Stories are fundamental to how we experience the world, how we organize it in our minds, and how we communicate our experience to others.
As Roger Schank begins his book Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence:
People remember what happens to them, and they tell other people what they remember. People learn from what happens to them, and they guide their future actions accordingly.
… intelligence is really about understanding what has happened well enough to be able to predict when it might happen again.
We experience the world and then organize our memory of that experience in the form of a narrative, a story.
When we come across something new, we are reminded of prior events and can use our collection of stories to help us respond to the new event.
We get reminded of what has happened to us previously for a very good reason. Reminding is the mind’s method of coordinating past events with current events to enable generalization and prediction.
People are social animals. We use stories not only to organize our own experience, but also when we communicate with others. We use them for the pleasure of sharing our experience in conversation, for communicating information in a way that the other person will remember it, and we use stories to persuade.
In the next several posts I’ll explore how we use stories to persuade, drawing on artificial intelligence research, on screenwriting techniques, and on the ancient Greek and Roman study of rhetoric.
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