Storythinking

This book explains how and why our brains think in stories. Angus Fletcher, an expert in neuroscientific approaches to narrative, identifies this capacity as “storythinking.”

Angus Fletcher is professor of story science at Ohio State University’s Project Narrative. His most recent book is Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature (2021). His research has been published in journals such as Harvard Business Review and Annals of the New York Academy of Science.

Indre Viskontas, Cognitive Neuroscientist, University of San Francisco:
The quickest way to elicit a scoff from 'serious thinkers' is to mention 'story'. But as someone who has built a career as a science communicator, who consistently straddles the line between art and science, and whose work is grounded in neuroscience, I know intuitively that storytelling is fundamental to how we think. Finally, Angus Fletcher brings his deep understanding of narrative together with his keen scientific mind to explain why we think in stories, why embracing story structure is the way forward, and how stories provide an architecture to thought as powerful and important as logic. Read this book.

Mark Turner, author of The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language:
Story is a basic mental operation. Most of our experience, knowledge, and thinking is formed and organized by story: prediction, evaluation, planning, explanation, agents and actors, processes, goals. Story is an indispensable element of creativity. Human beings project from story to story and blend stories to create new concepts, new proposals, new science. How can we push the cognitive science of story forward? Fletcher, in this captivating and inspiring new book, leads the way.

Lisa Miller, Ph.D., Professor & Founder, Spirituality Mind Body Institute, Teachers College, Columbia University:
Storythinking is absolutely excellent: a much-needed reminder of and expansion on the transformative power of story, story as an enriched form of learning and as a valid epistemology. The book is a lovely, readable addition to academic and public life. I am eager to see the use of story resurrected!

Shane Greenstein, author of How the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New Network:
Angus Fletcher explains why effective narrative prioritizes the unique, shifts viewpoints, and encourages conflict. Not for their own sake. It makes a writer create and clarify more thoughtful ideas and leads readers to intuit and retain the message. Both revelatory and pragmatic, and so gracefully explained.

Frederick Luis Aldama, award-winning author and Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, UT Austin:
Fletcher’s done it again. His polymathic erudition and word-wizardry elegance pull off the equivalent of a Copernican revolution in our understanding of storytelling—in all its resplendent iterations. With Storythinking he invites us on an extraordinary odyssey that enriches understanding of our deep, instinctive impulse to create stories as makers and transformers of our world. Storythinking is nothing less than a cosmological paradigm shift that puts story making and thinking at the center of all that we do.