Everyone loves a good story. And so do our brains. Whether its books, movies, fairy tales, or even office gossip, stories are much more than just entertainment. According to Dr. Fritz Breithaupt, narratives in our lives are way more powerful than we realize. We don’t just enjoy stories, we actually need them. But why are they so important? Does the brain gain anything from a good plot on your favorite Netflix series, or the well-developed characters in an Oscar winning film? There is actually something much more important in a good story, a reward for our brains that has actually been essential to human survival.
Phil Stieg: We all love a good story, and so do our brains. But according to Dr. Fritz Breithaupt, storytelling is much more than just entertainment. In his new book, the “Narrative Brain – The Stories Our Neurons Tell,” he provides insights from psychology and neuroscience about various forms of narrative, whether it’s books, movies, fairy tales, and even office gossip, revealing that stories are very important and a powerful part of the human experience. They are essential to how we think, how we feel, and how we connect with other people. We don’t just enjoy stories, we actually need them. Let’s learn from Dr. Fritz Breithaupt about his experiences with storytelling. Fritz, thank you so much for being with us today.
Fritz Breithaupt: Thank you for having me, Phil.
Phil Stieg: So I always remember the story where a mother went up to Einstein and said, how do I get my son to be like you? And he said, read fairy tales. And she said, okay, what else should he read? And he said, more fairy tales.
And that leads into my first question with you is really you’re writing about stories and the narrative brain. So, you’re writing about stories and the narrative brain. How did you get into this?
Fritz Breithaupt: Thank you. Thank you also for starting with that beautiful story of Einstein. While I cannot claim to be an Einstein, I fully agree with that assessment. We need stories. That’s how our mind grows. I think I got into stories… Well, all my life I’ve been telling stories, so it makes a lot of sense to me. But here there is a big point behind all of the stories. They’re not just fun.
Stories allow us to share experiences. If one of us kind of has something that happened to them, we can not just tell people of the events, the facts of what happened, but other people can go through that experience, share the emotions, and then have learned from it. And I think that has made our species so successful, we can break out of our brains and connect. So there’s something about stories that is optimal for our brains.
Phil Stieg: I am intrigued as to how you actually study story telling. Do you just sit there and watch people make stuff up?
Fritz Breithaupt: Ha! Okay, so I’ll take you along the journey of my research. So I run a lab. It’s a very unusual lab. I call it the Experimental Humanities lab. And in it I have scholars of literature, but also have neuroscientists in it, cognitive scientists and informatics people. But on the nicer side, we do telephone games.
The telephone game has many names in different languages. It’s a kind of a party game. When you do it with everyone in the same room, you have people lined up in a circle, and the first person whispers a story into the ear of the person next to them. That person then will kind of make sense of the story however they want to and retell it in their own words to the next person.
And you then can record, of course, what everyone has been saying. And it’s amazing how many changes come in. People always think they understood the story and write it down the same way it changes. They give it to the next person, that person again, makes sense of it, passes on to the next person, and so on and so on and so on.
So in that way, we can actually track from step to step how the stories change. As a research method, this is now more than a hundred years old that researchers have used it, and they use it to figure out the basic form, the optimal form, or the schema, as researchers often call it. The schema of the story. What’s the basic? Because they assume the basic will stay the same. And researchers for a long time thought, oh, it must be the core story, the causality, who is doing what and why. And yeah, that’s some. That’s somehow important what someone is doing and why. But what we figured out is that’s not what is transported very well. Instead, the emotion is much more important, or at least is remembered in a more stable way and transported on.
We had thought that emotions played a role. We thought they would increase and stuff like that, but just seeing that no, people use the emotion and everything else becomes completely flexible in the story. I mean, we had these stories, those like, let’s say, embarrassing stories. Something embarrassing happens.
The starting story is about the young boss who has to give a speech to his company, and he is just kind of like not doing it well. He’s kind of stuttering and stuff like that. But then the retelling, it suddenly becomes a very changed scene. It’s the party. It’s a party. And this young man basically spills wine on other people in spots where you don’t want to spill it to. And it turned out to be similarly embarrassing. But what was going on and so on was changing radically, and we had to make sense of that.
Why could these stories be the same? And it sounds so simple to say, oh, it’s the emotions. But we had to get to that first.
Phil Stieg: Fundamentally then how do stories get encoded into our brains?
Fritz Breithaupt: That is basically million dollar question. And I think there’s a lot of questions about this. We don’t know everything about it.
So very important for the encoding of stories is that they are short segments, episodes, but that they end with this emotional signal. I mean, it can be the happy end, as I said, it can also be the punishment of the bad guy, which is also rewarding in some interesting way. That gives us the end signal. Okay, here’s something. There’s a unit that we now can bring together. So that is a core part of that encoding process. Because then we have a unit that we can now recall as an entirety, as a packet.
Phil Stieg: Do you see that as the genius of TikTok? The short segments and they just either end positive or justice is being done. Then there’s that emotional hook that they’ve put into it. That’s why it’s so popular.
Fritz Breithaupt: I mean, I think, yes, I think these mini very short TikTok stories, they tap into our ability to encode stories in a rapid way. One doesn’t need a 1000 page epics or novel or so for having a very satisfying story. That also means that in everyday storytelling, gossip, standing at the farmer’s market or in the supermarket or so on an airline queue, you can successfully share an experience.
I stood next to a pilot recently in an airport and he just told me about a very horrible experience that he had of a near crash and told it in the most relaxed way and was laughing about it and wow, he took five sentences and I had that big in my mind, I co-experienced what was in it. And that’s amazing. We can do this in a very brief way.
Phil Stieg: You talk a little bit in the book about animals actually having some stories as well. Obviously they don’t communicate it verbally, but following that, I’m also interested in how the evolution of narratives is important in terms of the development of our culture.
Fritz Breithaupt: I think there is a quantum leap between us as humans and even our closest relatives. What we have learned is to make our experiences mobile. We can. What happened to me? I can tell you now. If I tell you what happened last night at the bar when I met this weird person who was there alone, and this can be the start of a story. I can tell you. And you will go through that . And you will learn from it, you will have fun with it, we can laugh together about it, and it becomes part of your own experiences. And that’s what even chimpanzees cannot do. When they’re in the same place and witness the same thing. They have a co-experience. We have co-experiences of things that we made up. That are memory, that are in the past. That is our quantum leap as humans.
Phil Stieg: And I presume that that is somehow linked to the. Also linked to the ability that we as humans have the power of prediction. Correct?
Fritz Breithaupt: Yes, scientists have now talked a lot about the predictive mind, the predictive brain. Our brain is always ahead of us, is making assumptions of what is coming. It’s usually the near future that people talk about. I mean, while you’re driving on the highway, you suddenly have a stronger grip on the steering wheel. And that is because we somehow anticipate something strange is going on, even though you can’t really see what’s going on yet. That’s this prediction that we assume there’s something happening.
In storytelling, we also do this prediction, but it’s much more forward thinking. We anticipate, oh, this is a happy end. My friend is telling me, single friend had a lot of bad experiences at these blind dates. And now he comes to me with this glowing face that you won’t believe what happened, Fritz. And that friend tells me, I’m anticipating there’s a happy, glorious end. But in reality, something else may happen. Then of course, he may have messed it up or something else happened, but he’s still happy about it in a different way.
But I anticipate what’s coming. I create more than one possibility what’s happening. And that’s what I want to kind of focus on here. We also, when we are hearing a story, it’s not just the plot line that we follow. Oh, yeah, this happened and that. And that. It’s a little bit boring. No, we make up other things that could have happened. In every horror story, we kind of Imagine the worst. That’s great fun, too. And sometimes the worst happens, sometimes not. But we have all these conflicting stories in it. That’s fun. And then, of course, it gets limited to one.
Phil Stieg: That’s interesting. And that leads me into the next question about the impact of a story is dependent upon whether it’s happy, sad, embarrassing or disgusting. Now – which is it? Is it positive or negative that endings are better in storytelling?
Fritz Breithaupt: I don’t have a global answer to that because there is this element of surprise. Once something becomes a little bit too schematic when you already can predict the Happy End all too much, it can get dull. You always need some kind of unpredictability. You need something that wasn’t just exactly what was the easy way into it.
There is a second point here, and that’s – it’s very fascinating. Researchers call it the paradox of surprise. People like and dislike surprise. They like surprise when they already know what’s coming. So. So there is something about us that we want to anticipate what’s coming, but we don’t want to be completely in the dark either. So there’s a lot of people who read the same book over and over again or they watch a movie again, even though of course they know what will happen, but they do still enjoy that. They like going through that surprise here. So the emotion here in that case is not simply being completely shocked. It’s also to be confirmed. I n the end, I kind of anticipated correctly what was coming.
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Narrator: In the 1970s, tabletop gamers introduced a new type of communal storytelling. Players would seek treasure, battle monsters and explore magical realms, in the world of Dungeons & Dragons. But this fantasy game can also have real-world impacts. It can even rewire your brain.
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Narrator: In Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D, participants roleplay as characters with different talents, physical traits and magical abilities.
D&D Game Master: But I am trusting you …. You will guard them with your life.
Player 2: As you will it, sire. It is my fondest hope ….
Narrator: We’re listening to an internet show called Dimension 20, where a group of actors and comedians display their D&D skills in adventures that they share with the world.
Game Master: The Goblin’ King’s smile goes feral, and as the skin splits away all the way to his ears, it reveals row after row of shark-like teeth. His eyes go over black, but…
Narrator: A Dungeon Master guides the action, and dice decide tests of skill or luck.
Player 2: Oh, boy. That’s going to be a 17.
Game Master: Oh, yeah. A 17 absolutely catches a dancing five-foot-tall goblin. Thank God.
Other players: He’s tall. He’s tall. He’s tall. He’s tall. Don’t worry. He’s tall. The soft boys are safe. The soft boys are safe.
Narrator: Games last for hours, and a full campaign can take years to finish. Most D&D campaigns follow a general outline, but all of the players’ choices shape the story’s direction, and what motivates their characters is up to them.
Playing D&D means building a narrative as a group and then experiencing that made-up story together. Through shared worldbuilding and roleplay, D&D gamers can improve their communication skills, build empathy, and bolster their mental health.
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Raffael Boccamazzo, a psychologist in Seattle, uses D&D to teach social skills to children on the autism spectrum, and to help patients cope with ADHD and social anxiety. Psychologist William Nation at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, founded Skills Quest, a D&D-centered therapy group. Dr. Nation says that because playing D&D builds trust, players feel more comfortable about exploring painful topics. In the game’s fantasy settings, they can confront real causes of stress or depression—without lasting consequences.
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Researchers suggest that D&D—when combined with other more traditional therapies—can be an effective tool for managing even complex trauma. The game provides a safe space where players can overcome obstacles, learn from mistakes, and are empowered by their choices.
In reality, you’ll probably never have to slay a dragon. But you might feel better after pretending to slay one.
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Phil Stieg: You did a specific study on ChatGPT. What did you find with that?
Fritz Breithaupt: Yes, so we do a lot of studies on ChatGPT. So one study, for example, we did was to see how ChatGPT now does story retelling and whether it’s similar to humans or not. For example, can it pay attention to emotions that are just in the situation? There’s no emotion words. Is it just like embarrassing a situation is? There’s no word for it. And it turns out already the earlier version of ChatGPT did a fantastic job at that. So very good. I mean, ChatGPT has a good sense of what matters in those things.
However, there was an interesting difference. When ChatGPT retells stories, it summarizes. That’s what it’s for. It does it very well. But when humans do that, they accomplish the same thing. They maintain the emotion, but they’re so much more creative in it. They retell the story, recreate a similar emotion, but use all different words and situations. They go into much larger loops basically, to come to that result. Every human being apparently, or at least most of them in average, replaces the vocabulary of a story that they retell by 60% each time, even when the story is very short, they make up new things.
And that’s not what ChatGPT does at this point. It’s not meant to do that. But humans are so creative. So what we really learned was not that we learned so much about ChatGPT, we learned to. To really be excited about our human ability to come up with new ideas on the fly at every moment, even when we try to just regurgitate old stuff. That’s amazing.
Phil Stieg: From an evolutionary standpoint, you’ve said that stories are important. And the reason stories are important, as you said, is because they create an emotional response. Emotion doesn’t put food on the table. So from an evolutionary standpoint, and the survival of the brain, how do you link the importance of the narrative story and survival of the fittest?
Fritz Breithaupt: So we imagine now early mankind. Early mankind, maybe pre linguistic. There’s no direct storytelling yet. So some of what I’m talking about here, the narratives is not fully there yet. However, they already find ways to bond together that makes humans so good. And so when one of them had an important experience in hunting or in gathering, that has to be something that the others also have to learn. And if they couldn’t communicate that and share the experience in some way, then everyone would have to go through that themselves and face the leopard in a dangerous way on their own. That’s not a good strategy.
Humans have learned to share that when they gather, they could probably. And this is I have to speculate here, so I very openly want to say I’m speculating here. They found ways to share their experiences. For example, from hunting, very important for food, where they could potentially dance or act as a theatrical performance what has occurred. And once the group members would understand, oh, this is something what we would nowadays would call a performance. Here someone is enacting something for us that there’s danger. That’s what they did, and it worked.
Once they could share that and maybe dance rhythmically where others could jump, chime in that experience, they were better prepared to face predators or to face a lot of hardships. And along the way they would bond better together. So I do think that indeed our early storytelling experience and ability there of sharing that bringing the group together has very much protected our species early on.
Phil Stieg: Can you give me a great example of how storytelling became a solution or a therapy in a crisis situation?
Fritz Breithaupt: Let me take a big one – 9/11 here in America. That was a horrible crisis and it was also a very dangerous situation. But it was interesting for me to see what happened then. There was a kind of strong discourse, a way of telling the story of 9/11 that gave it a certain form of coming together. The New York Times, but also Fox News. The stories that we saw everywhere on radio, on the books and so on. And so they stressed something that was not focused immediately on the, the evil side, the terrorists. They said, okay, here are we. The day after, there’s all these people and we are mourning together. They’re coming together. We erect a monument of sadness here.
We tell the stories of the dead people, we collect those stories. We are willing to say remembrance is what we need first. Not vengeance first, not other kind of things.
That had an enormously therapeutic effect. It may have had some negative effects too. It did drive some ugly sides of nationalism. But overall, I would say that was a story of therapy where people, and also all the people who lost a loved one, they found suddenly an ear in the nation. Everyone was willing to say, we have to stop our normal business. This is the moment of their story. We gave her that space and that was incredible. That was very powerful. And I would say that is an effect of this therapy of coming together and listening of that story, of what happened here. The shocking event to the sadness of it, that is on the large scale, one of those ones very powerful that has worked.
Phil Stieg: Can you describe the difference in your mind between storytelling and talk therapy?
Fritz Breithaupt: I think talk therapy has borrowed a lot from our ability of storytelling. It’s actually surprising how long it has taken us to develop modern psychoanalysis, psychology, talk therapy, because in a way, the core of it is already something that we are hardwired for – which is storytelling. And the amazing thing is that when people retell what happened to them, and they do it, especially when they do it more than once, they bring the events of the past, including very troubling events, into a form that is easier to cope with.
We are currently publishing a study in which we asked people to retell us a meaningful memory, one that they haven’t often retold. And then we asked the same people back a week later to tell us that episode again. And so then we compared the first and the second retelling, and it turned out that every single emotion that they used in the story, positive, negative, was much more reduced in the second retelling of their own memory, and the ending was much more positive. All the positivity and the positive vocabulary are lumped together at the very end. So suddenly, they found a frame for the story to give it a better ending and a closure thereby.
Phil Stieg: So there’s a catharsis in storytelling.
Fritz Breithaupt: Absolutely. A catharsis that literally is a Greek word that means something like purification or washing off. That washes off something and sets an end point, finishes it.
Phil Stieg: So my last question, the narrative brain, the stories our neurons tell, what’s the take home message?
Fritz Breithaupt: The take home message for everyone here is to say that this is not just guilty pleasure you are allowed to tell stories, listen to stories. Stories make us human. This is how we connect. How the experiences of one person can become the experiences of other people. This is an amazing ability. It is an art and it’s a joy. Practice it.
Phil Stieg: So in the end, you’re selling happiness.
Fritz Breithaupt: I’m selling happiness. On connection. I am a deep optimist. Absolutely.
Phil Stieg: Dr. Fritz Breithaupt, thank you so much for being with us today. You’ve taught us about how to communicate the stories that we carry within our own brain and within our own neurons within our brain. It’s so important in terms of our own personal mental health, but also, it’s important in terms of society dealing with tragedy. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Fritz Breithaupt: Well, thank you so much for having me, Phil. That was great fun.
