lo and behold, the vmPFC ignites like wildfire on an fMRI when we exchange stories. Our brains have entire regions dedicated to rewarding us for participating in the great network for exchange of information. We rely on each other to survive – we need each other’s stories. 

We need each other. 

And that’s where the caudate nucleus enters into this neural network that has evolved over thousands of years to keep us alive. Nestled within the subcortical structures of our brain, the caudate nucleus interacts constantly with the prefrontal cortex, the two structures volleying electrical signals back and forth in order to create your highly complex, sophisticated sense of emotional intelligence and social connection. 

The caudate nucleus, just a small cluster of tissue in the medial region of our brain, is thus yet another region in our brain that drives us to share stories with each other. We are by nature a species built on collaboration – natural selection has shaped our brains to reward us with oxytocin and dopamine for creating strong social connections. An elaborate network of white matter tracts extends like an ever-running railroad between our vmPFC, our caudate nucleus, our mirror neurons, our Broca’s area, our hippocampus, and our reward pathways. Our brains are essentially wired towards social interaction because what good can stories do for our survival if we have no social drive to share them with each other? When we listen to each other's stories, we have what can only be described as a primal response – the surge of oxytocin and dopamine that creates a sense of community. Now we take that social bond for granted because with modern technology it’s easy to think we don’t really need anyone but ourselves to survive. But back when you needed every single person in your small hunter-gatherer group to share their gathered resources in order to cling onto the hope of survival, creating strong social bonds was a matter of immediate life or death. 

So with the creation of stories, we prepare ourselves for real-life danger and we create the social relationships necessary to survive. 

But there’s yet one more reason that humans have used stories to survive. 

This is our clever, subtle way of training children how to think. As we listen to stories, it is human nature to speculate about what will happen next. Our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus fire together to use our own memories and experiences to form inferences about what will happen next in the story. In this way, children can learn to logically reason out the consequences of different actions and evaluate the risk in novel situations. 

All of this is to say, there is much more to storytelling than mindlessly passing time or entertaining oneself. Stories are in fact the earliest form of currency in human civilization, the most valuable things people could exchange as bargains for survival. 

Being a high school student, one of my main responsibilities for the past decade or so has been to read literature – to listen to stories. Stories of all sorts too – short stories, poetry, novels, plays, and epics. Five days a week in school, there I am, carrying on a tradition that began back when we were just Neanderthals shivering in caves dimly illuminated by fire.

Stories are the legacy of our species. They’re our way of sharing information. They’re our way of creating family and community. They’re our way of surviving.  

References:

Graff-Radford, Jonathan et al. “Caudate nucleus as a component of networks controlling behavior.” Neurology vol. 89,21 (2017): 2192-2197. doi:10.1212/WNL.0000000000004680

Andres, Zoe. "Psychologically speaking: your brain on writing." University of Waterloo, 22 Apr. 2019, uwaterloo.ca/writing-and-communication-centre/blog/psychologically-speaking-your-brain-writing. Accessed 18 June 2025.

"Caudate Nucleus." ScienceDirect, www.sciencedirect.com/topics/veterinary-science-and-veterinary-medicine/caudate-nucleus. Accessed 18 June 2025.

Driscoll, Margaret E., et al. "Neuroanatomy, Nucleus Caudate." NCBI, 24 July 2023, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK557407/#:~:text=The%20caudate%20nucleus%20(CN%3B%20plural,in%20various%20higher%20neurological%20functions. Accessed 18 June 2025.

Westover, Jonathan H. "The Power of Storytelling: How Our Brains Are Wired for Narratives." Human Capital Innovations, 11 Jan. 2024, www.innovativehumancapital.com/article/the-power-of-storytelling-how-our-brains-are-wired-for-narratives. Accessed 18 June 2025.