Our brains don't treat stories like ordinary information.

When we're following a character's actions, intentions, emotions, and surroundings, the brain draws on systems associated with language, memory, emotion, social understanding, prediction, and mental simulation. We're constantly anticipating: What is this person going to do? Why did he do that? What's going to happen next?

That's part of why: The man walked into the forest, doesn't do nearly as much to us as: The man walked into the forest, although everyone in the village had warned him never to go there after dark.

Now I want to know what happens!

Our brains are extraordinarily interested in cause and effect, intentions, danger, other people, and what happens next. Stories bundle those things together.

There's even a term called narrative transportation: the experience of becoming mentally absorbed in a story. Our attention narrows toward the narrative world, we form mental representations of what's happening, and our emotional responses can become quite real even though we know perfectly well that the events are fictional.

That's why we can cry over someone who has never existed.

So why are human beings capable of caring so much about something that isn't actually happening?

Let's go backward—long before novels

Storytelling is enormously older than the novel and older than writing itself. For most of human existence, knowledge had to survive inside people.

There was no encyclopedia to consult. Or weather app or medical handbook. There is no map tucked into the glove compartment. No GPS.

Imagine a child being told: Don't go beyond that ridge.

That's information.

But what if the child were told: Your grandfather's brother went beyond that ridge after the rains. He stepped between two rocks, and the snake struck him before he ever saw it.

Now you've got a story. And the child may remember the story long after forgetting the instruction.

That makes me think of children and the stage they all seem to go through when they continually ask: Why? Maybe it's because they need more than information. They need enough of the story to understand.

Most of us are not so different. You can give us all the information in the world, but if you can't make me care about it, our brain is going elsewhere.

Stories have helped preserve practical knowledge: where danger was, how people behaved, what happened when someone broke a rule, where food or water might be found, who belonged to the group, what ancestors had done, and what the group believed about itself and the world.

Myth and folklore add another dimension. They don't have to be literally factual accounts to carry cultural information.

A monster lives in that forest. A spirit punishes people who do this. A clever little character survives because he notices something everyone else overlooks.

Stories can encode warnings, expectations, values, and accumulated experience. Eventually, they become more than survival instructions. They can preserve identity.

This is where we came from.

This is what happened to our people.

This is why we perform this ritual.

This is who our ancestors were.

This is what courage looks like.

This is what betrayal costs.

From there we find ancient epics, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homeric traditions, legends, religious narratives, folktales, fairy tales, ballads and sagas—and, eventually, the novels sitting on our shelves.

And notice how often the same fundamental things remain.

Someone leaves home. Danger arises. Someone loses somebody. Someone wants something. There is betrayal. There are choices to be made. Change happens.

Thousands of years later, we're still listening.

Loving stories isn't something frivolous human beings invented once life became comfortable enough to allow us to entertain ourselves. Story has long been one way human beings have tried to understand the world and one another.

A person sitting in bed at midnight saying, "One more chapter," is obviously doing something very different from someone thousands of years ago listening to a story around a fire.

And yet . . .

Both want to know what happens next.

Both can care about someone who isn't standing in front of them and imagine a world beyond the one immediately surrounding them.

And both may walk away knowing something they didn't know before—not necessarily a fact, but something about fear, courage, grief, foolishness, loyalty, love, danger, or themselves.

We can go with them . .

Another amazing thing about stories and the human brain is that we don't merely observe a character. We can mentally simulate being in that person's situation.

If the character hears something outside the cave, we're wondering what it is. If she has to decide whether to trust the stranger, we're evaluating him too. If someone betrays her, we feel some version of that violation.

We know we're reading or listening to a story, but we're drawing on many of the mental abilities we use to understand actual people: interpreting intentions, predicting behavior, remembering consequences, and imagining likely outcomes.

We don't have to be bitten by the snake in the rocks to learn about the snake.

We don't have to trust the wrong stranger to discover which warning signs were missed.

We don't have to get lost in the mountains to learn what the person who survived did differently.

And we don't have to become the jealous king, foolish brother, brave daughter, deceitful neighbor, or clever child to experience—in imagination—where their choices lead.

That's where myth and folklore become especially interesting.

Think about Icarus. The story doesn't simply announce:

"Overconfidence and ignoring warnings can have terrible consequences."

It gives you a boy.

It gives him wings.

It lets him fly.

And then it lets him make the choice. That's much more powerful than a rule written on a wall.

And here we are in the Information Age

Information is a good thing. I certainly wouldn't want to live without it. We have access to more knowledge today than people throughout most of human history could have imagined.

But perhaps information alone has never been quite enough for us.

We still want to know why.

We want to know what happened before and what happened afterward. We want to understand the people involved—what they wanted, what they feared, what choices they made, and what happened because of those choices.

We want the story.

Thousands of years ago, someone may have sat beside a fire and listened to a story about what happened to the person who went beyond the rocks. Today, we might read a novel, watch a film, listen to a podcast, or pick up a biography.

The world around us has changed enormously. But that child inside us who keeps asking "Why?" has changed little at all. And maybe that's one reason we still love stories.

So here's a question for you - What's a story you still remember years after reading or hearing it—and why do you think it stayed with you?

Reply and let me know. I'd love to hear from you.

Until next time, keep reading,

Helen

Note: Why We Love Stories and its original written and visual content are © 2026 Helen G. Huntley. All rights reserved.