1. Like our language instinct, a story drive—an inborn hunger to hear and make stories —universally emerges untutored in healthy children. Every culture bathes its children in stories to explain how the world works and to educate their emotions. Perhaps story patterns could be considered another a layer of language patterning the character types, plots, and social norms important in our culture. 2. Stories deliver “feelings we don’t have to pay [full cost] for.” They’re like simulated experiments in people-physics, freeing us from the limits of our own direct experience. 3. “Stories the world over are almost always about people with problems.” Their deep pattern—summarisable as story = character(s) + predicament(s) + attempted extrication(s)—transmits (often tacitly) social rules and norms, defining what counts as violations, and what approved reactions are expected. 4. The “human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.” We can use logic inside stories better than we do outside. For example, the Wason Selection Test can be solved by fewer than 10% as a logic puzzle, but by 70-90% when presented as a story involving detection of social-rule cheating. - bigthink.com