From the day the first primitive human clambered up a tree while fleeing a pack of ravenous wolves — and later grunted out the details of their narrow escape to cave dwellers around a campfire — the human brain appears to have been hard-wired to process and retain stories. Now, a research team at the Johns Hopkins University is asking for the public’s help in mapping the areas of the brain that kick into high gear every time we read a new Stephen King novel or see a “Deadpool” sequel, or watch reruns of “Doctor Who.” It turns out that telling and listening to tales isn’t just fun — it’s a key survival strategy.
“Understanding stories is part of the fundamental anatomy of the brain,” said Janice Chen, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins, “and it’s a very robust brain system that you find in everyone.” Chen said different regions of the brain tune into characters or location, while others are devoted to what could be described as the plot. “If you think about it, your life is made up of a series of events.
And each one of those events is a story,” she said. But Chen doesn’t study literature. She studies how neural systems support memory.
And she’s especially interested in a group of high-level brain regions, known as the “default mode network,” that appear to be involved in episodic memories, or those that spring from personal experience. Many of her experiments involve putting subjects into an �.
