Why do we tell stories?

I don’t mean, “Why do some people like getting on a stage and others would prefer to sit at home and binge watch House of Cards season 2?”

What I mean is: Why did human beings evolve in a way that makes them capable of making, understanding, and enjoying stories?

In Jonathan Gottschall’s book The Storytelling Animal–which I’ve spent the last week or so responding to issues that he raises in the book–he enumerates 7 (as I count them) reasons why we tell stories.

• Storytelling makes us more attractive mates, making is easier for us to pass on our genetic material.
• Stories are a “playground for the mind”–Brian Boyd’s words and theory–and making and consuming stories confer the same benefits on our mind that good exercise provides for our body.
• Stories are low-cost sources of information. I tell you that yesterday, I saw a man eaten alive by seventeen rabid saber-tooth tigers in a specific valley, and now you know not to go to that valley. I don’t have to burn calories or risk death by taking you to the place and showing it to you.
• Stories act as a kind of social glue, encouraging cooperation between people, sometimes between very large groups of people. Community histories, religious parables, and national myths and legends are all examples of social glue-style stories.
• Consuming stories allows us to create a rolodex of potential problems (and solutions for the problems) that we might encounter. This “flight simulator” model is from Steven Pinker in his book How the Mind Works.
• Related to the “flight simulator model,” consuming stories might just work our problem-solving muscles a little, helping us to improve our abilities to figure out situations in general, but not the specific ones we encountered vicariously through stories.

I used the Blabberize site to create the individual scenes in the video, exporting them to video right from the Blabberize site, and uploaded them to Youtube to avoid the embed problems I’ve been having.

You can see the original blabbers here–Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4.