Storytelling has been around since the beginning of time. You may hear that stories are simply a form of entertainment, but as some of you may know, stories are actually a vital part of survival. 

Stories come in many different forms. Songs, fables, poems, books, drawings, and even just the spoken word. But no matter what form, stories always send a message. And that message teaches us something. 

You see, stories aren’t just…stories. They’re a part of us. All of us. We all harness the story telling ability and that’s not a coincidence. Because stories are everywhere. When you tell your friend a funny childhood memory–story telling. When you tell your Mom how your day at school went–story telling. Even when you share the small town’s latest gossip…guess what? STORY TELLING!

And in today’s blog post I’m going to share exactly what makes stories so important.

Learning from stories

Have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to memorize one math exam question, but you can easily explain an entire magic system or every single personality trait of an elf to anyone, anytime? Yeah…that’s how efficiently storytelling can teach us things and make them stick. 

Our brains have a very complex security system. The human mind processes information at a rate of at least 600 bits per minute, 3,000 at the most. So on a simpler, more understandable level, our brains have a lot of info to process. Sensory, sight, sound, and those are just the basics. So in order to keep our brains from crushing under all of that data, the security system is in charge of discarding anything that is not important. When we go to learn anything, we end up having to convince the security system that what we are learning is important.

Because school topics tend to bore us and we have a hard time caring about them, our brain’s security system doesn’t see them as important, so it discards them. Books and movies on the other hand keep our attention not only because of the fun plots and twists and action, but because of the human element…yes us as humans have an obsession with humans.
Stories contain characters that we can relate to on an emotional level, therefore telling our mind that the information is important.

But that’s not the only thing in stories that help us remember information.
You might have heard of the spaced repetition technique. As some of you may already know, spaced repetition is the process of reviewing information incrementally to basically engrave it into your brain. This works because the more we use information, the more “important” it becomes. 
Books automatically do this because we need to remember certain details from earlier in the story in order to understand what’s happening. And we may not be using that information daily, but the characters are. There’s no reason for us to know what dementors are, but Harry Potter sure did. That information was useful to him and therefore useful to us if we wanted to know what was happening.

Another example is Percy Jackson. Greek mythology is a very broad topic. There’s a whole lot of stories and Gods and beasts and lore. In school if you had to just learn this topic, it would probably be pretty difficult. But those of you who’ve read Percy Jackson know that reading it in book form and seeing how knowing or not knowing certain facts about the Gods can become life or death situations for the characters, it ends up sticking into your brain as well.

Or take science for example. It’s pretty difficult to memorize the periodic table, but I’m sure if you read a science fiction where the main character was a math genius you would pick up at least a few math and science facts.And it doesn’t even end there. We don’t just learn facts from stories. We gain wisdom.

Stories have been used for centuries as a way to teach people valuable life lessons. Of course back then they were probably more about the dangers of wandering into the forest at night or why you should never touch a bear cub, but stories always have an underlying lesson, even if you don’t always find it.
And the fun and also slightly terrifying part is, we can learn these lessons without knowing we’re learning them…which leads us to our next subtopic:

The Reader Effect

Belle is one of the most iconic Disney princesses and almost every girl’s role model. She’s independent, intelligent, compassionate, and curious. She’s not afraid to be different or scorn societal expectations.
Anne from Anne of Green Gables is a very unique, but also very loved character. She’s fiercely loyal, passionate, goodhearted, and expressive.
Both of these characters have one specific thing in common, something that they’re known for…they both love to read.

Reading is a very common, very well known hobby. But what if I told you that reading actually builds character (pun intended). I call it, The Reader Effect.

Stories do something to our brains, specifically books. As I’ve said, books teach us so many lessons and they can teach us those lessons without us knowing it. 
Let’s look at Harry Potter again because it’s a well known book/movie series and I love it. You can watch Harry Potter and think you’re learning nothing except that professor Mcgonigal can turn into a cat and Voldemort has no nose.

But you actually learn so much more than that. 
You learn about the stages of grief and how it can affect one person in many different ways depending on who died. You learn about sacrifice and how the life of one person can save so many others. You learn about love and how love is more powerful than evil. You learn about friendship. You learn about betrayal. You learn that things aren’t always as they seem and who we think is the bad guy might actually be the good guy.

You see? All of these lessons and more are hidden in these stories. 

I’m homeschooled and an introvert. I barely leave the house because I always would rather be reading. So sometimes I’ll be talking about something and I will spew the most random wisdom and think, how in the world do I even know that?
But the answer to that question is stories. I may not interact with real people very often, but I read about them. I understand the human element just by reading words on a page. Just by looking at a fictional character’s internal dialogue. 

By learning about characters and how they interact with each other, we learn about people. We learn about the human element. We end up gaining an understanding of how the human mind and emotion works. We watch as these beautifully flawed characters make mistakes and navigate the consequences.

This builds empathy. As we are immersed into the fictional world, into the story, into the narrative, our minds mirror the emotions and experiences of the characters. BUT while this can be a very good thing, it can actually be harmful if you are reading a book that doesn’t have good messages in it. That is why it’s important to be careful about what books you read (I will talk about this more in another blog post).

This is why stories are so important. Stories are so much more than entertainment. They are a vital part of our being, our instinct. And they are everywhere. I hope I helped you understand that today so you can see the beauty of storytelling. I love you all.

Hugs,