ABSTRACT
The Western journalistic tradition of turning information into stories taps into some of the fundamental ways that we think and view the world around us. Neurological scientists tell us that our brains receive a huge amount of information every second, and we automatically filter these signals, provided by our senses, concentrating on just a few important signals at any one moment. This filtering follows patterns learned from birth. We recognise familiar patterns, from the basic rhythm of night and day, to more complex patterns of movement that enable us to do something very complicated, such as driving a car. In his television series, The Human Mind, Professor Robert Winston demonstrated that while we all find it difficult to remember a large number of bare facts, our memory works very much better when it is asked to recall narrative patterns. ‘When we invent simple stories to memorise facts, we set up lines of communication into the key receptors of the brain.’ Storytelling helps us to identify with something, and to remember it.
