FAQs

How do I become a Story Scientist?

Just make up the term and start using it to refer to yourself, like I did.

Wait. You made up Story Science?

Sure. Like previous scholars made up the fields of Biology, AI, and Literature.

That’s what humans do. We invent stuff.

But what qualifications do you have?

I started out by getting my degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Michigan. I trained in Neuroscience for four years in a Neurophysiology lab at Michigan’s medical school, where I learned to design and run my own experiments. I then received my Ph.D. in Literature at Yale, with a focus on Shakespeare. At Stanford, I trained in Narrative Theory. I now run collaborative research with psychologists and other scientists and scholars at labs at UPenn, the US Army, Ohio State Medical School, the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute, and other places.

That sounds all over the place.

It’s all driven by a single core question: How is the human brain is so creative? To answer that question, I’ve borrowed tools from across the arts and sciences. But it’s one line of research.

Can you succinctly define what Story Science is?

Neuroscience + Rhetorical Narrative Theory = Story Science

And you really invented that?

I pioneered the integration of modern Neuroscience with Rhetorical Narrative Theory. But I’m not the first person to use scientific experiments to unearth the psychological effects of story. The method was used by Aristotle all the back in 335 BCE in his Poetics. After Aristotle, the method fell out of use for thousands of years, before being revived by the Chicago School in the mid-twentieth century. Out of the Chicago School came Jim Phelan, the godfather of Rhetorical Narrative Theory and the Director of Project Narrative. He recruited me to Ohio State and has supported my mad scientist research.

Does story science reveal the secrets to the perfect story?

No. There’s no perfect story, any more than there’s a perfect human brain.

The idea of perfection is pseudoscience, like eugenics and how-to books that claim to teach you the universal formulas for bestselling novels or blockbuster films.

Hold on. You don’t believe that there are universal formulas for writing blockbusters?

If there were, a lot more people who read those how-to books would be rich.

Well, they would be if they could follow instructions. People are terrible at following instructions. Or didn’t they teach you that in science class?

The reason that people don’t follow instructions is because instructions are boring, just like stories that obey rules. Robots enjoy rules. Humans prefer originality, authenticity, and spontaneity.

You really think that no stories are better than others?

In biology, no lifeforms are intrinsically better than others. There are only different brains with different powers and different stories with different effects.

But sure, some stories are better for some tasks than others. Some stories are better at healing you while others are better at sparking curiosity.

I don’t get the point of story science if it doesn’t teach you the magic recipe for perfect stories.

Story science allows you to reverse-engineer novels, movies, poetry, etc, to uncover the hidden narrative machinery that your favorite stories use to generate their unique effects on your brain.

Sounds a bit mechanical for my taste.

Story science can also show you how to innovate. To write the opposite of formulaic movie scripts. To grow narrative in fresh directions. To create stories that no one else has ever told before.

Really? Story science can help me become a more original storyteller?

Absolutely. That’s its primary purpose.

Not that you need story science to innovate. The human brain is a natural born innovator. But with story science, your brain can innovate faster, further, and more powerfully.

So, you can change the narrative. And change the narrative, change the world.

Why do you have such a goofy way of talking?

I try not to take myself too seriously. The neuroscientific source of personal growth is taking life seriously but yourself not seriously. And believe me, I need all the personal growth I can get.

I don’t understand how you’re involved in AI.

I was recruited to help on various efforts to improve Natural Language Processors, that is, programs that supposedly read and write like humans. The programs are generally reliable at handling nouns, adjectives, and linking verbs, but they’re terrible at handling all other verbs. That’s because those other verbs are narrative. I’m an expert on the practice and theory of narrative, so the computer programmers flew me in to troubleshoot the bugs.

So, you help AI process verbs better?

No. I discovered that AI could never process verbs. Because computers lack the hardware to do narrative.

Don’t be dumb. Computers can beat humans at chess, so they can do anything.

Computers can do lots of things, but they think differently from humans. Humans think in narrative; computers think in statistics. Statistics and narrative can both be used to play chess. And in fact, statistics is a more effective way to play chess. But statistics exists in the timeless mathematical present tense, so it can’t run mental processes—like verbs and like narrative—that take place in time.

Um, actually computers are great at time. That’s why they all have clocks.

Computers can only process time by treating it as a spatial quantity, like on the x-axis of a graph. Computers cannot experience time as a temporal process, in the way that animal neurons can. That experience is why the human brain can use verbs and think in story.

When computers achieve consciousness, they’ll be able to do everything.

If a computer achieves consciousness, it’ll just be aware of itself computing, just like if a car achieved consciousness, it would just be aware of itself driving. A conscious computer wouldn’t be any more capable of storythinking than a conscious car would be of flying.

But computers are getting better at processing verbs. Haven’t you checked out GPT-3?

I have checked out GPT-3. It’s a prank. It’s not actually generating natural language; it’s playing a game in which it’s trying to trick you, for as long as possible, into thinking that it can generate natural language, which it does by learning to hide its most obvious tells. So, it’s not learning how to create writing; it’s learning how to mask the behaviors that give away the fact that it can’t create writing.

For a technical rundown, see “Myth 2” in “Why AI Will Never Do What We Imagine It Can” on my Research page.

I’ve heard you say that we’re taught to read literature wrong in school.

In school, we’re taught to read literature as words to be interpreted. Which is the same pre-scientific method used in the middle ages to read the “book of nature.” It employs semiotics, which is the application of logic to language. It’s how a computer would read. So, it deletes all the story. And since story is the main operating system of the human brain, it deletes almost all the stuff that we finding interesting and useful about literature.

How should we study literature instead?

We should shift our focus from the words on the page to the literary experiences of the human brain. Those experiences include story elements such as characters, plots, storyworlds, poetic voices, and fictional narrators. And they include story effects such as emotion and imagination.

But emotion and imagination aren’t serious, academic stuff. We can’t study that in class.

Emotion is joy and love and wonder. Imagination is creativity and empathy and innovation. We need more of all that in the world.

Are our literature classes all that’s wrong with school?

No. The big problem with school is its heavy emphasis on critical thinking and other training in logic. Logic is fine, in limited situations. But what’s much more useful is creativity. Creativity solves problems and invents new medicines and generates original science, technology, and art.

Critical thinking is also frequently just negative thinking and judgment. And negative thinking and judgment are easier and less useful than optimism and openness. We already have enough negative thinking and judgment in the world to last for generations. We can never have enough optimism and openness in the world, ever.

Isn’t optimism dangerous? Doesn’t it dupe people into ignoring the hard truths of life?

What you’re talking about is magical thinking. And magical thinking is different from optimism. Magical thinking is ignoring reality. Optimism is engaging constructively with reality. Magical thinking is “I will.” Optimism is thinking “I can.” Magical thinking is believing that if I imagine myself flying, I’ll reach the stars. Optimism is building rocket ships that explode and explode and explode and explode, until. . .

If you’re interested in creativity in technology, science, business, politics, art, and everything, then why do you focus so much on literature?

Literature is the most powerful technology that humans have ever invented. Why? Because literature allows us to get more out of our brain, and our brain is the most powerful thing on earth, for good and for ill. With literature you can make your brain its best possible self. You can troubleshoot its emotional hitches, freeing it from anger and pessimism and grief. You can boost its kindness and its hope. You can make it more inventive, more adaptive, more resilient, more imaginative, more scientific, more impartial, more visionary.

With literature, you can become a happier, healthier human being. And you can make yourself a more innovative engineer, a more caring doctor, a more dynamic leader, a more imaginative artist, a more perceptive scientist, a more successful entrepreneur, and a more effective strategist.

That practical power is why I have yet to encounter a genuinely original thinker who wasn’t influenced by some form of literature, whether that literature was science fiction, song lyrics, folktales, or epic poetry.

Steve Jobs read Shakespeare. Van Gogh read Shakespeare. Abraham Lincoln read Shakespeare. Einstein read Goethe. . .who read Shakespeare. Carl von Clausewitz read the Romantics. . .who read Shakespeare.

Shakespeare. Shakespeare. Shakespeare.

Should everyone read Shakespeare?

No. You should read the authors who speak to you, who activate you, who inspire you. And you should never, ever, ever be compelled to read a piece of literature. That compulsion ruins literature’s most basic gift: Freedom. Possibility. Empowerment.

You feel that gift every time you step into a library, see the thousands of books to choose from, and feel the exhilaration of knowing: I can take my mind anywhere.

That’s why, when I teach, I never assign books to students. I invite students to bring in their own favorite books—or the favorite books of someone they like or admire. Then we share those books with each other, learning what makes our different brains spark.

You sound like some kind of freedom-loving, individual-cherishing libertarian.

Well, I do love freedom and I do cherish individuals. But I don’t subscribe to libertarianism. Or socialism. Or capitalism. Or any other -ism.

I subscribe to biology. And biology is ideology-free. Animals don’t know right and wrong. Trees don’t know justice. What they know is life and light and rain and pain and healing and trying and trying and trying again. And what they also know is growth.

Growth is branching, open-ended, and original. Like you. Like me. And like the books we read.

So, it’s okay to like different literature?

Our brains are all different. That difference powers human creativity—and adaptability. It’s what has allowed us to invent the wonders of art and technology that cram our globe. So, if you want to improve the lives of future generations in the way that past generations have improved our lives today, you’ll celebrate your different brain—and empower the different brains of others.

Who are your favorite authors?

Maya Angelou and Virginia Woolf. My favorite classic writer is Sappho.

You claim that literature isn’t words on a page.

That’s right. It’s processes in your brain.

Okay, but it’s also words on a page, right? I mean, obviously. That’s what you see when you open any respectable book of literature.

In oral literature, there are no words or pages. . .

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a technicality. Nobody would read oral literature anymore if it hadn’t been written down. So, forget all those ancient myths and lyrics. Just talk about modern literature, like novels.

Okay, even in novels, most of the stuff you like isn’t in the words. Or on the page.

Stop right there. You don’t know what stuff I like.

You forget, I have brain scanners. I know what’s inside your head.

And I know that you like characters, storyworlds, plots. All the things we call story.

You’re telling me that story isn’t on the page?

Yes.

That’s insane. I’m opening a novel right now, and I can see things happening, and events, and all sorts of other story stuff.

Well, people thought it was insane when science told them that the earth was flying at tremendous speed around the sun, instead of sitting still, like people were confident, right before their eyes.

Okay, but there was evidence for that.

There’s scientific evidence for my claim that characters and plots aren’t on the page. For a technical explanation, see “Myth 1” in “Why AI Will Never Do What We Imagine It Can” on my Research page.

I don’t want some technical explanation where you hit me with weird data and dense lingo that I don’t understand. That proves nothing.

For a quick analogy, imagine a cartoon flipbook. If you flip the pages, you see a girl walking.

I’m imagining it. It’s not that interesting.

Ask yourself: is the girl walking on the page? No. On every single page, she’s still. The only place she’s walking is your brain.

Story, like walking, is a kind of action. It doesn’t happen on the page. It only happens in your brain.

That’s why when we focus on the page, like we’re taught in school, we miss the story, along with the plots of scripts and the characters of novels and the storyworlds of comic books and the voices of poems.

Which is to say, we miss most of the stuff that touches our heart and sparks our imagination.

You have some very controversial opinions about the Hero’s Journey.

The Hero’s Journey is based in Jungian and Freudian psychology. Which is to say: in junk science.

But the real problem with the Hero’s Journey is that it contradicts biology. Biology reveals that life is branching, evolving, diversifying. That’s why there isn’t one ideal type of tree in the forest. There are maples and oaks and redwoods and pines and thousands of other species.

Stories are like trees. There isn’t one true story. There are endless varieties—and to be human is to dream up varieties more.

Don’t limit yourself by thinking that all cultures are recycling the same monomyth. All cultures are different. All individuals are different. There’s an endless world out there to explore.