Humans have been swapping tales around campfires for millennia, but new research suggests this ancient tradition is actually deeply tied to how our brains evolved to store and recall information. A new study from the University of Mississippi reveals that simply weaving facts into a narrative is one of the most powerful memory-building tools we possess.
Published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, the research put storytelling to the test against the current “gold standard” of mnemonic devices: survival processing. Survival processing involves relating the information you want to remember to how it might help you survive in a life-or-death situation, such as being stranded in a grassland without resources.
Associate professor of psychology Matthew Reysen and doctoral student Zoe Fischer conducted four experiments involving more than 380 participants to assess how storytelling stacked up against established memory hacks. They asked subjects to take 20 to 30 unrelated nouns and craft them into a story.
The results proved the power of a good narrative:
- Beating the alternatives: Those who created a narrative remembered significantly more nouns than participants using “pleasantness processing,” a popular technique that involves rating words based on their positive or negative connotations.
- Matching the gold standard: Storytelling performed just as well as the highly lauded survival processing technique.
- The writing advantage: In cases where participants physically wrote out their stories, the storytelling method actually outperformed the survival processing technique.
Interestingly, the researchers found that combining storytelling with survival processing did not further improve memory retention.
Fischer explained that this lack of a compounding effect indicates both techniques likely rely on the exact same underlying cognitive functions. These functions include relational processing, in which the brain remembers by identifying how concepts are similar to form a bigger picture, and item-specific processing, which identifies what makes each piece of information distinct.
Evolutionary roots
Reysen noted that before humans invented written language, stories were the primary vehicle for passing down crucial survival information from person to person.
“So, it makes sense to me, from an evolutionary perspective, that we would be better at retaining stories, that the mind provides a sort of framework or structure within it to include the information which organises it and makes it easier to retrieve,” Reysen explained.
Fischer also highlighted the immediate educational benefits of these findings. She noted that professors and teachers who use stories in their lectures aren’t just keeping their students entertained — they are actively triggering an evolutionary mechanism that helps students retain the course material.
