When do people tell stories

We are always tempted to add some juicy extras to the facts. The fellow caveman might already have exaggerated his encounter with the tigers by describing a heroic fight, although truthfully he only observed the predator from a safe hiding place.

Why did he lie? To make himself look better and make the whole thing more interesting. If we can make a better story out of something, we prefer often unconsciously to go for that — the real version can often be much more boring and difficult to listen to, or to keep in mind.

Fictional storytelling is never true in a factual sense, but it is always built around influences of reality and our human nature. We love story patterns. We even see them when there is nothing there. In a particular study, people had to say what happened in a short film that showed geometrical shapes randomly moving across the screen.

A clear majority of the participants came up with an interpretation and tried to think of what the shapes symbolized. Only a very few people described what it really was: Just a bunch of randomly moving shapes. Oh, the wonderful and foolish human mind! The ship got caught in a bad storm? People can swear there was a sea monster. Stuffed animals are alive to kids and they go on adventures with them. That guy on the shopping channel tells us about people who lost so much weight with this miraculous new pill.

Storytelling is a very human attribute, an instinct, a need. It has always been there and always will be, as long as humans exist. Over the ages we perfected the strategies of storytelling: We discovered guidelines and rules that make appealing and interesting stories. Storytelling is an exchange. There is a storyteller on one side and a listener on the other. The story contains the experiences, opinions, knowledge and moral values of the storyteller wrapped up into a nice, more or less imaginative package.

This is vital for our species. Instead of bringing new abilities to the next generation by long evolutionary processes, we keep our species up to date by providing information through language — and the story form makes it fun for us.

A storyteller contributes to that pool with a tale which includes everything that has influenced him previously; his ideas then get reflected by his listeners and maybe become part of the extelligence forever, inspiring other future listeners and storytellers.

A child develops what it takes to deal with stories and other more dry forms of information and can form his personal intelligence by learning from the extelligence.

Through tales we can prepare ourselves for the ups and downs, the good and evil of our existence without being in any real danger. What does it mean to be real? Is it simply transparency and truthfulness with those around us? Eureka moments are rare. They often come at the most unlikely times — 3am in a dream state haze, slowly taking shape over breakfast coffee.

All day long, the Memory is essential to all our lives. Without a memory of the past, it is impossible to operate in the present or think about the future. Marketers across the globe are tapping into the idea of power from the people. And not just power from clients and consumers, but power from the inside How do they even function? Actually, yes. Since human groups are roughly three times larger than other primate groups, tactile gossip was no longer enough to produce the opiates that make social existence tolerable, even pleasant, for primates.

And it is exactly in that excitement that the real relation of stories and science might be found. Good stories are strange. What strong scientific theories, even those crafted in pop form, have in common with good stories is not some specious universality. Good stories are startling. A sensitive, educated man is mad with lust for an eleven-year-old girl! Or, Yuck! Which is the same reaction with a slightly different sound.

Are you serious? It took us so long, and so many long sentences, to find that out—but it was worth it. Good scientific theories are always startling, too. How do you choose? In telling the story of the whaleship Essex, novelist Karen Thompson Walker shows how fear propels imagination, as it forces us to imagine the possible futures and how to cope with them. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories.

Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

David Ikard. Black history taught in US schools is often watered-down, riddled with inaccuracies and stripped of its context and rich, full-bodied historical figures.