New research from the University of Mississippi suggests that telling stories – from ancient campfire tales to modern-day digital communication – may be tied to how human memory evolved.
It also could be a key to improving everyday retention.
Matthew Reysen, associate professor of psychology , and Ole Miss doctoral student Zoe Fischer recently put storytelling to the test. Their study, published in Evolutionary Psychology , found that storytelling performs just as well, and sometimes better, than the current gold standard in mnemonic devices, a technique called survival processing .
"People have been using stories to communicate information as long as they've been passing information from one person to another," Reysen said. "But there wasn't much in the literature about storytelling as a way to improve memory.
"Our result was that storytelling was just as good as survival processing, and in the cases where people actually wrote out the stories, even better than the popular survival technique. The overall conclusion is that, just like with survival processing, memory may have an evolutionary tie to storytelling."
Understanding human memory – and what improves it – could improve education practices as well as everyday processing, the researchers said. Anecdotally, this was no surprise, said Fischer, a fourth-year doctoral student in experimental psychology from Verona, Italy.
"This is something that we hear often, right?" she said. "I presented at a conference recently, and so many professors came up to me after and said, 'I tell stories during my lectures and I do it because it's entertaining and more interesting, and people tend to love it.'
"It's so wonderful that we can see that there's evidence that this actually helps them remember information even more. Now we know it's not only entertaining for them, but also helpful."
Among the various means of improving memory – from Sherlock Holmes' memory palace to acronyms, acrostics and rhyming – survival processing has been lauded as one of the best and easiest to employ. The technique involves relating what an individual wants to remember to how it might help them survive being stranded on a grassland without resources, which creates a stronger impression of the words and makes them easier to remember.
Another popular mnemonic device is pleasantness processing , which asks participants to rate words based on how pleasant or unpleasant they are. Thinking more deeply about the word's connotation – "shark" can be good or bad, depending on a person's love of sea life or fear of the ocean – can also improve memory.
Similar to survival processing, Fischer and Reysen's storytelling method asked participants to take 20 to 30 unrelated nouns and create a story with them. Across four experiments with more than 380 participants, those who created a narrative remembered far more of the nouns than those who used pleasantness processing.
They also remembered the same number or more nouns than subjects who used survival processing.
However, combining survival processing with storytelling did not drastically improve retention.
"You would think, if both things work separately, that they would work even better together," Fischer said. "But what that tells us is that these two systems, underlyingly, have the same kind of cognitive function."
The researchers said that both techniques likely rely on relational processing – where the brain remembers by identifying how words or concepts are similar – and item-specific processing, which instead remembers through distinction, not similarity. Where relational processing remembers puzzle pieces by relating them to the completed picture, item-specific processing identifies what makes each puzzle piece unique.
If both survival and storytelling devices rely on the same underlying cognitive mechanisms, it stands to reason that combining two processes does not create a better outcome, Fischer said.
This insight also hints at a deeper truth about storytelling: that humans may have evolved to value the stories they hear.
"Before people began even writing down words, they used stories to communicate information," Reysen said. "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 organizes it and makes it easier to retrieve."
