From campfire to cortex: storytelling as shared cognition

Stories as an evolved cognitive technology

Nov 11, 2025

I had the great pleasure of being invited to speak as part of a panel at the recent Dublin Book Festival, in the amazing setting of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, west of Dublin city centre. This is an old and historic venue, and the rooms we were in were astonishing, elaborate and very beautiful indeed.

A huge crowd turned up on a lovely afternoon to hear me, Niall de Burca, and Claire O’Connell—who moderated the session—discuss storytelling.

Niall is a traditional, oral Irish storyteller who makes his living telling stories from different traditions. Drawing mostly from Irish traditions, he performs at venues all over the island and indeed all over the world. He told us he was heading off to Lithuania to a storytelling festival very soon, and has many other travels planned.

The session kicked off with Niall telling a dramatic story that he had been, in turn, told. He explained that as a storyteller, he asks permission to retell stories—to show appropriate respect, absorb them, and tell them in new ways.

This was remarkable event to experience, and a wonderful way to tap into an oral tradition of human storytelling that is as old as we are.

The power of a live oral telling is no accident: shared attention and emotional arousal are potent drivers of memory encoding and social bonding, which is part of why a room like that feels electric.

At the end of Niall’s storytelling, we conducted a small experiment. I invited the audience to close their eyes for about thirty seconds, which they all did. It was slightly strange for them, I think, to be told a story and then asked to close their eyes and be given no other instructions.

After the thirty seconds had passed, I asked the audience a few questions: “when you closed your eyes, did your thoughts linger for a time on some of the content or emotions from the story you had just heard? Did you find the course of your thinking driven in part by that experience? And did you wonder, after perhaps ten or fifteen seconds, why you were sitting there with your eyes closed?”

I asked for a show of hands. I then suggested that, after a little while, many were no longer thinking much about the story, but drifting to other things: what they were going to do later that day, the feel of the seat they were sitting on, the hall they were in, whether it had been worth going out on a Sunday afternoon to hear what I had to say, and a whole variety of other thoughts.

This exercise was to introduce the idea of narrative transport—the extent to which your thoughts are captured by a story you’ve just been told (or have read; or indeed watched). Elements of the story linger in your thought for a while and then, often, you begin to drift to other things - the important stuff in your life.

I then asked them to stop paying attention to me and, instead, to look at the screen behind us and isolate and count each of the individual colours on it. We did that for a few seconds, and then I asked how much thinking about the story they were doing while focused on this attention‑demanding task. The answer, of course, was very little to none at all.

This little experiment illustrates the difference between the capture of the default mode network by narrative, and its down‑regulation when a person engages in a particular, goal‑directed task. Humans are astonishingly good at flicking between these two types of thought (forest and trees): task‑positive, when we focus on the elements and try to see the trees; and default mode, when we step back and try to see the forest. The default mode is called “default” because such a large share—on the order of about forty percent—of our waking thought is spent in this broader, internally oriented stream of thought.

In neural terms, narrative listening recruits core default‑mode hubs (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate/precuneus), while the colour‑counting task shifts control to fronto‑parietal attention networks that damp down default‑mode activity—a quick “method moment” that matches the subjective switch most people feel.

Little experiments like this also prove that narrative transport is real.

Not only that, this experience unfolded in a shared social context. Everybody was seated facing forward toward the central speaker—Niall—doing his story; I was handing on some instructions; and Claire was effectively ring‑mastering to keep us on track. A good story, in that setting, creates a shared neurocognitive experience and drives similar activity across the brains of the people present at the same time.

You might say there’s nothing remarkable about that. My simple response: no gathering of chimpanzees would sit quietly and focus their shared attention on one or two or three chimpanzees telling a story. Their brains are simply not built for this. More likely, you would see outbreaks of aggression until they sorted themselves into a defined hierarchy with an alpha at the top and the others below.

Secondly, the anthropological evidence suggests that shared storytelling has deep roots in our ability to regulate behaviour in social groups—transmitting norms horizontally within a generation and vertically across generations.

From Talking Heads

We tell our stories to each other – to teach others, and to learn from others. The anthropologist David Smith and his colleagues at Cambridge University have examined how human cooperation in the Philippines varies according to the quality and type of storytelling occurring within tribal groups. Smith and his colleagues propose that storytelling may have played ‘an essential role in the evolution of human cooperation by broadcasting social and cooperative norms to coordinate group behaviour’. Storytelling within groups allows the transmission of collective memories. The stories themselves must be easy to comprehend, easily transmissible with very high fidelity and transmissible in two different ways: horizontally – that is, between people who are present – and vertically – that is, between generations (because stories are handed down through generations over time).
Importantly, they found that hunter-gatherer stories reliably assist in the coordination of social behaviour, because the stories themselves embody informal social standards we share with each other regarding our behaviour towards each other (‘cooperative norms’). Cooperative norms are learned by others through storytelling at social gatherings, thereby providing the necessary bridges from the past to the present and thence to the future, based on the hard-won knowledge of our ancestors.
Buy Talking Heads

We now know that the brain systems that support memory are intimately intertwined with the systems that enable imagination—especially our capacity to simulate future events. We are regularly fooled into thinking that the point of memory is to recall the past. As I argue at length in Talking Heads, the purpose of memory is subtler and less restricted than that.

Memory exists to infuse our present thinking with what we have learned from the past, so we can adapt to what is happening in the here and now, and to imagine what might happen next. Being able to draw these elements together allows us to do things that are, in practice, uniquely human: simulate futures and think ahead in rich, flexible ways.

The same circuitry that supports episodic recollection—hippocampus interacting with default‑mode hubs such as medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate—also supports constructive future simulation: recombining memory fragments to forecast possible scenarios that guide present choice.

Some other thoughts

Permission as cognition: The ritual of asking permission to retell is profoundly ethical and frames the teller as a trustee rather than an owner.
Event boundaries: The“eyes closed” pause creates a clean episodic boundary. Boundaries help the hippocampus segment experience, which can make key beats of the story more retrievable later.
Synchrony is staged: Facing the same way, sharing a soundscape, and breathing with the teller all nudge inter‑subject synchrony, and not just content overlap. Stagecraft (lighting, cadence, silence) is cognition by other means.
Default ≠ idle: The default mode is down‑weighted by the task, and the quick flip is a micro‑lesson in cognitive control (useful for educators and clinicians who need to interrupt sticky rumination).
Prediction machinery: Transport works because stories feed our prediction systems with structured uncertainty. The eyes‑closed interlude reduces exogenous noise, letting prediction errors from the story consolidate.
Common priors: Shared attention to a story functions as a fast way of building common priors in a room—useful for norm‑setting and, at scale, for civic coordination.
Primates, with a footnote: Chimps won’t do auditoria, but their grooming circles hint at a distant analogue of attentional synchrony.
Palate‑cleanser effect: The colour‑counting task acts like a cognitive palate cleanser. Brief, concrete tasks can reduce residual emotional carry‑over without erasing the memory trace—handy when stories touch on difficult material.
Stories as simulators: Because memory serves the future, stories are cheap flight simulators for policy and personal choice.
Seating and shared gaze as alignment tech: The forward‑facing room, a single focal speaker, and a steady moderator act as a cognitive phase‑locker: they minimise competing cues and help the audience’s brains “tick together.”